a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
By Jack Limpert
I was always good at math and when I drifted into journalism I still liked to play with numbers. At publications where I worked, it always was a surprise that most journalists couldn’t do basic algebra. Let’s say a magazine has a 55-45 ad-edit ratio. We have 113 pages of ads sold for the June issue. How many editorial pages do we get?
By Jack Limpert
What can the editor of a news organization—a magazine, newspaper, or website—do to help writers do great stories? Which of these ten things have helped you the most? Which are of least importance?
I’m sending this to writers I’ve worked with, but welcome more feedback and suggestions. Let me know which of these are the most important and the least important to you, and add any other ways an editor can help or get in the way. Email me at jacklimpert@gmail.com.
1. Pay me enough that I feel rewarded for my best efforts.
By Jack Limpert
Sports journalism never gets the National Magazine Award recognition it deserves—after all, it’s about people playing games. But Sports Illustrated continues to be a very well-written, well-designed, well-edited magazine.
An example: The May 19 Sports Illustrated, appearing a week after the blockbuster issue featuring Jason Collins, has a great narrative piece, “Drinking, Driving and Dying,” by Thomas Lake.
By Jack Limpert
On today’s early morning walk with the old golden retriever I met another dog walker, Jordan Posner, who is a digital guru, and we talked about why I started this editing-writing website. I told him it mostly was because there didn’t seem to be much written about how editors actually work and the reason for that probably was the fact that most the work we do isn’t very interesting.
He then asked, “Who are the three editors you’d most like to have dinner with?”
I immediately said, “Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, and Harold Hayes, the great Esquire editor.”
By Jack Limpert
Talk about surprises: Amy Cunningham, a very good feature writer for The Washingtonian in the 1980s, someone who’d written for More, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and the Washington Post, is now a New York state licensed funeral director. She says she’s gone from an industry facing death to one that embraces it.
By Jack Limpert
An earlier post, “The Yin and Yang of Being an Editor,” focused on the warm-and-cold-blooded duality of being an editor. Most of that post was on the need for an editor to have a cold-blooded side, being decisive about how you spend money and how quick you are to swing the editorial axe. In truth, a good editor is supportive and warm-blooded most of the time, bringing out the axe only when necessary.
Beyond that, there is a lot of yin and yang in what an editor does.
By Jack Limpert
In Chinese philosophy yin and yang are opposite forces that interact to form a whole greater than either part. Looking back at a life of editing, there was a surprising amount of this kind of duality.
Are good editors warm-blooded? Sure. When someone had a story idea that seemed promising, I tried to sit down and talk about it with the writer, making sure we both were on the same page and enthusiastic about taking it on. I always thought that mutual enthusiasm with writers, editors, designers, and everyone at the magazine was key to getting the best work out of all of us.
From an essay, Some for Glory, Some for Praise, about life as a combat pilot and writer, by James Salter:
The cynics say that if you do not write for money you are a dabbler or a fool, but this is not true. To see one’s work in print is the real desire, to have it read.
…in grammar school we had to memorize and then stand up and recite well-known poems….Language is acquired, like other things, through the act of imitating, and rhythm and elegance may come in part from poems.
By Jack Limpert
Tom and I go way back. I came to Washington in 1967 to start a weekly newspaper, the DC Examiner, for a strange, rich man, O. Roy Chalk, who then owned DC Transit, the company that operated the Washington bus system. Chalk hated the Washington Post, which had been critical of him and the whole idea of public transit being run by a private company. The idea of the DC Examiner was to give the paper away to the people who rode the buses and maybe steal some readers and ads from the Post.
By Tom Shales
People sometimes told me they couldn’t imagine the Washington Post’s Style section without me, which was flattering in a way, but what came to pass was considerably more surprising: the Washington Post without the Washington Post. Yes, the paper still exists and appears daily, but its golden age fades further and further into the mists of memory.
