By Jack Limpert

Back before 9/11 closed the skies above the Nation’s Capital, I had the chance to look down on it and shoot pictures from a helicopter and also to cruise in the Goodyear blimp over the city.

By Jack Limpert

One: You can’t have too many people stories. When Time Inc. started People in 1974, the journalists at Time wondered why the great publishing company would start such a magazine. Almost 40 years later, People has lots of readers and revenue and Time looks to be withering away. At The Washingtonian, an editor once asked me if the new issue had too many people stories.

An Interview With Ariel Sabar

Ariel Sabar is a Washington-based author and journalist who recently won the top national award for best profile from the City and Regional Magazine Association. His prize-winning piece, in the July 2012 issue of The Washingtonian, was a deep dive into the life of John Wojnowski, an alleged victim of clergy sex abuse who has spent a decade and a half in a lonely vigil outside the Vatican’s U.S. Embassy. The contest judges said: “Ariel Sabar’s unforgettable story of a man committed to following his conscience to the extreme is sharp and graceful and based on the kind of reporting that bores into the heart and mind of this tortured subject.”

By Jack Limpert

One of the great learning experiences for an editor is the annual budget meeting where you have to defend any overspending in the current  year, argue for any increased spending in the next year, and make cuts and compromises to get the money and people needed to improve the publication. I always felt it was the editor’s job to protect other editorial people from the often heated arguments about magazine revenues and spending—church and state and all that—but in retrospect maybe it would have been good to let several editors and writers sit in on the budget meetings each year so they better understood the real world of publishing.

By Mike Feinsilber

DISCLAIMER: I’m no mavin about Yiddish. I don’t speak Yiddish. I don’t understand Yiddish beyond the handful of words that everyone knows. When I was young, my parents used Yiddish to say things they didn’t want the kids to understand. But I wasn’t interested enough to demand that they teach me Yiddish. What did I need this ancient, guttural language for?

By Jack Limpert

In the spring of 1977 I had been at The Washingtonian for eight years and was in New York City for a conference on magazine publishing. As I was walking through the Hilton lobby a man stopped and introduced himself and asked if could we talk for a few minutes about city magazines—he said he was about to buy Baltimore magazine. We found a quiet corner and he asked such good questions that we talked for almost an hour. As we parted, he handed me $50 and said, “Enjoy dinner on me.”

By Jack Limpert

The New York Times Co. and Hearst Magazines are among the latest publishers to introduce advertising presented as editorial content in their mobile and digital spaces. Native advertising is advertising that resembles an article in its host publication but is actually provided by an advertiser or outside company. —Poynter, May 29, 2013

By Jack Limpert

A week ago I posted “How a Writer, With Some Help, Learned to Do Great Work.”  It was based on the book, Good Prose, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, and most of it focused on Kidder talking about his writing. This focuses on Richard Todd and his life as an editor.

1. Todd on writers:

I was once on a panel with another editor, who said the most extraordinary thing. Asked why she went into publishing, she said, “Well, I just really like writers.”

By Jack Limpert

I’ve played an editing role in a couple of hundred stories on the Washington Post, starting with a piece back in April 1969 about Ben Bradlee and his elimination of the paper’s women’s section to create the new Style section. Some of the stories were great—thank you Barbara Matusow, Larry Van Dyne, Mary Walton, Harry Jaffe, and others. Some were just okay, but I can’t think of one dumber than the National Journal piece posted today about Marty Baron, who in January became the Post’s executive editor.

By Jack Limpert

I saw an interesting story in a science magazine and noticed in the author’s note that the writer lived in Washington. Always looking for talent, I called to ask him about doing a piece for The Washingtonian and he agreed to come in and talk.

When he arrived, I brought him to our editorial conference table where we were joined by Ken DeCell, a senior editor who knew more about science than I did. We began to talk about stories and the writer seemed to speak a little haltingly and I had the feeling he wasn’t clicking in with what Ken and I were talking about. After about five minutes, Ken and I looked at each other as if to say, this isn’t going anywhere.