About Editing and Writing

After the Washington Post headlined its obit of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghddadi with “Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48,” it got enough negative feedback that it apologized and changed it to “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, extremist leader of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

The first Post headline inspired the writer Cockburn of the Spectator/USA to ask readers for other much-too-kind obit headlines:

Adolf Hitler, passionate community planner and dynamic public speaker, dies at 56.

Joseph Stalin, former seminarian and noted agrarian reformer, dead at 74.

Jeffrey Epstein, noted Island Hopper, dies tragically at 66.

Tweets from an American Press Institute seminar in Arlington:

I think it’s a good sign when you’re leading a newsroom training with a brand new organization and the eradication of racist institutions, systems, and practices casually comes up before 10am.

A major key for allowing this to happen was starting the two day training with a community meeting and dream salon so that community informs the process.

I lol’d when someone said that too much of journalism was OWM4OWM: old, white men for old, white men.

 

Author Ben Horowitz, talking about his new book, “What You Do Is Who You Are”:

If you make decisions that everyone likes all the time, then those are the decisions they would have made without you…by definition, the most important decisions are the ones that people don’t like and cause people not to like you.”

Also from the book:

“If you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.”

My wife and I have three grandchildren, ages three to six, and over the past week we’ve seen about 40 photographs and 10 videos of them doing everything from celebrating a friend’s birthday to picking apples to falling asleep next to the dog. Everyone in our family carries an iPhone and takes pictures almost reflexively.

In Week 1351 the Empress asked for ideas for timely and creative Halloween costumes or party ideas. Judging from many of the entries, we’ll predict that a lot of people will show up at your nerdier parties as a Republican congressional invertebrate: spineless, see, harharhar.

Some of the best entries:

From the book,  The Washington Diaries, by Alan Gotlieb, a former Canadian ambassador to Washington:

Sir Nicholas Henderson is reputed to be the best British ambassador to Washington in modern history. . . .We talked about the complexities of Washington. The players are so numerous and dispersed, he said, you can never explain what actually happened. “If anyone tells you why a particular decision was made in Washington, he is either a fool or a liar.”
—
My predecessor and mentor Marcel Cadieux warned me that the most demeaning part of his job was trying to get an appointment with a senator, or waiting around to see him, or trying to get him to the house for dinner and coping with the seating plan when he, as so often happens, cancels his acceptance at the last minute.

As the exciting Washington Nationals baseball team returns to DC after winning the first two games of the World Series in Houston and gets ready to play the third game tomorrow night, sports fans tonight have little to watch other than the NFL game between the Washington Redskins and Minnesota Vikings.

The tale of those two franchises offers a management lesson as relevant to journalism as to sports.

Coverage of the Nationals often zeroes in on general manager Mike Rizzo, seen watching and sometimes taking notes. Coverage of the Redskins often shows owner Daniel Snyder sitting in the owner’s box watching his hapless team.

Barnard Law Collier adds his recollections of editor Harold Evans to the 10/20 post, “My Husband Signed the Contract for Your Book”:

So many things about Sir Harold Evans: His newspaper, magazine, and book editorships. His brilliant friends and authors. His despicable enemies. His awards. The verbosity he has cut from humptynine blathering stories.

What I recall vividly about Sir Harry as an editor—aside from being a bon vivant, raconteur, and dazzling intellect—was one of his offices in New York City. The room was neither fashionable nor elegant (unlike its resident) but it had about 100 square feet of table and desk space, which was topped with tureen-sized bamboo baskets, each labeled with the name of one of his many ongoing projects.

Donna Shalala, elected to Congress last year from Florida, successfully ran three universities before going into politics—she was president of Hunter College, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, and president of the University of Miami.

A Washington insider once told me he thought that more college presidents should be brought into the national government because to succeed as college presidents they had to learn how to balance a variety of competing interests. That, he said, is the way to get things done in Washington.