About Editing and Writing

For some writers, working with an editor is like going to the doctor. The doctor can see that you’re cheating on your diet, you’re drinking too much, and you don’t get any more exercise than a three-toed sloth. And you know that the doctor sees all of that. You don’t have any secrets from your editor, either.

If you have a good editor, you won’t be savaged. You will benefit. You may even find some satisfaction in collaborating with someone who sees what you mean to do, sometimes more clearly than you yourself do, and helps you to get there.

Want to close America’s rural-urban divide?
Washington Post, February 20, 2019

As middle- and low-wage jobs in the American heartland disintegrate further, the national anger and polarization fueled by an urban-rural divide will only deepen.
Axios Future, February 20, 2019

Big city journalists like to divide the country into “urban,” meaning the big cities where much of journalism is now created, and “rural,” which means farm country.

The real divide is between big cities and the many hundreds of cities with populations, say, between 20,000 and 200,000. My home state of Wisconsin is full of such medium-sized cities, as is Michigan, where I worked as a journalist.

The Karl Lagerfeld obits in the New York Times and Washington Post both had the great line, “I’m very much down to earth. Just not this earth.”

I loved the line because it captured a few writers I worked with.

The most expensive example was the man who wrote a tell-all piece about Jack Kent Cooke, the late owner of the Washington Redskins. He had been Cooke’s driver before he got fired and we helped him write a piece describing what it was like to work for the rich and mercurial Cooke.

When big cities had two or three newspapers plus radio and television stations competing for great crime stories, a former reporter for the Chicago’s  City News Bureau told me how he sometimes got exclusive details and quotes from people involved in the story. He’d call from a pay phone at a police station and say, “This is blankety-blank from 9th district police headquarters—we need more information on what happened there tonight.” The recipient of the call assumed he or she was talking with the police and and the reporter often got good details and quotes, usually never disclosing who he really was.

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

—Sam Brown, director of Action, a federal domestic volunteer agency, in 1977.

The country’s most powerful media voices—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the important magazines, the big digital sites—are in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.

In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump got 10 percent of the vote in Manhattan and 4 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C.

The Washington reaction was mostly shock—31 states voted for Trump? That TV clown is our next president? How did this happen?

Another reaction in Washington was we don’t want him here. This is our city and there’s nothing about him we like. (Along with the disdain, there was some journalistic looking in the mirror: How did we miss this? Are we out of touch with the country?)

James Salter, in his book Burning the Days, writing about author Irwin Shaw:

This is the third of a series of odes on NiemanStoryboard that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special  and sadly contracting culture. The author, Don Nelson, has been a newsman for almost 50 years.

To see previous poems:

Ode #1, City Editor, Friday night

Ode #2: Reporter on deadline

COPY EDITOR, STANDING GUARD

I am the last bastion,

The guardian

Of grammar and syntax,

Spelling and style,

Structure and clarity,

Accuracy and context.