Why Editors Matter

“Civilians, people who don’t think the toppling of a sitting American president with newspaper articles is one of humankind’s lasting achievements, will read encomiums to Ben Bradlee like this one and wonder: what’s the big deal?

“After all, he didn’t cover the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. It’s not as if he wrote the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Mr. Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential subjects. People who worked for him went through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which altered it.

—David Carr

What Does an Editor Do Exactly?

“Editors constantly save writers from mistakes or misjudgments. Writers can’t always take the long view or judge adequately whether their tone or rhetorical devices are working as they think they are. I can’t count the number of times an editor has done me that great service.”

—Margaret Sullivan

How the Editor-Writer Relationship Should Work

Ben Smith:

BuzzFeed executive editor Doree Shafrir and I started talking about hiring a “longform” editor in the spring of 2012, at the urging of our most experienced writer, Michael Hastings. Michael had just filed a 3,800-word profile of the writer Jose Antonio Vargas, and I gave it the sort of edit that I had learned in a decade of political reporting: I sharpened the top; took out a couple of really egregious barbs; made a tweak here and there, and put it on the page.

Michael was appalled. Half of the things he’d written, he explained to me, didn’t belong in the story — he’d put one passage in so the editor would cut it, rather than a more cherished section; others were tentative and preliminary and he wasn’t sure where they were supposed to fit. The story, as he’d filed it, was the beginning of a conversation with his editor, not something that he expected to see on the internet.

The Question Every Editor Should Be Asking Right Now

Is this article tweetable?

Carlos Lozada, of the Post, explains:

“When I’m editing an essay or opinion piece, I try to make sure the final version includes some memorable lines that I imagine getting posted, shared, tweeted and retweeted. I’ll even slice a smart but lengthy passage for that purpose. ‘Trust me,’ I advise the author, ‘you’ll get more readers this way.’

“Yes, anticipating the social-media response has become part of the editing craft.

Addendum (2/3/2014): Marc Tracy fills in the backstory, by way of the ever-tweetable BuzzFeed:

“Smith inspected Coppins’s story and noticed that he had buried his only piece of fresh information: an editor at the New Yorker went on record saying that the episode wasn’t going to halt the magazine’s attempt to expand online. Even though it wasn’t a particularly interesting or important bit of news, Smith told Coppins to move it much higher up in the piece, because, as Coppins explained later, ‘It’s the tweet’—the tiny morsel that Smith felt had the best chance of getting attention on Twitter.”

Addendum (5/15/2014): This is encouraging: ProPublica requires its reporters to submit five possible tweets when they file stories.