The news editor, multiple perspectives, and strong personalities

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.”