About Editing and Writing

For readers of the Washington Post, New York Times, and other big city papers it’s ever harder to read about someone you actually know, or have seen in person. The obit sections of big newspapers seem—probably for reasons of digital traffic—increasingly about people of national and international renown. Locals going to eternal rest are written about in death notices paid for by the family.

As writer Barbara Holland put it in a 1999 Washingtonian article, “Serious newspapers are all about strangers. That’s how you can tell they’re serious.”

From Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon:

Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume.

This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward.

“Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders.

The picture with today’s page one Washington Post story about the death of Barbara Bush shows her smiling, wearing her trademark pearls, and holding a Springer Spaniel. It was President and Mrs. Bush’s love of dogs that gave the Washingtonian a story that got more world-wide attention than any other we ever published.

In the summer of 1989, trying to add some fun to a July best and worst cover, we added a picture of Millie, the president’s Springer Spaniel, and called her, in the worst category, Washington’s ugliest dog. That happened after a neighbor of mine with a Springer Spaniel said she thought Millie was a very homely representative of the breed.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has said that humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. We tend to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understood narratives.

Along the same lines, writer Ariel Sabar, in talking about one of his magazine profiles, said:

Lisa DePaulo made a name for herself as a feature writer for Philadelphia magazine and in the ’90s I lured her to the Washingtonian with the promise of more money and even better targets. She did great pieces—my favorite was a profile, “He Came From the Swamp,” of James Carville, the genius who got Bill Clinton elected president. She also caused a stir with a “Dates From Hell” cover story about how boring she found Washington men and she soon left for New York, where she’s done great work for GQ, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and the late George.

By Barnard Law Collier

Toward the end of the hour we spent discussing the proposed book, Bezos leaned forward on his elbows and asked, “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?”

—From Brad Stone’s book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown and Company, 2013).
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Jeff Bezos asking Brad Stone how he might deal with “the narrative fallacy” is a question I’d expect from Bezos. He’s asked such questions almost all of his intellectual life and without those questions there would be no Amazon.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said he will not run for re-election.

Page one Washington Post headline:

Ryan to exit, adding to GOP hurdles

Fiscal hawk leaves behind tax cuts, mushrooming deficit

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Editorial page:

Mr. Ryan Surrenders

Slow to take the Trump phenomenon seriously, and then unwilling or unable to confront it effectively, Mr. Ryan now exits, a diminished figure.

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Columnist E. J. Dionne Jr.:

Ryan’s curdled idealism

Paul D. Ryan started his political life hoping to be the champion of a sunny, forward-looking conservatism. He will step down from the House speakership as the personification of conservatism’s decline.

Stone’s book was published in 2013, just after Bezos bought the Washington Post.

In the prologue to Brad Stone’s book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Stone describes his first conversation in 2011 with Bezos about wanting to write a book about the rise of Amazon:

Toward the end of the hour we spent discussing the book, Bezos leaned forward on his elbows and asked, “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?”