An editor's haiku

The coffee is hot,
my hands poised above the text,
its vitals exposed

Regard the comma,
apt with the compound sentence,
not with compound verbs

An expanse of white,
regular ranks of black type,
and slashes of red

The patient labor
of the lexicographer
embiggens our tongue

So sweeping the claims,
so erratic the result —
Wikipedia

The writer who knows
how to use “comprise” rightly
will rise to heaven

Give up explaining
suspensive hyphenation;
insert as needed

A reporter’s hand
reaches for a thesaurus;
screams die in my throat

Too many “touches”
in processing the copy —
layoffs now impend

This writer’s in luck:
I have been turned down to serve
on a death panel

Too many hours
on a chair in the basement
perusing the Web

Previous efforts
emphasize the feebleness
of the work today

Best of Baltimore?

I tried to contribute today to the City Paper’s Best of Baltimore 2009 reader poll, mainly to nominate Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large as the best local blog, but the software wouldn’t accept my nominations because I had fewer than 25.*

Anyhow, here are my nominations, along with a couple of categories in which I have views but no choices:

Best Neighborhood: Hamilton (of course)

Best Local Landmark: Fort McHenry

Best Park: Druid Hill

Best Place to Take Out of Town Visitors: Visionary Arts Museum

Best Oriole, Best Raven, Best Local Sportscaster: Oh please

Best Local Journalist: No entry here — not clear whether the category can include unemployed as well as employed, and I have just about as many colleagues in the former category as the latter

Best Local Publication: The Baltimore Sun, even in eclipse

Best Local Blog: Dining@Large. Elizabeth Large not only offers sound advice on food and restaurants, but she has fostered a genuine Web community among her readers. Come for the food; stay for the topic drift.

Best Independent Bookstore: Ivy Bookshop

Best Auto Repair Shop: Apple Auto on Harford Road (Hamilton again)

Best Liquor Store: Wells

Best Local Beer: Resurrection

Best Neighborhood Bar: Hamilton Tavern

Best Movie Theater: Senator (with hopes for its survival)

Best Reason We Should Invite You to the Best of Baltimore Party: 1. Last year I was working at The Sun and couldn’t attend; this year it appears that I’ll be free. 2. I didn’t nominate my own blog. 3. Sit next to me, and I’ll tell you stories.

Want to dispute choices? Want to add categories? You know what the comments function is for.



*Copy editors don’t get out much. Besides the City Paper categories don’t offer much for a person of my advancing years. Now if there had been a Best Bar Where You Can Have a Conversation Without Having to Shout Over the Music category ...

The tale of the gnome

In the old days, when copy editors left newspaper one by one, instead of being pushed down a chute with a man holding a sledgehammer standing at the bottom, a decorum of departure was observed.

The chief of the copy desk or some other minor satrap delivered a few gracious remarks, small gifts were presented, the honoree made a short speech of reminiscence and thanks, and cake was cut and served. Occasionally, outliers from other news departments would wander over, especially after cake was announced.

At some copy desks, of which The Baltimore Sun’s was one, the farewell gifts included jocular items. As you might expect, such jocular gifts often carried with them a back story or personal association.

At one point in my tenure at The Sun, there was a copy editor on the desk whom a fellow editor referred to privately, because of his physical appearance and a disposition that it would be generous to describe as grumpy, as “the Garden Gnome.” The gnome departed, and so, in the fullness of time, did the other editor. When the latter editor retired, one of the farewell gifts was a plaster garden gnome.

The former editor was held in such low esteem and the latter in such affection that it became a tradition on the desk to present a garden gnome, the uglier the better, to each departing copy editor. It generally fell to the managers to acquire the damn things, either plaster or — even uglier — plastic.*

I suppose that many close-knit groups develop such rituals — append yours in a comment if you like.

But the tale of the gnome has a little moral: If you are disagreeable enough to your colleagues, you can expect to achieve a rude immortality.



*On the day I was dismissed, I harbored five garden gnomes in an office cabinet. The pending purge had been well telegraphed, but I had underestimated its scope. And I myself left cakeless and gnomeless.

Credulity and skepticism

Fans (I am one) of Snopes.com, the “searchable database of urban legends and myths, email hoaxes, computer virus warnings, and folklore,” can only marvel at the boundless credulity represented by the nonsense that Barbara and David Mikkelson painstakingly research and refute.

There is the patently false report, propagated by Betsey McCaughey and subsequently spreading faster than the swine flu virus, that a health care bill before Congress requires that senior citizens be given counseling on euthanasia every five years.

There is the Internet petition to President Obama protesting a Senate decision to grant illegal immigrants Social Security benefits. (The petition to President Obama is a repurposed version of a comparable petition to President George W. Bush from 2006.)

There is the image showing deplorably low grades and SAT scores on Sarah Palin’s high school report card — a fraud that demonstrates how easily images can be manipulated and falsified.

This proliferation of — let’s be frank about it — lies tells us something about ourselves:

People believe what they want to believe, crediting information that reinforces those beliefs and rejecting information that challenges those beliefs. Many of these beliefs are inextricably intertwined with people’s fears about the world and their place in it. Today’s intense anxieties about economic well-being leave people easily moved to share their fears, with demagogues standing by to exploit them.

If you fear that oppressive government regulations are going to endanger your freedoms and personal security, or that illegal immigrants are a threat to the nation, or that Sarah Palin is dangerously uninformed, you are liable to seize on any report that confirms your suspicions, however ludicrous and unsupported. (Before I go on, am I being clear to you that this is universal, and that the left, the right, and the center are equally credulous?)

And not just in politics. The range of rumors and legends that people are willing to entertain and spread abroad, and which the Mikkelsons explode, is astonishingly wide. Some examples:

Mussolini did not make the trains run on time in Italy.

Mariah Carey did not say, “When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”

It is not true — I may have readers who will find comfort in this — that a woman older than forty is likelier to be killed by a terrorist than to get married.

It was once thought that the job of journalism was to sort out the true from the false and enable the public to make informed decisions. Rumor and fabrication were left to the supermarket tabloids, so that credulous could be entertained and the informed amused by reports such as “Stroke victim falls in garden & is eaten by her Venus flytraps.”* But in a world in which, for example, Wikipediasts can insist that it doesn’t really matter than some of the information in the “free-content encyclopedia” is not accurate, and journalists can uncritically publish bogus information taken from it, it is not clear how much journalism takes its old responsibility seriously.

If I were designing a journalism curriculum, I would experiment with a course, Skepticism 101, in which the students would have to analyze press releases boasting unsupported claims, polls with unreliable samples, scientific studies with questionable methodology, statistics that don’t add up, rumors, and the other free-floating nonsense that is as much a part of the atmosphere as the polluted air we breathe.



* An actual Weekly World News headline.

I wasn't at Woodstock

Few things in journalism bear as strong a sense of inevitability as the anniversary story. Point a writer to an event, ten, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, or fifty years in the past, and you can lay out the page before the text is in hand — none of those messy contingencies with stories that don’t pan out.

No doubt such articles appeal to a “Hey, I remember that” nostalgia among readers, especially my fellows in the boomer generation, our waistlines expanding as our hairlines recede, as we struggle to see through our trifocals to the golden haze of youth.

But the real reason for the proliferation of anniversary stories is that they are easy.

Very little real reporting is involved; much of the information can be retrieved readily from the archive — rather like the partially masticated rodent tissue that owls deposit in the beaks of their young. Beyond that it is only necessary to round up a few people with a peripheral connection to the event and record their incisive comments: “Like, it was heavy, man.” And because our visual age demands images with stories, the photo archive is just sitting there to be exploited. Nothing could be easier.

I was at The Cincinnati Enquirer for the fifth-anniversary commemoration of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.* The most notable contribution to the literature of anniversaries that year came from one of the suburban papers, which published a first-person account by a reporter who had been in the club when the fire broke out. This “I was there” article recounted how he got out of the building, was told by a police officer to clear out, and got in his car and drove away, listening to the sirens of the approaching fire trucks as he left.

Yes, a newspaper reporter — a newspaper reporter — left the scene of the biggest story of the decade. Then he wrote about leaving the scene with witness-to-history pride. And his newspaper put this account on the front page. Thus does American journalism honor its own.

So when you round up a couple of people whose feebly firing synapses produce some half-coherent account of what went on in the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969, make the most of it. But I wasn’t there then; I’m not much interested now.




*The fire on May 28, 1977, in Southgate, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, killed 165 people. (You can read The Enquirer’s twenty-year commemoration here.) It was a touchy subject at The Enquirer, because the Courier-Journal of Louisville won a Pulitzer Prize for covering this story in The Enquirer’s back yard. The Enquirer attempted to compensate by producing an interminable series on aluminum wiring, which was determined to be the cause of the fire. This series was undoubtedly submitted to the Pulitzer judges, who promptly rolled over and went back to sleep, but it did produce a bon mot from a copy desk colleague: “This is the only paper I’ve ever worked for that had a wire editor and an aluminum wire editor.”

Evaluating copy editors

If you happen to oversee copy editors, one of our nation’s fast-dwindling resources, you might be interested in some suggestions on how to evaluate their performance. If you are a civilian, unclear what copy editors do, apart from filing for unemployment insurance, this post will suggest to you what is being sacrificed at the publications you read.

These standards for evaluation are based on materials I used as head of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. The most effective evaluations are thoughtful and detailed commentary on the copy editor’s work, laced with examples of solid work and work that could stand improvement, written in English. (I was once supplied with a little book of catch phrases to use in performance reviews; it goes against the grain for me to have a book pulped, but exceptions must sometimes be made.) You are welcome to assign percentage values to each category, or a 1-5-weak-to-strong ranking, if you prefer for your performance reviews to display a spurious mathematical exactitude.


THE SELF-REVIEW

If the copy editor takes a self-review seriously, instead of shying away from it as a document of self-incrimination, it can afford useful reflection. It does not have to be complex; consideration of four basic questions is adequate.

1. What strengths can I point to in my work?

2. In what areas do I need to make improvement?

3. What obstacles hamper me from doing better work?

4. What training would help me achieve better work?

(In Question 3, the copy editor might well consider personal matters as well as workplace circumstances.)



THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW: COPY EDITOR


1. Knowledge of work

Identification and correction of errors of fact.

Identification and correction of errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and English usage.

Appropriate application of house style to texts.

Success in writing headlines that are accurate, which appropriately convey the tone and nature of articles, and which engage readers’ interest.

Mastery of the editing software.


2. Work judgments

Successful pacing — the ability to size up quickly the editing issues in a text and to deal with them appropriately while meeting deadlines.

Productivity — completion of an appropriate volume of work during the shift.

Successful revision of texts to achieve greater clarity, without introducing errors.

Ability to explain and justify editing changes.

Identification of flaws in focus, structure, organization, and tone in texts, with suitable recommendations for their correction.

Identification of potential ethical or legal issues, including libel, falsification, and plagiarism.

Overall quality of the copy editor’s work.


3. Collaboration

Ability to deal collegially and tactfully with authors, identifying and resolving issues in good time without acrimony.

Ability to maintain good relationships with assigning editors while dealing with editing issues in their writers’ work.

Ability to deal collegially with fellow copy editors, coordinating activities with a minimum of friction.



4. Intangibles

Ability to concentrate and disregard distractions.

Effectiveness under stress.

Willingness to accept change in routines and duties.

Display of initiative — taking necessary action instead of waiting to be instructed.

Receptivity to advice and instruction.

Willingness to take responsibility for the quality of work.



THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW: SUPERVISOR

Effectiveness in planning and organizing the work of the desk to ensure productivity and appropriate quality of work.

Efficiency in scheduling to ensure that the level of staffing and the volume of work match, day to day.

Skill in testing, interviewing, and evaluating applicants.

Success in training new employees and providing any necessary additional training for experienced editors.

Willingness to help subordinates prepare themselves for promotion, placing them in situations where their abilities can be noticed.

Management of budget to contain expenses and provide adequate resources.

Insight and fairness in evaluating employees.

Readiness to undertake appropriate disciplinary action.

Sound judgment and good decisions.

Openness to innovation.

Readiness to accept responsibility.

Willingness to share the burden of the work alongside subordinates.

You too can be Montesquieu

Waiting at the Evergreen coffee house on Cold Spring Lane for a friend to arrive, I picked up from the discarded books available on the shelves a copy of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Leafing through it, I came across a passage describing the behavior of the French that I thought well summed up today’s traffic on Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones:

They are always in a hurry, because theirs is the important business of asking everyone they meet where they are going and from where they have come.

This literary device putting a foreign observer in one’s own culture and recording his naive perspective is a well-used device in satire. In another 18th-century instance, Voltaire’s “The Huron,” a Native American is brought to France, converts to Christianity, and proceeds to take the New Testament seriously. Hilarity ensues.

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop takes a humble nature writer from the country an turns him into a foreign correspondent for The Daily Beast, opening up the lunacies of Fleet Street in what is still the funniest newspaper novel.

Now I am about to go off for two days to visit a retired colleague and his wife in the country. (Just in time, too, because if I have to read any more crack-brained theories or outright lies about health care legislation, I might apply to be euthanized myself.) During this interval, why don’t you put fingers to keyboard and bring an innocent outsider onto the domestic scene and record what he or she discovers? Particularly about journalism. On my return, I’ll publish here anything that’s not libelous or obscene. Write a paragraph; write a page. Don’t worry that you can’t outdo Waugh; only reality can accomplish that.

Those whom the union protects

Last week, when I argued that the mores of newspapers protect stars and incompetents, a number of responses in public comments and private messages went along this line:

Managers are often at fault and, goodness knows, you've described the lawyers' dilemma and unfortunate response accurately. I fear you may have left one culprit off the list. (Intentionallly?) Local unions (or Guilds, if you believe that confers a more precise image) play a significant role in protecting under-performers as well.

Having worked as both a dues-paying member of the Newspaper Guild and as management scum, I know the perspective on each side of the aisle.

Unions do protect under-performers. They have to. They exist to represent the interests of their members, and their members are interested in not getting fired. To protect all their members, they are obligated to defend each. And I don’t object to that. Having a union establishes an orderly, open means of dealing with personnel issues.*

I also think that blaming the union for problems with unsatisfactory employees is too easy for managers who have abdicated their responsibilities. Contracts include probationary periods, and a manager who is paying attention can usually tell within those first six months whether an employee is up to the job. Even after that, there are procedures for evaluating. The real difficulty comes with an employee who has been sub-par for years and who has merely been shifted from one desk to another (often with the ultimate threat of transfer to the copy desk) — there’s always the temptation to deal with a problem by moving it elsewhere.

By contrast, when something that management really cares about happens — an employee is discovered to have been stealing money, to have sexually harassed other employees, to have plagiarized or fabricated, to have downloaded pornography into the company computer — action is swift and certain, and that employee finds himself out at the curb.

It’s just that competence in doing the work doesn’t engage the same sense of urgency.



*I concede that it’s not always easy for managers, as on the occasion when a lawyer for the Newspaper Guild contrived to persuade an uncommonly dim hearing officer that I was not qualified to testify about the duties of a copy editor.

Half of Samuel Johnson

Every few decades we are invited to rediscover Samuel Johnson — Joseph Wood Krutch’s biography in 1944, Walter Jackson Bate’s in 1977, and now, at the tercentenary of his birth, Jeffrey Meyers’s Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books, 528 pages, $35).

Johnson compels the modern reader more for his personality than his work: His monumental accomplishment, the first comprehensive dictionary of English, has been supplanted by the OED, which absorbed it; his edition of Shakespeare, which established a critical foundation and resisted Bardolatry, has also been superseded; his Lives of the Poets, apart from sharp work on the Big Boys, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, consists of rather carelessly assembled accounts of now-obscure writers; and his essays in the Rambler are written in a compact Latinate style that some thought stilted and artificial in the 18th century and which are not congenial to the modern taste. (This does not speak well of the modern taste.)

No, we are instead fascinated by the heroic figure described by James Boswell in the first great biography in English: left half-blind and half-deaf by a difficult birth, then infected with scrofula by his wet nurse; adrift after leaving Oxford after a single year and suffering a breakdown; troubled by grotesque convulsive twitches, leading some biographers to surmise that he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome; beset throughout his life by spells of profound depression; struggling in grinding poverty as a hack writer, then producing his great dictionary as a solo effort with the assistance of a handful of amanuenses; forming deep friendships with some of the foremost writers and thinkers of the age; celebrated and revered, and finally laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

All subsequent biographers labor in the shadow of Boswell. Fortunately, recent scholarship has made available information from Boswell’s journals and notes for the biography that Boswell suppressed or distorted, as well as other 18th-century documents, and it is on this material that Mr. Meyers has focused.

First, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle is a highly readable book. If Johnson’s life is well-turned soil by now, Mr. Meyers nevertheless describes the territory clearly and fluently. I would have liked more extensive commentary on Johnson’s literary work, but there are books like Henry Hitchings’s excellent Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 293 pages, $24) to consult. Reading Mr. Meyers’s biography was like making a welcome reacquaintance with its subject.

But I regret to say that I put it down disappointed, with the sense that Mr. Meyers’s approach is ultimately reductionist, defining Johnson by his depression and his anguish. It’s true that Johnson was ugly — his bulk, his scarred face, and his convulsive gestures and movements frightened people — and that you would not have wanted to sit next to him at table. It’s true that he suffered throughout his life from bouts of severe depression and from sexual frustration, and it’s also true that his religious belief may have brought him more anxiety than comfort. We know this from Boswell, too. But Mr. Meyers appears to see Johnson’s exuberance and generosity and genius for friendship only in the context of anguish. Of episodes such as the older Johnson’s rolling down a hill for fun, Mr. Meyers says, “Johnson’s spontaneous athletic feats, outbursts of violence and displays of courage were all crucial outlets for his sexual feelings.”

I wish that Mr. Meyers was not so cocksure about Johnson’s sexual practices. His interpretation of the discovery of a padlock entrusted by Johnson to Hester Thrale — a subject of commentary since publication of an essay by Katherine Balderson in 1949 — is that “Johnson’s practice ... combined voluntary humiliation, masochism (rather than sadism), displaced sexuality and religious penance.” Well, maybe. Walter Jackson Bate, ladling a thick layer of Freudianism over this material thirty years ago, suggested that the information from Mrs. Thrale and Johnson’s diary points to “dread of mental paralysis and loss of liberty rather than erotic craving or desire” — a nuanced reading that I find more compelling.

Where others arrive at conjecture, Mr. Meyers reaches certainty; where others see the possibility of metaphoric understanding, he declares literal fact; whether others step carefully around the difficulty of knowing what was in people’s minds or what occurred in their most private acts, he barges in.

Mr. Meyers would argue, no doubt, that he gives full value to Johnson’s positive and even endearing qualities. That material is indeed in his book, but such is his emphasis on Johnson’s misery that the positive material looks more like cross-hatching to enhance the main outline.

As we approach the tercentenary in September, I mean to reread Boswell, and I suggest that you could do worse. Failing that, try Beryl Bainbridge’s exquisite novel about Johnson with the Thrale family, According to Queeney.


Addendum

It is becoming a ritual to lament that publishers appear to have abandoned copy editing or applied such constraints as to make a thorough job impossible. A copy editor going over the manuscript of Samuel Johnson: The Struggle might have noticed that Benjamin Jowett’s little rhyme about his name is misquoted, or that the wrong dates are given for the American War of Independence (1775-1783, not 1778-1783), or that the fireworks display in 1749 to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (the one for which Handel wrote his “Music for the Royal Fireworks”) marked the conclusion of the War of the Austrian Succession, not the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763).

Episcopal talk

That you’re not in church this Sunday morning does not mean that you escape ecclesiastical subjects. Religion, like science or law, is treacherous to write about because it is so easy to get the lingo wrong. This morning — sit up straight; I’m talking to you — you’re going to learn how to write about Episcopalians.*

First off: Episcopal (adj.); Episcopalian (n.). It’s an Episcopal church, an Episcopal priest, and an Episcopal brouhaha, not an Episcopalian church, priest, or brouhaha.

Titles

A priest or deacon is written about with the title the Rev.: the Rev. Martha Macgill. Not just Rev., because Reverend is traditionally understood as an adjective, not a noun. That is why you will never write about a member of the clergy as a reverend. **

But wait; there’s more.

A canon, a member of the clergy assigned to diocesan administrative responsibilities is the Rev. Canon: the Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool.

An archdeacon is the Venerable: the Venerable Kerry Smith.

The dean of a cathedral is the Very Rev.: the Very Rev. Hal T. Ley Hayek.

A bishop — look at me while I’m talking to you — is the Right Rev. or the Rt. Rev.: the Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton. (Episcopal bishops are much given to tripartite names.) Bishop is an acceptable substitute for the Rt. Rev.

The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, its primate, is the Most Rev.: the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Congregations

Collectively, Episcopal congregations are members of a diocese, of which the bishop is the chief pastor and administrative officer. The adjectival form is diocesan.

The central church in a diocese is a cathedral, from the Latin cathedra, or chair, the place which holds the bishop’s chair of authority.

An Episcopal congregation, unless it is part of a cathedral, is called a parish.

In a parish that is self-supporting, its pastor is called a rector. In a parish that is supported by its diocese, the pastor is called a vicar.

The lay leadership of an Episcopal parish is its elected vestry, of whom the chief lay administrators are the wardens, senior and junior. (A cathedral has a chapter rather than a vestry.)

Denominations

The Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA, if you go in for abbreviations) is a member of the Anglican Communion, a loose confederation of national churches whose titular head the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Rowan Williams. (The Archbishop of Canterbury holds both ecclesiastical and noble titles.)

The Anglican Church dates from a dispute between King Henry VIII of Britain and the See (diocese) of Rome in the 16th century. Though there is a history of antagonism between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, most modern Anglicans are not hostile to the pope and his followers for their having broken away from the Church of England.




*We’re talking about the Episcopal Church of the United States, the dominant denomination, not the schismatic denominations that have split off every time the national church has revised the Prayer Book or the congregations and dioceses that have recently affiliated with Anglicans outside the United States. There’s a limit to how much of this that non-Anglicans, or, for that matter, Anglicans, can take.

The titles and terms in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are similar, but with significant variations which you must learn separately.

**Regrettably, this distinction has blurred seriously even among the churchy.