A good columnist’s best friend . . .
Dave Kindred |
Sept. 24, 2009 8:30 a.m.
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The column reaching for humorous effect would have worked just swell had Dugard been an expatriate novelist working on an historical romance while taking the sun on a Tahiti beach. But as a victim of barbaric brutality, not so much. In the history of sports column train wrecks, Whicker’s was epic.
As to how a veteran newsman widely respected for decades of good work could commit such a column, I suggest he had nothing in his notebook that day. All columnists know the dread feeling when it’s your day to perform and you have nothing. You go scavenging. You read the paper again, make phone calls, check websites, look at message boards, call up e-mail, and, for the first time, you ask the bright, ambitious intern, "Read any good tweets lately?"
Still empty and with the deadline remorseless, you start typing with the hope that maybe by the sixth or seventh paragraph the blurry words will turn into a hint of a suggestion of a thought that is good enough to send you back to the top where you can start hoping all over again. Every columnist dead or alive has been to that scary place.
John Schulian, once a great sports columnist, is now a television producer and writer who keeps a hand in sports journalism with books and Sports Illustrated pieces. He has seen deadlines flying at him and been frightened into typing, as he confessed by e-mail the other day: "Maybe that dilemma weighs heaviest on a columnist, the alleged star with the fat salary and the puffed-up reputation. So when anything remotely resembling an idea comes along, you run with it like an Oklahoma chicken thief. But I remember what Red Smith used to say when he looked at the results of such desperation: ‘I had nothing to say today, and I didn’t say it very well.’"
By now, a month after, there is little to gain by picking through the Whicker debris. But it might be useful to talk about the systemic failure that allowed the column to be published in the first place.
The Register sports editor, John Fabris, wrote an apology to readers in which he admitted that three junior editors who worked on the column were troubled by it but did not raise an objection to senior editors or to the columnist. "Thus we deprived Mark of what every writer needs: an attentive editor," Fabris wrote.
Only the editors involved would know why they ran silent. Maybe previous complaints had been ignored by the columnist and senior editors, so they thought it useless to complain this time. Maybe editors thought it was just too much trouble to deal with a star’s column so late in the production cycle. Or maybe the editors and the columnist thought the column was right up against the line of good taste and, while it might offend some, who would really care? All that is bad enough. Worse, there is the possibility that they all operated on a level of insensitivity that many readers suspect is commonplace in newspapers.
At The New York Times, editors are expected to speak up. "We have a good system of conversation with columnists," said sports editor Tom Jolly. "We have an editor specifically assigned to talk with columnists on their ideas and ours. And, yes, absolutely, our editors give feedback to columnists. They are the last line of defense. Feedback is essential."
Jerry Micco, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor, wants his columnists to make their points emphatically, "but if I think they are taking it a bit too far, I’ll tell them and either they or I will change it. As for our desk editing the columnists, I’ve always made it a policy that as long as you aren’t changing their opinion, then feel free to edit . . . If they think there is a red flag, they have the go-ahead to call the columnist directly, or me."
The best thing any sports editor can do for columnists is make sure their stuff is handled by the best copy editors available. Joe Posnanski is as good a columnist as newspapers have had in the last decade. Like all of us, he has heard rumors of "no-edit" clauses in columnists’ contracts and understands why some writers want such a deal. He’s not one of them.
"Of course, there have been times in my career when a copy editor inadvertently inserted an error or made what I thought was a tone-deaf edit," Posnanski wrote in an e-mail. "But more – much, much, much more – those editors have saved me from mistakes, from a clunky phrase, and from my own tone-deafness. The best editors are worth ten times their weight in gold. I can’t say I’ve never tossed my newspaper across a room after seeing a bad cut. But I can say that editors have let me down a thousand times less often than I have let them down."
Legend held that Schulian was a no-edit columnist. "I was never above the law," he said. "Mike Rathet, when he was sports editor at the Philly News, killed one of my columns. Then there was Marty Kaiser, my boss at the Chicago Sun-Times and as caring an editor as a writer could hope for. When George Halas died, I gave him a less than glowing sendoff. So Marty simply held my column for a day. No big deal. I still got my say. That’s all I ever asked for."
Wait.
A headline here:
John Schulian Defends Editors.
"It must seem pretty comical to hear me coming down on the side of stricter editing," Schulian said. "I fought editors at every step of my newspaper career. I worked for some damn good, even great, ones, but I fought them just the same. I fought them for the freedom to write the way I wanted to write. What, after all, was I there for it not that? If they thought I was making a hash of something, I didn’t want them putting their fingerprints all over the piece; I just wanted them to show me the parts that didn’t work and let me fix them in my own style."
I, too, asked only for last-touch privileges.
"To me, that seemed logical," Schulian said. "To too many editors, it was heresy."
Posnanski knows that a columnist’s job is to get out there on the high wire in the wind and see if he can make it to the other side.
"A touchy subject in the right hands on the right day can become the best kind of newspaper writing – the funniest, the most haunting, the most emotional," he said. "I once wrote a very emotional column that involved my brother, who was dealing with a terrible tragedy involving his daughter. I sent it in to my editor and specifically said, ‘I don’t know if this should run in the paper, but I felt like I had to write it.’ He did not run it, and he did not say anything about it. Later, I re-read the column – and I was thankful it didn’t run. It wasn’t appropriate and it said things that, if I was thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have wanted to say in the newspaper. Later I thanked the editor, and he said something like, ‘Your job as a columnist is to be out there. And our job is to be there for you.’"
During my first ten years in newspapers, my work was divided between reporting and handling copy. Hundreds of times since, editors have saved me from myself. For each rescue, I was, am, and forever will be grateful. Editors have corrected spellings of names, redone my math, fixed dates, and, while seldom winning, have argued against my habitual inanities and banalities as well as my flirtations with the luminescent one, Charlize Theron. As it happens, Posnanski, too, read copy: "I know how hard and monotonous and exhausting that job can get. And in the grand scheme, I’ve always thought that columnists should make it clear that they welcome editors, that they appreciate the good work they do. You want editors there for you – engaged and undeterred – on those days when you need them most."
One day during the Whicker hoohah, a friend asked, "Have you ever done a column you regretted?" Hundreds could be the answer there, too, but I knew the question was not about simple misjudgments.
"Richard Jewell," I said.
I’d do the Jewell column again, but with a new last line. He was a security guard at the center of an FBI investigation of the Atlanta Olympics bombing that killed one person. I became one of several defendants in his long-running libel suit against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (All 22 claims against the AJC were finally dismissed by December 2007. Jewell died three months earlier.) My involvement began when reporters watched the feds search Jewell’s apartment. I quoted a photographer saying the last time there had been such a search in Atlanta it involved serial killer Wayne Williams. A city desk editor didn’t like the allusion to a convicted killer in a column about a man not yet identified as a suspect. That editor did not speak to me but to a senior editor, who said the column was fine. I learned about her complaint years later.
In the column’s penultimate paragraph, I wrote of Jewell sitting in the shadows of his building’s staircase. Then: "Wayne Williams sits in prison forever."
I didn’t need that. The guard’s uncertain future, clouded by shadows of suspicion, was enough. I should have ended it there.
This is thirteen years later. An editor knew it that night.
