The Editor Wall II

Advice via email from Roy Wenzl: Here’s my take on how to get past the editor wall.

First, just print out what “MIKE” said, and keep it with you. It’s the best adivce possible, because it’s about turning potential enemies or potential neutrals into occasional allies.

What I say here now merely supplements what Mike said. I suppose I should mention that I worked as an editor for 16 years at four papers before i went back to writing nine years ago.

When I talk to reporters about The Editor Wall, I tell them that I work hard at doing what Mike wrote, but I also tell about a couple of pivotal times when I’ve really blown up, risked firing or a permanent rift.

I did this only two times in the last nine years, and it was because mid level editors were trying to push me into becoming just another typist, just another stenographer, just another person to do multiple assignments that readers would not read.

So I dug in and fought.

But when I’ve told those stories, what young reporters immediately say is that I might be able to get away with it, but THEY would NEVER get away with it.

That’s a partially true statement. At my paper, what I do is valued. If I were to die tomorrow, and got to choose my six pall bearers, most of the six would be editors here.

But the fact is, I did those one or two staged tantrums, and put my career on the line, at a time when I had not yet won awards, had not yet proven myself to myself, let alone to my editors or anyone else.

I did it not because I thought I would win, but because I had resolved that the fear of losing my job was less important than my fear of becoming what Tommy Tomlinson calls “just another typist in the industry paragraph factory.”

I always work toward making editors allies, in part because we need allies, in part because I was an editor, and I know how the daily can beat you to pieces if you don’t keep feeding it.

But there are editors who refuse to grow, refuse to stray outside the dull lines of routine. There are editors who refuse to listen. They will be the death of us. Once in a while, there comes a day when you are confronted by one of these bureaucrats, and you are confronted with a choice: do what they say, or fight/persuade to get them to listen.

Sometimes, that situation might require you to put it all on the line…or surrender to the paragraph factory.

Maybe you won’t ever have to do that. But our industry is FILLED with surrender-monkeys, filled with typists, filled with people who long ago gave up and decided to define themselves as people who just put stuff in the notebook and then type it on a screen. And that’s a sad thing, considering that the reason readers have left us is because we produce a product that they don’t want.

In any other business, that would be called bad business.

Sometimes you have to fight.