About Editing and Writing

Jeff Bezos: A tin ear for words.

At the Washingtonian, the cover word “best” sold the most copies: 100 Best Restaurants, Best Places to Live, Best & Worst. The absolute best newsstand seller was Top Doctors—we had to use “top” because someone had trademarked Best Doctors.

A cover usually had five or six cover lines to go with the main cover story. I didn’t like to use “best” more than once on a cover so at times struggled to find for other ways to say it. Over one year, these were the cover words used most often:

A reader sent me his automatic renewal notice from the New Yorker:

Thank you for subscribing to The New Yorker. Your current subscription term expires in the month of November 2018. I want to remind you that, as promised, your subscription will be automatically renewed for another 1 year and your card will be charged at the rate of $149.99*.

The asterisk is plus any applicable sales tax.

The reader’s reaction to the $149.99 a year subscription price: “I opted out of automatic renewal so the subscription I have for $99 will just end in November.  I wonder if they offer different renewal prices based on the subscriber’s zip code.  One person on your web page said she got a good renewal deal by calling and I might try that.”

By Mike Feinsilber

Back when most people got most of the day’s news from newspapers—printed downtown, delivered to the front porch, smelling of ink, fresh as a daisy—most of the news the papers carried that didn’t originate around town came with one of two sets of initials in parentheses: (UPI) or (AP).

Those were the wire services —United Press International and Associated Press—that delivered a ton of stories relentlessly on Teletype machines, spewing it out at 60 words a minute. They delivered the news from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, or Ho Ho Kus, New Jersey, from Wall Street or Hollywood, from the state capital or Washington, from the ballparks, from the weatherman or the Weathermen, from anyplace that produced news outside of the local papers’ reach.

Avery Comarow, a veteran editor, took exception to a recent post about a Washingtonian editor angrily reacting to a freelance writer who had complained to the magazine’s publisher about her treatment:

“I handled freelance writers at a science mag and would have reached for the phone to apologize 30 seconds after hearing from above that I’d let a writer fall through the cracks–not because I wanted to get my boss off my back but because there’s no goddamn excuse for treating writers like that. I’ve BEEN a freelance, been treated that way, and fumed helplessly because I knew I wasn’t going to get satisfaction from story editors puffed up with their own busy tinpot importance.”

Avery Comarow responded with some outrage to yesterday’s post about an editor’s dark reaction when a writer went above him on the masthead to complain about how she was being treated:

“I handled freelance writers at a science mag and would have reached for the phone to apologize 30 seconds after hearing from above that I’d let a writer fall through the cracks–not because I wanted to get my boss off my back but because there’s no goddamn excuse for treating writers like that. I’ve BEEN a freelance, been treated that way, and fumed helplessly because I knew I wasn’t going to get satisfaction from story editors puffed up with their own busy tinpot importance.”

Editor 1 is me, the magazine’s editor; Editor 2 is the magazine’s articles editor, who works mostly with freelance writers. Writer 1 is someone who has written several books and wants to write articles for the magazine and has communicated that to Editor 2. Like many articles editors, he is too busy to please everyone and frustrates some writers.

Writer 1, a few months after submitting a story proposal to Editor 2 and not getting a response, is at a Washington social event, meets Phil, the magazine’s publisher, and tells him of her dissatisfaction with her treatment by the magazine’s editors. Phil suggests she call me. I get the call and write a note  to Editor 2:

Journalist and author Madeleine Blais talking about narrative journalism at a Nieman conference:

In narrative non-fiction in some way the writer is part of the story.

Two separate skills are required: social skills to hear people and the ability to sit still in isolation and come up with something worth reading.

Facts are important, but just as important are emotional facts.

The bigger the story, the more scaled down and miniaturized it should be—John Hersey’s Hiroshima, J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, Katharine Boo at the Washington Post.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a UPenn professor, wrote about “The quiet bias in college admissions” in yesterday’s Washington Post. The column’s lede: “Do Harvard and other elite universities illegally discriminate against Asian American applicants?”

He says he’s not sure about that but “there’s another group of people who definitely face routine prejudice in college admissions. They’re the quiet types who keep to themselves….I’m talking about introverts, of course. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from reports on the recent lawsuits against Harvard University’s admission system, it’s that introverts routinely get the short end of the stick….Harvard’s ‘personality evaluation’ favors people who are outgoing, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight.”

Today’s Washington Post business section pulls together excerpts from the buying-a-car columns of Warren Brown, who died recently at the age of 70. Lots of newspaper and magazines run such how-and-what-to-buy pieces but rarely with the life and humor that Brown brought to the Post. A few excerpts:
—
I’ve driven thousands of cars. But no one ever followed me home. No one begged me to stop for photographs, or pleaded with me to linger in a mall parking lot to placate a friend who was trapped at a checkout counter, and who would “just die if she couldn’t see this”—the 1998 Volkswagen Beetle.
—
Ford named the car “Aspire.” That’s a good thing. Had the company called it “Inspire,” it would have violated truth-in-advertising laws.
—
The 1997 Buick LeSabre Limited is an old folks’ car. It’s big and roomy. When it moves, it galumphs— bounding along highways in a self-satisfied, triumphant manner.
—
The styling is governmental. It would fit nicely into any municipal, state or federal vehicle fleet. That is our first impression of the 2008 Ford Taurus Limited AWD sedan, a full-size car designed to haul parents, children, police, perpetrators or politicians. Even with its bright, bold, three-bar grille, the new Taurus appears devastatingly official.
—
My mother, Lillian Gadison Brown, always wanted a Cadillac, but she couldn’t find a dealership that would sell her one—not in segregated New Orleans, anyway.

In 1990, when George H.W. Bush was President, I went to a George Plimpton speech in DC and Plimpton described what it was like to play tennis with President Bush at the White House. He said President Bush liked to shout out self-motivating or celebratory phrases while playing.

When he wanted to motivate himself or his partner, he would shout “Unleash Chang!”

When something good happened, President Bush liked to shout “Vic Damone!” which meant victory. (Vic Damone was a popular big band singer and television entertainer.)

What did “Unleash Chang!” mean?