About Editing and Writing

“In his praise for Manafort, now convicted of multiple felonies but refusing to spill the beans, to his ire with Cohen for a willingness to cooperate, to his absurd claim that turning state’s evidence should be outlawed, Trump acts more like a mob boss than a president.”

”Tweet on August 23, 2018, from Congressman Adam Schiff of California
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Vic Gold, who died a year ago after a long career in politics and journalism, wrote a 1980 Washingtonian story about what it’d be like if things got so bad that the American people would elect a Mafia boss as President. Excerpts from Vic’s story titled “If a Mafia Boss Ran the Country.”

Every two years the Washingtonian surveys members of the Senate and House and their staffs, asking them to rate members of Congress in a variety of categories, some serious, some fun: Best Leader, Worst Follower, Hottest Temper, Straight Shooter, and more. In 2006, two years before he became the Republican nominee for president, here’s how Capitol Hill insiders saw John McCain.

Straightest Shooter

1. John McCain (R-Arizona)

2. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska)

McCain’s Straight Talk Express is still humming. He gets votes from both sides of the aisle, as does Hagel, considered “McCain Lite.”

Worst Follower

Jonathan Franzen in the New York Times Magazine.

From an article “Jonathan Franzen is fine with all of it,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in the New York Times Magazine of July 1, 2018:

“I’ve never been a big fan of society structured predominantly along lines of consumerism, but I had made my peace with it,” he said. “But then when it began to be that every individual person also had to be a product that they were selling and liking became paramount, that seemed like a very worrisome thing at a personal level as a human being.

Going to a baseball game with a journalist can bring back the famous Janet Malcolm line about reporters being con artists: “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse.”

By Ray E. Boomhower

“An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.” —E. B. White

“One must never forget that writing and editing are entirely different arts, or crafts. Good editing has saved bad writing more often than bad editing has harmed good writing.” —Gardner Botsford

“Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.” —Norman Cousins

When Abe Rosenthal stepped down as executive editor of the New York Times in 1988, I wrote him, asking if he’d be interested in writing a piece for the Washingtonian titled “If I Ran the Washington Post.”

Rosenthal had no love for Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post, and I thought maybe he’d take the opportunity to put the needle into Bradlee.

He sent back a hand-written note: “It’s an interesting idea but a little bird is telling me not to do it….”

The psychologist Paul Rozin points out that the negative trumps the positive in many ways….Other scholars, in the paper titled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” summarized the evidence as follows:

“Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”

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.