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A world without editors: The sequel

2 comments on A world without editors: The sequel

A world without editors: The sequel
: Last month, I had a snarkfit about the ham-handed “editing” I received at the hands of the butcher overseeing the exceedingly dull and ponderous Nieman Reports. (It continued here and here.) Rather than having my story about weblogs mangled and having my views changed to fit this alleged editor’s own agenda, I killed the piece and published it here, for a larger audience, on the web.

Now a brief sequel:

Sheila Lennon, the Projo blogger, just submitted her piece and reports:

I know the difference between a deadline and a drop-dead deadline (when the presses roll), and it’s been a busy summer. I didn’t get around to filing my story till Monday.

Like Jeff, I found that Melissa rewrote some of my sentences, making them inaccurate. It was shocking to see my straightforward prose badly misunderstood, my facts replaced by someone else’s erroneous assumptions.

Which was, of course, her point: It’s an aggressive magazine-editing style — Samurai editor! Hai! — that forces a yelp and a strong reaction: “It’s not that, it’s this!” Which was exactly what she was trying to get from me. By taking on the persona of a clueless reader who would interpret my words willy-nilly, she forced me to nail every concept so it could not be misunderstood.

Sorry, Sheila, but like the mom of a mass murderer, you’re just justifying the hack.

Good editing never but never entails changing facts and making them wrong and changing the writer’s solicited opinions to make the writer disagree with herself just to provoke a reaction. That’s treating bad editing as if it were performance art: Hey, man, if you hate it, at least it got you to react.

No, a good editor who doesn’t understand something should ask a question. A good editor who doesn’t like the way something is said should say so. A good editor who doesn’t like a piece should kill it.

A bad editor mangles first and asks questions later.

Sheila is happy with her story as it turned out.

I’m happy, too. I’d rather be on the Web.

[By the way, Sheila’s post came up with funky one-word-wide formatting on my screen, so I hope I managed to read it all.]

2 responses to “A world without editors: The sequel”

  1. sheila Avatar
    sheila

    Jeff, “hate” isn’t really operative here. She didn’t hate my story at all; she expanded it, and forced me explain the Web, and blogs as a “form,” to Flatlanders.
    She challenges. I tried to make the point in the part you didn’t quote — about her 1977 suit against major league baseball to get access to locker rooms. It works, although you and I both know there are more tactful ways to do this.
    But if you imagine her as standing in for crystallized blockheads who won’t see the future unless it’s spelled out for them, she’s a translator, your best friend.
    I work in the daily indigities of a newsroom, so I’m used to having to fight for my point of view. Nevertheless, I came to enjoy the process. Spelling out the details of newsroom operations that are obvious to me will be interesting details to the reader, “news” even to those who have no idea how that culture works.
    Melissa changed back anything I felt strongly about; some things I thought she rewrote well, in that was clear how to make it right. Some sections I killed, because it took too much explanation to give a context.
    (I never thought her rewrite was meant to be published, it was just a Zen master’s tool.)
    I added things i had thought could be taken for granted, but I was wrong. It took some humilty, but I enjoyed the process, overall. I like collaborating with strong, smart women.
    And I’ve spent this weekend sleeping a lot, eating good food, watching the birds in our backyard from the screenportch, reading a detective novel, and playing with my husband, glad the ponderous assignment of speaking blog truth to the power of the traditional news establishment is in and over.
    I use Mozilla, and don’t see the formatting problem you do. I’ve emailed our night guy to troubleshoot further.
    btw, I’ve always loved the mothers of mass murderers who say, “He’s a good boy.” That’s a definition of unconditional love, in my book.

  2. Mike G Avatar
    Mike G

    By the way, to answer your question of 3 weeks ago (and I now the world was waiting for someone to do that), I do think the WSJ edited Den Beste. I think (just from reading it) they pushed back on some of the things a blogger gets to shoot from the hip unchallenged, and they made him cut back a little on the customary swagger (which is part of his brainiac charm in the blogworld, but would seem less earned in a place where he’d be little Steven with, say, James Baker on one side and Francis Fukuyama on the other).
    What they DIDN”T do, unlike your Nieman editor to judge by the examples you cited last time, was mash him like a frickin’ potato. That’s when it becomes bad dumb editing. It’s worth looking at his version versus the WSJ’s to see a skillful editorial hand at work, subtly professionalizing a piece without losing the personality and spark that attracted them to it in the first place. (I say “professionalizing” without meaning to imply anything pejorative– Den Beste is a perfect and admirable example of the modern-day “gentleman amateur” writer.)
    I corresponded with another pretty well-known blogger who had a piece picked up by Slate once, and definitely went through a process of them beating his piece into the Slate house style. It’s okay that a magazine should want to have a fairly consistent voice, but it makes you realize that the individual author is subsumed to the overall style (or only hired because he already matches it).