ABOUT EDITING

By Jack Limpert

Harold Hayes edited Esquire from 1964 to 1973, creating a magazine that was called “the center of  the new journalism.” To those of us who went into journalism in the 1960s Hayes was the most creative and influential editor of them all. After Hayes died in 1989, Tom Wolfe told the New York Times, “Under him, Esquire was the red-hot center of magazine journalism. There was such excitement about experimenting in nonfiction. It made people want to extend themselves for Harold.”

By Jack Limpert

Danny’s face has turned white from old age but every morning he’s still ready to go. We walk a block down the street to a big park. We go behind the tennis courts and kids’ play area to an open field that has a baseball diamond and enough space for football and soccer. Danny barks at the planes heading west after taking off from Reagan National and I look at the birds and sometimes study the cloud formations. Then on the way home we walk through the woods—in the old days he chased squirrels. I sometimes find wildflowers and bring a few home. After the walk, I always was ready for a good day as an editor.

By Bill O’Sullivan  

Copyeditors do more than fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They solve problems every hour of every day and plant the flag for good English and clear writing—a worthy goal in the age of emoticons and Twitter shorthand. They save writers and the publications they work for from embarrassment.

A copyeditor asks questions and makes suggestions that, for whatever reason during the editing process, no matter how good the assigning editors are, never got asked or suggested: What do you mean? Who is this person ID’d by only a last name? That last sentence doesn’t add much—it might be stronger to end with the previous one. This sounds choppy. Oh, and nice lede.

By Jack Limpert

1. A lawsuit is a problem you can’t make go away. Almost all problems faced by editors can be dealt with fairly quickly—not necessarily painlessly but they can be dealt with–but a lawsuit can go on about as long as the plaintiff wants it to go on. We’re talking a couple of years.

2. Once a lawsuit is filed, a legal process called discovery begins. They can ask you for answers to interrogatories (written questions), they can ask for documents, they can ask that depositions (oral questioning under oath) be taken of you, the writer, or anyone who might know something.

By Richard Babcock

I wanted to be a writer because that’s where the glory is, but at the mid-sized newspaper where I started out, I kept getting pushed into editing. I don’t think it was simply because my sentences were unimpressive. Rather, the higher-ups were acting on the dubious logic that because I had a law degree, I must know useful “things”—what sort of things was never quite clear, but reason suggested that I must have learned something useful in that expensive three-year professional education. No amount of argument (or malfeasance) would dissuade the bosses, so I became an editor.

By Jack Limpert

I’ve been an editor for almost 50 years and I know lots of editors and I’ve never asked any of them, “Why did you become an editor?”

I became an editor in 1964 not because of any desire to edit copy but because it was the best job offer at the time. After dropping out of law school, I’d spent four years with UPI in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Detroit and UPI wanted to move me to Chicago. I was being moved too much and wanted to settle down so looked for a job in Detroit. The daily paper in Mt. Clemens, just north of the city, was looking for someone to edit a weekly they owned in Warren, a fast-growing Detroit suburb. The money was decent and I’d be able to report and write and learn to be an editor.

By Jack Limpert

For a good close-up portrait of an editor at work, pick up Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, by Jeff Himmelman.  It’s a lively, entertaining book, and it is so intimate that some of its characters—notably Sally Quinn and Bob Woodward—are not likely to speak to the author again.

The book has lots of insights into how Bradlee made the Washington Post the nation’s hottest newspaper. Late in the book, Himmelman writes about a part of an editor’s job that doesn’t often get talked about:

By Jack Limpert

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a charming documentary film about an 85-year-old chef who runs a Tokyo restaurant that serves the world’s best sushi. The visuals and music are wonderful to see and hear, but I couldn’t help thinking about what an editor could learn from how Jiro Ono produces such consistent high quality. I kept thinking that running a restaurant is a little like running a magazine: You’re offering something to the public that you hope they’ll enjoy and they’ll think is worth the money, and your success depends on word of mouth and repeat business.

By Jack Limpert

One of the great storytellers in American journalism was Don Hewitt, who created 60 Minutes for CBS television. He approached the weekly television show like a magazine or newspaper editor. In his 2001 book, Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television, he described how he operated:

If 60 Minutes is anything, it’s a loose shop….We make it work not with meetings and memos, but with ideas and an open-door policy. Any member of our extended family—our on-air reporters, our executive editor Phil Scheffler, our off-air reporters-producers, the assistants and secretaries—can weigh in. When Mike [Wallace] gets an idea, he storms into my office with a “Hey, kid, why don’t we…”

By Jack Limpert

Here’s an expensive, exhausting, almost-got-me-fired lesson I learned the hard way: As an editor, don’t get in between a man and a woman who went through an angry divorce.

It was a lawsuit involving a Washington man who was a very public figure. He and his wife had met overseas, had gotten married, had been a fairly high-profile couple in Washington, and then got divorced. The woman came to us wanting to tell her story, which included a somewhat unusual courtship and many visits to the White House. We did the story, co-authored by the ex-wife and a staff writer, and we used quotes from letters the man had sent to the woman early in the relationship. The lawsuit was for copyright violation and invasion of privacy.