About Editing and Writing

John Fennell was editor of Milwaukee magazine for 13 years and then until last year taught at the University of Missouri school of journalism. At Missouri, he held the Meredith Chair in Service Journalism and also coordinated the annual editorial awards contest for the City and Regional Magazine Association.

Esquire subscribers now are being offered two free gift subscriptions if they renew their current sub. The offer is three subscriptions for $29.97—essentially $10 a year for each. The regular one-year sub offer is $12 a year, with some offers $8 a year, so the $30 Esquire offer of three for $30 isn’t that much of a deal.

But a smart move for Esquire—it builds circulation at a small discount and they then can hope some of the recipients of the gift subscriptions will renew.

From the book, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams. Richard Price, a novelist (The Wanderers, Clockers, and Lush Life), wrote screenplays for The Wire. David Simon  was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, an author, and the creator, along with former Baltimore police detective Ed Burns, of The Wire.

A story in the American Bar Association Journal showed how Republican President George H.W. Bush found a nominee for the Supreme Court who could be confirmed by a 90-9 vote in a U.S. Senate composed of 56 Democrats and 44 Republicans:

Unusual details of Justice David H. Souter’s personal life are beginning to emerge, from the way he eats an apple, core and all, to the way he met New Hampshire’s governor—at his hometown’s town dump, something of a place for socializing.

The Washington Post and the New York Times both published stories focusing on Souter’s personal life after news reports last week that the 69-year-old justice would be retiring and returning to his beloved hometown of Weare, N.H.

Wolcott Gibbs was an editor and critic at the New Yorker and in a book, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, author Gardner Botsford included these Gibbs observations about writers:

The average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate; that is, he is ornate to no purpose, full of senseless and elegant variations, and can be relied upon to use three sentences when a word would do. It is impossible to lay down any exact and complete formula for bringing order out of this underbrush, but there are a few general rules.

I edited a magazine for 40 years and still love getting magazines in the mail but soon it looks like I’ll be down to one sub.

The first to go was Sports Illustrated, which I had subscribed to for most of the past 60 years. SI kept sending ever more frantic renewal notices, always offering a special price for loyal subscribers. But the special subscriber deal was more than twice the price if you just went to the SI website and subscribed. Who likes to be treated that way?

The Washington Post ran a long piece this week revisiting Deep Throat, the secret Watergate source for Bob Woodward in the book All the President’s Men and the Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman movie. The hook for the Post reviving Deep Throat was the current search for the anonymous writer of the New York Times op-ed that had “bombshell disclosures about a scandal that encircled the president”—this time Donald Trump.

After reading the Post story, I wrote a piece pointing out that the first accurate story on the identity of Deep Throat was not, as the Post said, in the Wall Street Journal 0n June 25, 1974 but a month earlier in the Washingtonian, which named FBI man Mark Felt as the most plausible Deep Throat candidate.

The FBI’s Mark Felt: “He had every reason and resource.”

The Washington Post looked back yesterday at Deep Throat, the secret source who in the book and movie All the President’s Men helped Woodward and Bernstein do the Post reporting that helped cause the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The Post story, written by Eli Rosenberg, says that in the summer of 1974  “Mark Felt, the high-ranking FBI official who later admitted that he was the anonymous source known as ‘Deep Throat,’ wasn’t giving anything away—despite being named in the guessing game going on around him. A Wall Street Journal report noted that Felt ‘says he isn’t now, nor has he ever been, Deep Throat.'”

Out of the Pentagon inferno: Jerry Henson met with his two rescuers, David Tarantino (left) and David Thomas (right), after the attack. Photograph by Erica Berger.

Here is the 2001 Washingtonian story, by Tom Philpott, of what happened after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11/01.
—
“Remember This Name”

Trapped by Flames and Smoke in the Pentagon’s C Ring, Jerry Henson Thought He Was Going to Die. Then a Man He’d Never Seen Before Performed an Awesome Feat.