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.

Two: A lot of writers think profiles are fun and easy to do. Over the years I talked with hundreds of writers who were looking for an assignment or a job. I had questions: What books do you like to read? What magazines do you like to read?  What kind of stories do you like to do? When a writer said, “I like to do profiles,” that set off warning bells. Too often, especially with young writers, I got the sense that they had read a lot of celebrity profiles where the writer did a little interviewing and reporting and then used all their overwriting skills to try to do a lively piece. See last week’s interview with Ariel Sabar, a prize-winning profile writer, on the reality of doing profiles well.

Three: A good profile is about more than a person. Ariel Sabar said, “For me, the ideal subject is both richly idiosyncratic and part of something bigger than themselves.”At The Washingtonian we often used a profile of a person to examine an institution, to try to understand a trend, to look at a social problem. We led with a good picture of the individual but the head and deck tried to make clear that the picture was just the tip of the iceberg. Don Hewitt, the genius behind Sixty Minutes, said a good story is about an idea, not a subject. That insight—is this profile going to be about an idea or a subject—always was helpful in story conferences.

P.S. It’s amazing that most newspapers don’t see the potential in the ultimate profile, the obituary. What’s better to read in these jangly digital times than a good story about  a life well-lived?

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.”

Sabar grew up in Los Angeles and graduated magna cum laude from Brown University. He interned at the L.A. Weekly and Mother Jones before landing a daily newspaper job at the Providence Journal. In 2001, he left the Journal for the Baltimore Sun, where he covered the U.S. Naval Academy and National Security Agency and was the first reporter to interview families of the military reservists implicated in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He left the Sun in 2004 to write his first book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. A memoir about his father’s past in a community of Aramaic-speaking Jews in northern Iraq, Sabar’s book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. His second book, Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York, which he calls his “beach read,” won praise as a “beguiling romp” (New York Times) and an “engaging, moving and lively read” (Toronto Star).

Sabar covered the 2008 presidential campaigns as a national correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and is now a full-time author and independent journalist. His writing also has appeared in Smithsonian, Harper’s, Boston Globe, and The Washingtonian, where he is a contributing editor. For more, visit www.arielsabar.com.

Q. How did you go about writing the lead for your profile of John Wojnowski?

A: Because John is such an intense man, I wanted the lead—in its tone and symbolism and pacing—to mirror the fevered workings of his brain. In the opening paragraphs of a profile, I try not just to describe my subject, but in some ways to have the language embody them. That is, the lead should work on the level of both content and form. The focus on symbols of time and the jagged, almost conspiratorial connections between his environment—the atomic clock across the street, the date minders in his pocket, the innumerable hours he’s spent in his Quixotic duel with the church—were, I hope, a kind of evocation of how John sees and experiences the world.

Q: How do you decide if someone might be a good profile subject?

A: For me, the ideal subject is both richly idiosyncratic and part of something bigger than themselves. They’re both deep and wide.

By deep, I mean that their personality and biography are meaty and textured enough for the writer to show, at a fundamental level, what a subject wants, who they are, and how they got that way. The more eccentric the subject, the more apt you are to hold the reader. A failed profile is often a failure of reporting. If you dig deep enough and talk to enough people, you’ll find that almost anyone is interesting.

By wide, I mean that the best profile subjects don’t live in a vacuum. Good profiles show how their subjects’ lives intersect with larger currents of history and culture—whether at right angles or oblique ones. Subjects don’t have to be famous. John Wojnowski, the retired ironworker who has spent a decade and a half in a vigil outside the Vatican embassy, was not just a deeply anguished loner. He was part of a broader narrative about the long and difficult road to justice for people abused by priests. But he was a sort of outlier in the movement, and that’s what made him interesting.

An icing-like ingredient is an all-access pass to a person’s life, or as close to one as you can get without them getting sick of you. This isn’t always possible. I’ve written about subjects who wear a kind of reporter-proof force field, which leads me to rely more on friends, family, and other associates—and sometimes to post-publication regret from the subject that they didn’t take part and allow themselves more of a voice in the piece. But ideally, the subject is comfortable enough with who they are—or vain or unguarded enough—to let you be a fly on the wall. The DC nightclub impresario, Joe Englert, was a good example. I’d get calls and texts from him at all hours saying, “Hey, I’m about to go to my tennis lesson, Want to come along?” or “I’m about to have a staff meeting at one of my bars. You in?” In general, the more a subject lets you into their lives, the stronger the profile.

Q: Once you’re interested in profiling someone, what do you do next?

A: The first thing I do is read everything that’s ever been written about them and everything they themselves have said or written, online or on TV or in print. I’m lucky that my neighborhood library is the Library of Congress, which is a bountiful resource. I make this exhaustive review so I can be as smart as possible before we meet, and also to identify original story angles. If a subject has been profiled before, I don’t want to do a retread. I want to try to see something new, to try to connect dots that other writers have missed, so that the piece is fresh and gets at something hopefully truer than the ones that came before.

As I read clips and other writings, I use Word to create a detailed chronology of their lives, from birth and childhood to the present. In the case of my profile of the last King of Rwanda, that chronology ran 114 pages, because of how much history his life had intertwined with. For that story, I downloaded reams of reports from U.N. Visiting Missions to Rwanda in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which offered a contemporaneous look into his toppling from power. While the process can be tedious, I’ve found it often turns up revealing material that other writers may have been too lazy to look for.

Kierkegaard said that life is lived forward, but understood backwards.  The chronology I make at the very start of reporting becomes indispensible just before I start writing, because—like an aerial map—it allows me to see the recurring patterns and longer narrative thread of a person’s life.

Q: Do you try to balance talking with people who admire and don’t admire the subject?

A: It depends on the profile. If the person is controversial, I think you need to talk to at least a few critics. But if it’s, say, a quirky nightclub owner, I’m not sure you need that as much. That’s not to say you don’t portray people’s shortcomings or self-delusions or flaws; none of us would be human if we didn’t have those, and profiles that leave them out lack credibility and are often puffery. Good profile writers convey a person’s frailties or vulnerabilities in more subtle ways. We shouldn’t need to rely on a talking head to say, This guy can sometimes be overbearing or depressive or clueless or whatever. We should spend enough time around the person that we can see—and describe—those moments ourselves. This gets back to the old saw: Show, don’t tell.

Q: Do you tape record interviews or just take notes?

A: For me, the decision is practical. If we’re doing a sit-down interview, I usually will just type on my laptop. I type fast enough that I can keep up with people talking. Electronic devices are so ubiquitous these days that most people take no more notice of an electronic notebook than they would a paper one. If my subject is giving a formal speech or talk before a public audience, I’ll tape as well, for the sake of perfect accuracy. But if I’m shadowing a subject, I usually just have a paper notepad. I’ll supplement the notepad with a digital recorder in my shirt pocket if I’m moving around so much that writing is difficult—as it was when I was trailing some guys on turbo-charged pogo sticks for a piece on extreme pogo for Smithsonian.

I’ve also come to make greater use of my digital camera as a reporting tool. I use it both to capture the setting in which a scene or interview is unfolding and to remember the subject as they were in that setting. When I’m writing, I’ll often want to journey back to that place in my mind, to remember how it felt to be there. A series of photographs or a short video helps me get there. Photos also allow me to recover details of place that may elude me when I’m in the thick of note-taking or when a scene is fast-moving and there’s too little time to get every last detail down on paper. What were all those things piled on that shelf at the homeless shelter? What was that extreme pogoer wearing when he did that back flip? I don’t have to guess, or realize only after I’ve left, that I failed to examine something closely enough. I now have a digital image to consult.

Q. Any suggestions on how to open up someone so they talk more freely?

A: Just be a friendly, non-judgmental, and normal-seeming person. Show sincere interest in what your subjects are saying. Treat them like human beings.

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.

The real world of publishing? It’s that if you want to continue improving you have to do constant pruning. It’s delivering bad news to some journalists: We don’t need you anymore. Yes, I know you’ve been doing your best but things have changed; let’s see if we can help you find another job so you can leave with a smile. We tried to make it as painless as possible but sometimes the cuts weren’t at all gentle.

Usually when I looked back at the painful changes a year later, I thought the magazine was better off for it. Sometimes the “better off” also was true for the editor or writer who had to leave.
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When I read stories, like this one today by 29-year-old Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein about why investing in infrastructure (more government spending) is more important than cutting spending, my first reaction is  to wonder if the writer ever had to sit in on an annual budget meeting and make hard decisions about what had to be cut before you could get what you wanted to make things better. The nature of most journalists is to want to improve society, which often means more government money “invested” in doing good things.

My skepticism about let’s just spend without balancing nice-feeling generosity with painful cuts mirrors some of the political opposition to candidate Barack Obama in 2008: The guy has never held a real job, he doesn’t understand what’s needed to make something run sensibly and efficiently, he’s never had to fire anybody. That argument never seemed to resonate with journalists: Who cares about profits and losses? We’re sociologists, not economists. We want to relieve pain, not inflict it.

One journalist, Jonathan Rauch, wrote a brilliant piece on this in 1992 for the National Journal. It became a good book, Demosclerosis, but his ideas now seem mostly forgotten:

“In Washington, every program is quasi-permanent, every mistake is written into a law that some vested interest will defend furiously. The result is that as the old clutter accumulates, government cannot adapt.

“First, old programs and policies cannot be gotten rid of, and yet continue to suck up money and energy. And so there is little money or energy for new programs and policies. The old crowds out the new.

“Second, and at least as important: When every program is permanent, the price of failure becomes extravagant. The key to experimenting successfully is knowing that you can correct your mistakes and try again. But what if you are stuck with your mistakes forever, or at least for decades?”
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At any journalistic enterprise the editor often has to cut things (including people) that, as Rauch said, “continue to suck up money and energy.” You can’t let the old crowd out the new. You have to get rid of your mistakes. You can’t let the short-term kill you in the long-term.

A journalist who had been promoted to the top editor’s job at a magazine once told me, “I can’t believe I’m signing checks for $100,000.” Yeah, I thought, but wait until they tell you to cut editorial expenses by $200,000 next year.

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?

In the years since, Yiddish has infiltrated English. In the Detroit News of June 1, 2013, one reads of a Mediterranean restaurant in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, called Nosh. In the New York Times crossword puzzle on June 5, 2013, the clue for 48 across was “exclamations of tsuris” (“tsuris” means troubles) and the answer was “oys.” On May 28, 2013, the clue for 51 down was “like a schlimazel” and the answer was  “inept.”  And on May 30, 2013, young Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York, won the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee (and $30,000) by spelling “knaidel.” It’s a Yiddish word for Jewish dumplings, also known as  matzo balls, which give character and excitement to chicken soup.

DIVERSION #1: News of Arvind’s spelling of knaidel, which broke just as I was beginning to think about doing a posting on Yiddish in English, is an example of what I call Reporter’s Luck. A reporter is writing something and he needs an example to make his point. And suddenly, there it is, in the morning paper. That’s Reporter’s Luck. I’ve had Reporter’s Luck throughout a 50-plus year career in journalism, and it has come through for me over and over. More on Reporter’s Luck some other time.

DIVERSION #2: The spelling bee’s tossing “knaidel” at young Arvind set off a brouhaha (not a Yiddish word) in the Yiddish-speaking world. Yiddish speakers said the spelling bee conductors got it wrong. “We spell it k-n-e-i-d-e-l,” Jack Lebewohl,  proprietor of New York’s 2nd Avenue Deli, told the Yiddish newspaper the Forward. Published only in Yiddish, the Forward was founded as a daily in 1897 and had a national circulation of 275,000 in 1912. It now publishes a weekly edition in English, a biweekly edition in Yiddish, and daily on the internet in both languages.

After Arvind spelled and the Yiddish world buzzed, the New York Times consulted the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which, the Times said, is “recognized by many Yiddish speakers as the authority on all things Yiddish.” YIVO said the historic spelling is “kneydl.” But the spelling bee told the Times it was sticking with knaidel, which is the way Webster’s Third New International Dictionary spells it. Webster’s Third is the dictionary that contestants are told to cram with.

DIVERSION #3: Arvind is only 13, but he set sages five times his age tugging at their beards. His is an only-in-America story, too. The son of immigrants from India, he is an eighth grader at Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School in Bayside, Queens, New York. (What could be more American than a school named for a writer whose ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch trials?) Arvind knew the spelling of knaidel because he had boned up on German-origin words in the Third International. He did that because, tripped up by German-origin words, he had finished only third in his two previous participations in the bee; Yiddish is German-based. He told the Times he had never tasted a matzo ball,

Anyway, to illustrate how far Yiddish-creep has gone, here are some Yiddish words you probably know even if you don’t know from whence they came.

1. chutzpa.
2. mish-mosh.
3. klutz.
4. kosher.
5. mavin.
6. nosh.
7. kvetch.
8. nu.
9. shlep.
10. mensh.
11. dreck.
12. kvell.
13. shmo.
14. kibbitz.

Spellings vary (ask Arvind Mahankali) but I’ve stuck with the spellings used by Leo Rosten, the late author of The Joys of Yiddish, a book which, though 45 years old, is surely the most joyous guide to Yiddish and how it has enriched English. It is a lexicon and most entries are accompanied by a Yiddish joke illustrating how the word under question is used.

NOW THE POINT. It is to plead with you to use these words (and all others, too) with care. Yiddish words are strong, like horseradish. They have quite specific, quite pointed, quite pungent meanings and it is a shame to hear them watered down. A mensh is not just a nice guy. Helping an old lady, even an old lady using a walker, cross the street does not make one a mensh. Being a mensh is a lifelong characteristic. Likewise, chutzpa is more than just nerve (as in “some nerve”). It is stronger than that. Here is Rosten: “Gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.” Please: Don’t cheapen these words.

The definitions of the 14 words:

1. chutzpa. In addition to Rosen’s synonyms, here are  more: gross audacity, sheer cheek, brass, arrogant boldness, effrontery. The classic example of chutzpa: The son, having killed his parents, pleaded for mercy on the grounds he was an orphan.

2. mish-mosh. It’s a mess, a mix-up, total confusion. Rosen: “I consider miss-mosh a triumph of onomatopoeia—and a word unlike any I know to suggest flagrant disorder.”

3.  klutz. A clod, a congenital bungler.

4. kosher. It originally was applied only to food; it meant fit to eat under Jewish dietary laws. In English, it means legit, authentic, one who can be trusted, fair or ethical.

5. mavin. An expert, a connoisseur.

6. nosh. A snack or a tidbit or something eaten between meals.

7. kvetch. Rosten: “To fuss around, to be ineffectual…to fret, complain, gripe, grunt, sigh.” It is also a noun: a kvetch (or kvetcher)  is a whiner, a sad sack.

8. nu. Rosten says it is Yiddish’s most frequently used word—because it is the equivalent of a sigh, a frown, a grunt, a sneer. Depending on context, it means “well?” or “so-o?” or “how are things?” or “what’s new?” or 15 other nuanced things. For more, buy the book.

9.  shlep. Rosten: “To drag, or pull or lag behind” as in “Don’t shlep all those packages; let the store deliver” or “They shlepped me all the way out to see their house.”

10.  mensh. The word I most dread to see compromised by misuse. It means an upright, honorable person, someone of noble character. Use it with respect.

11. dreck. Junk or worthless stuff like a necklace made of plastic diamonds. It originally meant dung.

12.  kvell. To swell—almost to shake—with pride. Grandparents do it with slight provocation.

13.  shmo. Rosten: “A boob; a shlemiel, a hapless, clumsy, unlucky jerk; a fall guy.”

14.  kibbitz. To butt in, especially for a non-player to give unsolicited advice to someone in a card game. To fool around.

You notice there are no dirty words on this list?  Dirty Yiddish words are so poisonous, so villainous, so likely to lead to fisticuffs if the other guy knows their meaning that nothing should be done to encourage their circulation. In 1998, before some 40 Jewish leaders at a campaign breakfast, Republican Senator Al D’Amato of New York used one of those words to describe his Democratic challenger, Charles Schumer. His audience was shocked and D’Amato still hasn’t lived it down. It’ll probably be recalled in his obituary.

Please post a comment if you have a favorite Yiddish word that you think has won a place in everyday English. Also define it and give an example of the word in use. There are dozens of others that could be included (oy, tochis, tsuris, mazel tov, yente, meshugge, megillah, shmendrik, for example) but I tried to limit this first list to useful words that are in common use.

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.”

The Washingtonian then was owned by Loc Phillips, who had grown up in Washington and started the magazine in 1965. By 1977 it appeared to be doing pretty well—circulation and advertising numbers kept going up but we continued to lose money and none of us felt that confident about the future.

Then on a March morning in 1979 Loc stopped at my office door and said, “Would you come into my office.” When the owner says that in a serious tone of voice, the editor’s heart skips a beat.

As I walked in, Loc said, “I think you know Phil.” Getting up to say hello and shake hands was Phil Merrill, the man who two years earlier had asked such good questions in the hotel lobby.

The Merrill family still owns The Washingtonian, and during my next 30 years there I always told each intern class that journalism was not a dog-eat-dog business, that most the people who did well in journalism were good to work with and helpful to others. I’d tell them that if they went out of their way to be helpful to other journalists, including publishers, they’d be surprised at how often that help was returned.

Have a story about a memorable journalism moment? Send it on to jacklimpert@gmail.com for posting.

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

For those of us who edited magazines 25 years ago, native advertising sounds a lot like what we then called advertorials. Those were sections in a magazine—often 12 or 16 pages—that were a mix of what sort of looked like normal editorial plus ads related to the subject matter. Back then the Washington Post Magazine ran lots of advertorials on cosmetic surgery (the magazine’s editor at the time was a  talented journalist who has gone on to bigger things), and the quasi-editorial copy could be anything from helpful information to puffery about an advertiser. A half-dozen of the bigger city and regional magazines—and some national magazines— would run six or seven advertorial sections a month.

The American Society of Magazine Editors tried to police the advertorial sections—here are the ASME Guidelines–and some magazines pushed things close to or over the line by making it hard for readers to know what was real editorial and what was advertorial. At ASME board meetings there was talk about whether magazine X or Y should be barred from the National Magazine Awards because the advertorials weren’t clearly labeled or looked too much like real editorial. I took part in an ASME panel on advertorials and tried to make the case that the sections were the equivalent of Pablum, that most of the sections offered nothing useful or interesting to the reader, that they were there only as a bland excuse to sell ads.

At one ASME meeting, Ed Kosner, then the editor of New York magazine, suggested that advertorial sections were okay if the quasi-editorial material was objective (facts and figures) and not subjective (puffery about those running ads). That made a lot of sense then, and still does. One problem, of course, is what marketers see as objective may not be what editors see as objective.

At The Washingtonian we mostly avoided advertorials because we had a strong circulation base and we didn’t want to endanger that by junking up the magazine. There was another issue: At a meeting of city magazine editors, Brian Anderson, then the editor of Mpls. St. Paul magazine, called advertorial sections the dangerous equivalent of heroin. His magazine was running lots of advertorial sections and he said that the magazine’s ad staff had become addicted to the sections, that they claimed they couldn’t sell run-of-book ads, that they needed the crutch of telling the advertiser that their ad would run near copy that would mention them.

So it appeared back then that advertorials might give a short-term boost to ad sales but long-term would weaken the magazine—it was an argument that some business side people understood. As for the editorial side, we hated advertorials, thinking that they were an attempt to con readers, that they would erode reader trust in the magazine, that they were an insult to the intelligence of readers, that long-term they would wreck the magazine.

Back then long-term thinking seemed to make sense.

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.”

Imagine liking writers! I mean liking writers as a class of people. Safecrackers or jugglers or dental hygenists, sure—but writers? Writers are by nature narcissists….In a way they have to be narcissists, at least while they are working. To maintain the concentration and self-belief necessary to see one’s project as preeminently worthy generally requires a distorted sense of reality.

2. Todd on editors:

Editing is a wifely trade. This is a disquieting thought for editors, certainly for male editors, and in a different way for some female editors, too, but editing does involve those skills that are stereotypically female: listening, supporting, intuiting. And, like wives, editors are given to irony and indirection.

3. Todd on whether editors also should be writers:

To write can have a good or a bad influence on your editing. Being edited makes you more sensitive to the way in which the editorial hand, so innocuous seeming when you are wielding it, can cause pain. On the other hand, if you think of yourself as a writer, you may too easily imagine that the answer to another writer’s problem is your own fine prose.

4. Todd on whether an editor should rewrite:

Editors, in any medium , should avoid rewriting, and if they do try to rewrite, then the writer is justified in resisting. Revision by an editor never works as well as when the writer does the work. If editors do add words, they should try to maintain the author’s style and idiom, in the spirit of those signs you used to see at dry cleaners: “invisible reweaving.” The surest way to do harm to a piece of writing is to impose one’s own style on it.

5. Todd on the most important work an editor does:

Editors need a hierarchical sense of a manuscript, book, or article. They need to see its structure, its totality, before they become involved in minutiae. A writer should be on the alert when an editors starts by fixing commas or suggesting little cuts when the real problem resides at the level of organization or strategy or point of view….Editors ideally can see and hear prose in a way that the writer cannot.

The best thing an editor can do is to help the writer think, and this is the most satisfying part of an editor’s work, collaborating at the level of structure and idea.
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Some of Good Prose is about the Kidder-Todd collaboration at The Atlantic, the magazine where the writer-editor relationship started and blossomed, and some is about the books that Kidder wrote and Todd edited. Here are more thoughts about editing—with my perspective that of a newspaper and magazine editor.

1. It made zero difference if I liked or disliked a writer—all that mattered was what appeared on the printed page. I had editors who didn’t want to use certain writers because they were too pushy or too needy—it’s not an editor’s job to enjoy the writer’s company. An editor liking the writer too much is a bigger problem—I’ve seen lots of editors let writers they liked get away with work that should have been better.

2. A wifely trade? And, like wives, editors are given to irony and indirection? Maybe that depends on your marriage. Writing is hard; editing is easier. When I write, there’s always some writer’s block, some worry about whether I can take reporting, research, and ideas and make something worthwhile out of it. Writing is hard until you get published, and then it’s often worth all the anxiety and effort. When I had something to edit, there was no editor’s block, not much reason to worry that someone would read the story and think, “That story was badly edited.” Todd is right that good editors want to be helpful and supportive, they need to be patient and good listeners, they provide fresh eyes and perspective. And, yes, they have to remember that the writer is more important than they are.

3. I always liked editors to do some writing as a reminder that writing is hard. I had editors who got so worn down by writers that they developed almost a contempt for them. I once heard an editor talk to a writer, slam down the phone, and say quite loudly, “Dumb beast.” Writing can drive people a little crazy; the editor should write often enough that you remember that going a little crazy sometimes comes with the territory.

4. I almost never changed the wording in a story. My goal was to speed things up, to take writing that was going 45 miles an hour and make it go 70. Then I’d ask the writer to fix any problems that couldn’t be cut. Some writers thought I cut too much:  “You’re taking away my style!” My unspoken rejoinder was, “Overwriting is not a style.”

5.   The most important part of the editor-writer relationship comes early: What kind of piece are we going to try to do? How are we going to do it? What kind of background research? Who are we talking with? How long will it take? What’s the main idea? What kind of head might we put on it? We were in it together—the writer got the byline and maybe the glory, the editor got a regular paycheck and the satisfaction of helping.
————
Good Prose is a thoughtful and helpful book, the best I’ve read on the writer-editor relationship as it is today. It’s a good companion to Editor of Genius, Scott Berg’s wonderful biography of the great early 20th century book editor Maxwell Perkins.

If you have suggestions for other writer-editor books you’ve found thoughtful and helpful, please send me a note at jacklimpert@gmail.com or leave a comment.

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.

The story, titled “Is Marty Baron the Man to Fix The Washington Post,” is written by Chris Frates, who mostly covers lobbying for the National Journal. Here’s the story’s nut graf:

He’s the consummate newsman, a compliment that has long been reserved for industry lifers who care more about the makeup of Page 1 than the future of newspapers. But can The Post, whose flagging fortunes include tumbling revenue, circulation, and staff ranks, still afford that kind of luxury? If Baron has a vision for the paper’s future—and almost certainly he had to offer one to Publisher Katharine Weymouth to be handed the helm—he’s loathe to discuss it. He’ll talk about his journalistic accomplishments, the mechanics of a good story. But as for fixing The Washington Post, he’s not about to admit that it’s even necessary.

Baron has been at the Post less than five months after running the Boston Globe for the past 11 years. As a longtime reader, it appears to me that he’s injecting some life into page one and improving local coverage. He’s not laying out what’s next for the Post. He’s not giving Frates his blueprint for the future. He’s still hiring his people, still learning. He’s not trying to please a National Journal writer.

As the NJ’s lobbying reporter, Frates did get a “Washington public-affairs consultant” to suggest that Baron is failing in his role as Post editor because, ‘In fact, the consultant hadn’t even heard of Baron.” Do consultants that dumb make a living in DC?

At this early stage it appears that Marty Baron is a lot smarter than the people writing about him.

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.

But we talked another five minutes and then Ken and I looked at one another with the same realization: The reason why this writer wasn’t clicking in with us was because he was about twice as smart as we were and he was trying to find common ground with us.

And he went on to write a great story.

Have a story about a memorable journalism moment? Send it on to jacklimpert@gmail.com for posting.

They were thunderers, the editors of American newspapers of an earlier time. They wrote on asbestos. They felt no need to give the other side of the case. If there was one, let the scoundrel who put out the competing rag down the street champion it. Usually, there was a competitor down the street; in the 19th and early 20th centuries nearly every town with a population of 500 had two or more papers.

For old times’ sake, now that many newspaper presses are threatened with silence, let’s recall those editors. They were unambiguous, individualistic, full of themselves, full of spit and beans, full of spunk and spirit, sometimes mean-spirited, narrow and petty, sometimes humane, rarely humble. Sometimes they were dead wrong, and when they were they sometimes later acknowledged it and sometimes did not.  Wouldn’t the New York Times like to take back its 1915 editorial opposing women’s suffrage? It said the women’s vote, which would be granted by amendment five years later, would dilute the electorate “by the infusion of unpracticed, uninstructed feminism!”

The fury of some of these trumpets were recorded in a book, Outrage Passion & Uncommon Sense produced by Iowa journalist Michael Gartner and the Newseum in Washington and published in 2005 by the National Geographic, from which many of these examples are drawn.

Vitriol has often been the common currency of editorial pages.

Nearly 30 years after the Civil War, the death of a Union general in the war, Benjamin Butler—nicknamed “The Beast” and known for his unsparing treatment of rebel citizenry in New Orleans—was celebrated by The Daily American of Nashville, Tennessee: “He was a truckling demagogue whose selfishness amounted to pollution…he was mean and malignant, a hangman from prejudice, the insulter of women, a braggadocio, a trickster and a scoundrel…”

Vitriol? Try this:

In 1975, Leonard Edwards was a twice-convicted murderer awaiting trial for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. In Philadelphia, Richard Argood of the tabloid Daily News lost patience with what he saw as slowpoke justice. He wrote an editorial advocating Edwards’ execution which ended with these words: “Fry him.”

And in Kentucky in 1979, the Louisville Times grew tired of the “bumbling leadership” of the city’s mayor and said so: “He has worn out his welcome with everyone. His party wants him to go. The city’s elected legislature wants him to go. According to the Times’ recent poll, the public wants him to go. So git.”

That was mild compared to the low opinion editor Grover Cleveland Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser held of Alabama’s U.S. senator, Tom Heflin, “a bully by nature, a mountebank by instinct…a gent with a mission and without a muzzle.”

Throughout, nothing pumped editorial adrenalin faster than race.

On March 6, 1857, in the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, that black people, slave or free, were not citizens and not protected by the Constitution. In Albany, New York, the Evening Journal dissented: “Unworthy of the Bench from which it was delivered, unworthy even of the previous reputation of the jurist who delivered it, unworthy of the American people, and of the nineteenth century, it will be a blot upon our National character abroad and a long-remembered shame at home….It falsifies the most reliable history, abrogates the most solemn Law, belies the dead and stultifies the living…”

Nearly a hundred years after Dred Scott, the Supreme Court overthrew the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed public schools to segregate students by race. In Mississippi, the Jackson Daily News cursed the court: “Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court.”

When Freedom Riders rode buses into Jackson in 1961 to test a new federal law prohibiting segregation in public transport, they met with the scorn of Daily News editor Jimmy Ward:  “These people are crackpots.”

These editors also could get personal. H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, was one of the celebrated wordsmiths of his time, but in Emporia,  Kansas, William Allen White, the editor of the Gazette, saw the ham in him:

“With a pig’s eye that never looks up, with a pig’s snout that loves muck, with a pig’s brain that knows only the sty, and a pig’s squeal that only cries when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig’s mouth, fanged and ugly, and lets out the voice of God…”

Patriotism also brought out editorial rancor.

“Once or twice since Pearl Harbor, The Times has likened the Japanese to rattlesnakes,” said the Los Angeles Times in 1943. “This is to apologize to rattlesnakes.”

Respecting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent was too much to ask of the San Francisco News after Pearl Harbor: “The only course left is to remove all persons of that race for the duration of the war.”

On race, newspapers have been ahead of their readers or as bigoted as their readers.

Here’s one that was ahead. In 1937, the Delta Star in Greenville, Mississippi, ran a picture of Jesse Owens, who had won four gold medals in track and field at the Berlin Olympics. Some readers objected; they didn’t want to see a black man’s picture in the newspaper.

“We’ll print it again when we feel like doing so….Get this straight, everyone of you,” editor Hodding Carter II told readers. “We were brought up on a Louisiana farm.…But we personally have never felt so unsure of our status as a white man that we had to bully a negro, to return courtesy with rudeness or to make him think that he was a despicable beast…”

And in Emporia, William Allen White, noting the tendency of his neighbors to belittle black people, asked, in 1922, “Who in God’s name are we?”

Some newspapers with a racist history could—and did—acknowledge a change of heart as the nation moved toward equality and fairness. That was especially easy when the newspaper also had a change of ownership.

The other paper in Jackson, Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger, for years helped lead the charge against the civil rights movement. Then the paper acquired a new owner, the Gannett chain, and a new editor, Jackson native Charles Overby.  In 1982, on the 20th anniversary of James Meredith’s riot-causing integration of the University of Mississippi, an editorial announced the paper’s new view: “We were wrong, wrong, wrong.”

And even the proud Wall Street Journal, still the proprietor of a strong-willed editorial page, could announce a change of heart. In the 1960s, the Journal was a cheerleader for America’s war in Vietnam. But by 1968, the Journal ate crow.  “Everyone had better be prepared,” it said, “for the bitter taste of a defeat beyond America’s power to prevent.”

The L.A. Times, also a war supporter, shared that view: “The time has come for the United States to leave Vietnam, to leave it swiftly, wholly, and without equivocation.”

Not often, but every once in a while, these editorialists could display their human side. William Allen White did it in an editorial pleading for a meal:

“Public Notice. Mrs. W.A. White has gone to New York, called there by the illness of her sister. Mr. W. A. White is in Emporia. How about Sunday dinner? This is not only an opportunity but a duty, as we have said before on many cases of public need. Don’t all speak at once but phone 28 after six o’clock.”