On most American university campuses, there is a student
newspaper. At most student newspapers, there is a news editor. The poor sap.
This was I for my sophomore year back in the late nineties.
It was kind of risky having a second-year student do this,
but as our university was small, we were often short-staffed, so the advisor,
an old news ethicist with years of experience from the Chicago Sun-Times,
decided to let me do it. Going in to the job, I thought I was there to think up
news stories and assign them. What I learned, though, is that my job was to
consider a whole lot of perspectives at the same time and not go nuts doing
this.
There’s lots of perspectives that go in to newspaper work,
not just the classic liberal/conservative one that gets Americans all stirred
up, but those of business interest versus human interest (sometimes you have to
write the budget story although it’s dull), of advertisers wanting to be in a
decent newspaper versus students wanting to tell it like it is with lots of
swear words, of people who liked reading versus those who had little interest
in reading and wanted their information fast. The news editor has to not only
be able to think about all this at the same time, he or she has to care.
I quickly learned that most people’s complaints about a news
source being too biased / stuffy / dumb / weird / sports-centered / etc., did
not relate to its being any of the above, rather that the complainer’s one or
two perspectives were not dominant, and that they would not be happy until they
were. I, for one, loved The Manchester Guardian back in those days (which
published a weekly edition you could get in America) for its willingness to repeat
my prejudices back to me, but knew it was practically impossible to create
something of that variety on our campus.
As news editor, you’re asking, “How can we write this in a way
that would be interesting to MOST of our readers?” That word, “most,” was the
part that caused problems to most of the people who come to work for student
newspapers – they want to write for people who think like they do, and they’re
pretty strong in that preference. Here are some of the stronger odd personalities
we dealt with:
-- The film critic. This was a fellow who would review a
popular movie for us (like this wasn’t already being done nationwide) and it
would show up with a note across the top saying “Do not change one word of
this.” On “The Mummy II” an action-comedy with Brendan Frasier, he spent half
of the review going on about the special effects in different scenes, repeating
a bunch of pointless adjectives such as “stunning” and “amazing.” I wrote in
the margin in red ink, “NEWSPAPERS ARE NOT A VISUAL MEDIUM! Write about
something that can be described in prose!”
If you asked him to review a local theatre production
involving local students, or write a news story on a new theatre program, you
would be greeted by a blank stare. That would have involved talking to actual
people.
-- The verbosity queen. This was a young lady who at first
seemed brilliantly intelligent, but after a while I realized she just had a
large vocabulary of words that would every once in a while come out in the
right order. She went out of her way to use words like “gregarious,” “passé,”
and “loquacious” in conversation. I also discovered that she needed to be the
smartest person in the room, and these words helped her do that . . . until
someone used a bigger word. She asked me how to keep from crying while cutting
up an onion, and I answered, “Don’t anthropomorphize vegetables,” a joke I
learned from Calvin and Hobbes. A
couple of Latin majors on the other side of the room started laughing, but she
didn’t get it. Instead, she got mad and told me I was really stuck up,
intimidating people with overly long words.
When you’re writing news articles, you need to remove as
many unnecessary words as possible, including “that” as a relative pronoun
(most of the time) and you don’t need synonyms for “said” at the end of quotes,
such as “stated,” “declared,” “articulated,” or “verbalized.” For two years we
tried to get her to stop with all this variety. This didn’t help much. Her
junior year, she brought in an article with the word “utilize” in it six times.
“Always say ‘use,’ not ‘utilize,’” I shouted. “They mean
exactly the same thing!”
“But,” she said, “when you have two words that mean the same
thing, aren’t you supposed to use the longer one?”
“NO!” I shouted, louder, and threw an (empty) file folder at
her.
--The alt-ziner. We had this one writer who made it clear
that he thought our newspaper ought to become an alt-music weekly ‘zine, full
of wickedly hip stuff that older people wouldn’t care about or understand. He
was a good writer and highly intelligent, too, but his sentences were riots of
five or six dependent clauses each, they were full of parenthetical statements,
he had a tendency to drift from reality to surrealism and back in the same
paragraph (and sometimes in photo captions, too) and the topics he wanted to write
about were all kind of obscure.
He did three articles about the minutiae of the lawsuit that
the record industry had filed against Napster, a music-sharing Web site. I did
not think these were interesting to the readers because I was pretty sure very
few of them actually used Napster. On-campus
users couldn’t use Napster because the university had blocked the site because
it was such a bandwidth hog, and off-campus users probably weren’t using it
because they’d have to use dial-up connections, which really stank for trying
to download mp3 files in 1999.
He claimed he was a post-modern writer and that his style
and his topic selection reflected his genre, and he had a right to it. I told
him to use the damn AP Stylebook and to pick topics that would interest more
people than his coffee-shop friends. We didn’t get along so great, but he did put
together a cartoon about snails that was funny in an odd, post-modern sort of
way.
He’s now a lawyer with a practice in Boston, and he seems to
be running a campaign on zoning regulations and casinos or something like that.
--The romantic. We had a handsome, 29-year-old
editor-in-chief, and he had no clue how to use Adobe Pagemaker to lay out the
editorial pages. Soon, we had a hopeful 18-year-old paginator. She had used
Pagemaker at her high school newspaper, and came up every week to help him put
together his pages. She had quite a crush on him, and wanted to be quite
involved in the paper until the fourth or fifth week of the semester when she
found out he was married and had a 6-month-old baby. We were able to talk the
paginator in to staying until the end of the semester, but then she wandered
off.
--The arguers. We had these two staff members, one male, the
other female, who worked together regularly and had an intense dislike of one
another. This got especially bad late at night, and student papers regularly
required staff members to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning the night before
it went to the printing press to get it all done. This meant they had plenty of
time to intensely dislike each other. That is, until one night when they were
alone in the office and decided to try the opposite of intensely disliking each
other.
When the other staff members found out about this, a blanket
was put on the office couch, where it remained for the next 10 years when the
building was remodeled and the couch was hauled off to the dump.
--The Hero. The previous strong personalities could
frustrate an editor, but The Hero is the one who could terrify him. We had one
of these. My second week as news editor, a student got assaulted near campus.
The attacker had run up behind her and grabbed her. She screamed loudly, and
caught the attention of a passing driver, who called 911 on a cell phone, and
the attacker fled, leaving her uninjured but frightened.
The vice president of student life let everyone know about
this through a campus-wide voicemail, which I was listening to when The Hero
walked in to the office. I had never seen The Hero before, but he assured me he
was on the story, he was a regular from last year, had interviewed several people
already, and was ready to put it on the front page.
The story he ended up turning in had a little bit of
information from the assault that had happened that day, but
it also included several other assaults that I couldn’t tell were real or not
because neither he nor the cops had talked to actual victims or witnesses of
the said other assaults. He used anonymous sources, and made up for gaps in the
narrative with adjectives like “blood-curdling scream” and “heart-pounding fear”
and created his own profile of the attacker’s modus operandi.
We ran a heavily, heavily edited version of the story (but
only after I called a couple of sources to re-do interviews). A few days later,
the cops released a poster with four sketches on it that had been created using
information from the attacker’s other victims. The sketches to me looked like
people ranging in age from 9 to 50, and did not resemble each other. I got a
call from The Hero, telling me he had been at a bus stop and saw a guy who
looked like one of the sketches, and he called 911 to report it, and he thought
this would make a great story.
I said, “You really ought to come to our weekly meetings, be
part of the team, take assignments off the list, rather than have you spring in
to action when you see the Bat Signal.” The Hero did not like that at all, and
demanded a meeting with the advisor. “No problem,” I said, “you’re scaring the
hell out of him, too.”
The tense meeting occurred, and The Hero told the advisor
how I was holding him back. The advisor told The Hero that he didn’t he was
experienced enough for the kind of story he wanted to do. The Hero said this
was especially important work that he’d taken on since his sister had been
murdered, and that he was dedicating his life to advocacy for domestic violence
victims.
That made me stop and wonder whether the arrogance I was
getting from The Hero was actually arrogance or grief. The advisor and The Hero tentatively worked
out an agreement where he could bring in an outline on a feature article on
domestic violence.
Then, a student-government position came open, and a special
election was held. He ran for it and we kind of hoped he’d win and leave us
alone. He lost by 30 percent of the vote. He came back and wrote a couple more
stories, although he never did bring in an outline to the major feature he had
in mind, and then we stopped hearing from him. One of his poli-sci classmates
eventually let me know he had graduated and gone to Duke Law School. I wondered
what variety of high-fee righteous world-saving he’d do as a lawyer, but was
glad I wouldn’t be seeing him again. And, I wondered if he’d find something to
do for his sister’s memory.
A few weeks ago, at my part-time job as a bookkeeper for a
lawyer who does advocacy work here in Seattle, I was writing up financial
reports for the boss. He has three attorneys who work for him, all for pretty
low wages. The organization wasn’t doing very well, and we were thinking about
cutting people’s hours or laying them off (including me). My experience with
them had taught me that law-school graduates have an awful time getting surviving,
contrary to their Hollywood image as high rollers. I wondered what had happened
to The Hero, and typed his name in to LinkedIn. Up came, “Juris Doctorate, Duke
University 2003,” and “I am your true Ford sales professional. No gimmicks, no
pressure, and likely the best experience you will ever have buying a car.
Contact me for a hassle free experience at Anderson Ford in Fremont, Ohio.”
