About working with editors who change your words

A beginning writer asks:

My editors keep messing up my stories. How can I keep that from happening?

My advice: If your skin is the least bit sensitive DON'T READ YOUR CLIPS AFTER THEY COME OUT.

Don't. Really.

All sorts of awful things are in there, and if you don't know about them, you won't get upset.

If a source calls you up about a factual mistake, just apologize to the source, take the blame, promise to try to get it fixed, and pass the request for a correction up to the editor.

If a reader calls you up and says that the article doesn't have any factual mistakes, but misses an important part of the story, tell the reader she's absolutely right --then pitch it as a follow-up article to the editor.

But, you might say: "I know that there are mistakes in there, even if no else is bothered by it. I can't just let it go! What if another editor sees the article? I'll never work anywhere again."

Now, if you're writing about a topic that requires specialized knowledge, you can ask your editor to let you see the final proofs before they go to print, just to double-check that everything is accurate. And you can also train copy editors to not retype certain things, like numbers or names, because typos can creep in.

But, admit it -- you're probably less concerned about factual mistakes than about stylistic changes. Factual mistakes you just fix. Style, you can argue about for days with no results.

So don't do it. Really. Just don't do it.

But what if you can't help it? What if the editor is one of those sadists who makes you look over the final proofs for mistakes before publication, and you can't help noticing that all your best metaphors are gone and the structure is rearranged to the point of silliness

Here's what you do: first, glance over the words in quotation marks and make sure that they are true to the original (some cleaning-up permitted, but nothing that makes the source look as if he said the opposite from what he really intended). Then scan over the statistics, and the spelling of names and places.

Finally, check the chronologies -- mistakes sometimes creep in here during editing.

If you happen to come across a grammar mistake or typo, that's fine too -- but it's not really part of your job at this point. The copy editor should have caught that, you're just doing him a favor.

Your *only* job is to make sure the facts are still correct.

Do NOT read over for style. It's the newspaper's or magazine's style now. Don't read for structure.

And don't ask them to put back your original words -- if they liked them in the first place, they would have left them in. Remember that the customer is always right, and the customer is the editor.

Eventually, if it's important to you, you'll get good enough and famous enough to be able to dictate style terms. By then, though, you'll probably also be wise enough to know that an editor is the writer's best friend. As a general rule, it's the stuff that you like the most in an article, those fancy turns of phrase and lofty comparisons, that are really the worst and distract the reader from the content. Just let it go.

And when you cut out your clip, don't read it over for a few years. When you finally do, after getting a bit of distance, you might be amazed at how good you sound.

How do you get into business writing?

A beginning writer asked me:

How do you get into business writing?

My rule of thumb is you're as good a writer as your last clip.

So find an editor, any editor, and start pitching business stories. If you're really starting out, and don't have *any* clips at all, go after the Pennysavers and the like -- do some profiles of local businesses. The pay is pennies per word. But write the stories well and you've got yourself a clip. Then you try local weeklies, regional business pubs, suburban dailies, trades, big city dailies, then national business mags, in that order.

Get a frank assessment from somebody cruel as to where you are on that foodchain, based on your writing and reporting ability. Then call the editor you want to write for, and ask for a few minutes to come in and show him/her your resume and clips and chat about what you can do for them. (This of it as your standard sales call.)

If you're wrong about where you are on the food chain, and you've aimed too high, ask the editor to recommend other markets that might be more appropriate for you. Ask the editor to name names, then recommend people to talk to at those publications. Then follow up.

You need a niche. The more specialized, the easier it is to sell the first article. (Then, once you've made the first sale to the pub, you can branch out to other topics.) For example, I write about financial services technology. Once I pitch a tech story to someone, I often find that I'm asked to write about other topics, as well, that the publication is interested in.

Do you need a degree in journalism to work as a journalist?

When I left college I had a handful of clips from the local alternative newsweekly, one of them a cover story on town-gown relations. That's it. No journalism degree, no internships, no other editing or writing experience.

I went to Chicago, and, within a couple of months was working as one of the "full-time freelancers" for the Chicago Tribune in the northern suburbs, covering about a dozen municipalities and all the associated government boards. One of my features ran on the front page of the Trib (not the front page of a section, the front page of the Trib itself). A harder story on the drug trade also got high placement.

From there, my career path would have been pretty straightforward at the Trib, except that I decided to go to Russia, and covered civil wars for Reuters after about a year. Again, nobody cared about the degree, the internships, or anything else. The only concern was whether I had the persistence to be able to report a story, and then write it despite constant editorial criticism (I have to admit, my writing started out kind of lame).

Here's my theory: the only thing you need to be a journalist is the ability to ask a question, and keep asking until you get an answer. You can't be taught persistence, but you can get good at it with practice. Everything else can be fixed on the copy desk.

If I'm hiring somebody, I'd rather spend half an hour teaching them the inverted pyramid, than months and months standing over them and making them follow through.

War reporting: advice for interviewing refugees

Refugees are scared, upset, mad at the other side -- they'll tell stories that happened to "a friend of a friend" as if they happened to them. Then the news media picks it up, and more refugees hear them, and tell the same stories.

Then you go to the other side to find the destroyed village etc... to find out that it's still there and, in fact, people still live there.

That's not to say that atrocities don't happen -- they do. And we, as journalists, have an obligation to make sure that stories of human rights abuses get out, so that the world community can act to stop it from happening. This is a hard job, but straightforward.

What's less straightforward is to learn to judge whether a particular story merits coverage or not. I myself have been caught up in hysteria more than once and my editors were often able to catch me before I got into trouble. But when you're far from home, editors are more likely to trust your judgment, and, I'm sorry to say, I've put overblown stories into print.

Many local journalists I met while reporting often bought into the atrocity stories -- in fact, some even came right out and said that their job was to support the war effort, even if it meant fudging the truth a little bit. "Even if this particular atrocity isn't true, others are, because we know what those people are like." And any criticism of the war effort was seen as a deep affront to the people who had died fighting it -- including their colleagues in the news media.

I can understand that. It was hard to me to maintain my objectivity about Chechnya when a Chechen death squad killed a good friend of mine, a journalist. (This was before the war with Russia broke out.) But that doesn't mean that I would then run every horror story I heard of that involved Chechens.

So what do you do? You go back to the basics. You get as many facts as you can -- who, what, where, when, how. You can often tell that someone is making a story up by the fact that they get really shifty or upset when you ask for details. In particular, you ask for facts that you can confirm. Names of other witnesses, officials, dates, locations.

As a foreign journalist you're often in a position where you're able to go to the other side of the conflict to check things out, whereas local reporters might not be able to. You can check to see whether that particular village really was destroyed, or if it's still there and people are living there. You can check for signs of shelling, or bullet holes. You can talk to local international observers and medical personnel. If you don't have medical training, for example, you might have trouble telling a birth defect from a shrapnel wound or from deliberate torture. So be wary of accepting stories at face value (especially when someone asks for money as well) and do some digging before putting uncorroborated victims' accounts into print.

Struggling to make a living

I recently got the following question from a beginning journalist:

I have reached the point where a job in journalism in any capacity seems a hopeless dream. I cannot get anyone to hire me in any field, despite my college degree and experience. I'm getting to the point where I can just barely eat and pay my rent. Do you have any advice?

There is only one question you need to ask yourself: Do you HAVE to be a journalist?

If you DON'T absolutely, no-doubt-about-it, can't-live-any-other-way have to be a journalist, then you should start considering other careers. Pound for pound, a journalism career is more work, more aggravation, and less pay than almost anything else you can do. Really.

I spent my fair share of time sleeping on folks' couches when I was starting out, as, I'm sure, have many others. I've slept on my grandmother's couch, on my mother's couch, on my dad's couch, and on the couches of three friends that I can remember. (Quite possibly more couches are buried in my past, possibly under an alcoholic haze.)

If you're one of those people who HAS to be a journalist, then the worse things get, the happier you are (in a sick, twisted kind of way). You think of everything as material for the novels you're someday going to write, or as seasoning for your writers' voice.

I know journalists who are proud to have been fired from every paper they've worked for. Journalists in the mid-30s who are still just one paycheck or car breakdown away from being out on the street (again).

I know journalists who spend most of their working lives with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Granted, they're in other countries -- most of the ones here have renounced their evil ways, joined AA, and got nicotine patches. But how are you going to renounce your evil ways if you never had any in the first place? Right, right?

Now, it is possible to be a journalist and not lead a life filled with misery and dispair. I can't think of anyone like that right off, but I'm sure such things happen. But if you want to avoid a life of misery and dispair, then switching careers would significantly increase your odds. For example, I know some pretty happy teachers, archivists, engineers, and librarians.

If you do HAVE to be a journalist, then you'll get through it. You'll get a job stuffing envelopes or manning the help line for an insurance company so you can cover school board meetings at night, or you'll get a job teaching English in China so you can freelance articles about the economic changes over there. As a journalist, you'll probably live the most interesting life it's possible to lead.

And that, of course, is the curse as well as the joy of the profession.

Advice for public relations people pitching stories to me

The biggest problem is inappropriate pitches. I didn't do consumer finance -- I work for a trade publication, not a consumer magazine! The PR folks who send me consumer-oriented press releases, and then call and try to talk to me about them, to use up my time even further, don't bother to check. That's really annoying and makes me think worse of their agencies.

The next biggest problem is incomprehensible pitches. If I can't figure out what you're selling, I'll just hit the delete key right off.

If an unintelligible press release *has* to go out, the best PR people would put a few paragraphs of explanation addressed to me personally before attaching the press release -- so I wouldn't have to wade through it to figure out what the story was.

They'd say something like, "Maria, here's hot trend in wireless for you -- ESP-based communication networks. They're fast and secure, and work through psychics. We've got some customers and analysts for you to talk to, if you're interested." And then the press release would go on to say, "ESP Networks, Inc. has announced the release of Gobbelty 2.0, an end-to-end, user-focused, communication solution for the enterprise networking marketplace." Argh! Please, folks, can you stop using the world "solution"?

Finally, my last pet peeve is PR folks who are either lazy or overworked (it can be hard to tell which). Either way, it makes the company look really bad.

Say, someone promises to get me in touch with customers, company spokesmen, and analysts. And then I wait while my deadline comes and goes and the PR guy only responds to messages to say "I'm working on it."

Well, I get pissed off, their company is left out of the story (and the competition gets to say nasty things about them unchallenged) and I have to scramble to fill that space with something else. Not fun.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I don't call the company for the next article, and I don't recommend them to colleagues as a good source. And that's the opposite of good PR.

Better to just tell me that you don't have the time to set it up, but that I can contact the parties involved directly.

How important is graduate school to new journalists?

I beginning journalist asked me this question:

I'm worried about getting a journalism job. Should I go to graduate school?

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on this, but, having been in a position to hire recent graduates in the past (and having faced this same question myself) I have to strongly vote against grad school.

I first left school in a similarly bad market, and I had to work my butt off to get started. But the experience you gain will be worth more than grad school ever will. Here's my advice: move to an area where you can get free or cheap rent, in a large metropolitan area if you can find it. Get a day job if you have to, doing whatever you can. And spend your evenings going out and covering every school board meeting, fire district gathering and library fundraiser you can get yourself assigned to. It doesn't matter how little they pay you, or how small the paper is. Keep pushing for meetings with area editors and keep asking for more assignments. Meanwhile, volunteer for the local journalism organizations. It gets your name out and lets you network, while at the same time improving your basic skills.

I can't stress this enough: the only requirement to be a journalist is persistence. Everything else can be fixed by the copy desk. Really. If you're ignorant, they can fix that (trust me, I've worked with plenty of ignorant reporters). The only thing they can't teach you on the job (or cover up for you) is persistence. With persistence, you'll get the quotes you need. You'll keep digging to get the meat of the story. When I was an editor, the worst reporters I had were the ones who gave up when a source didn't return the first phone call. I had reporters who didn't know what the inverted pyramid was. That takes a few minutes to fix, and a couple of assignments until they get the hang of it. I had reporters who didn't know you were supposed to write down quotes verbatim. They went back, and redid it. Problem solved.

But the reporters who were afraid to go up and ask a follow-up question, or who'd sit and stare at the telephone because they didn't know what to do next, or who kept coming back to me and saying that they couldn't find anything out -- those were the ones I had the most problems with.

If you go to grad school simply because you couldn't find a job (as opposed to improving a particular skill, say) that's a big red warning flag to me. After all, finding a job requires good networking skills, the ability to go up to a stranger and ask them for help, and, of course, persistence. Do I want to hire a reporter who can't do any of that? No.

And if you really can't force yourself to do any of that, then, while it's possible to have a journalism career, it won't be as successful or fulfilling as if you pursued a different line of work.

So get out there and start calling people, start hounding editors. Really. Only a really idiot editor prefers a polite, shy journalist who takes the first "no" for an answer. You don't have to be obnoxious about it. But be firm. And follow up, and follow up, and follow up again.

Think of it this way. Someday, you are going to write a really ground-breaking, monumental piece of journalism. (Otherwise, why are you in this profession?) If you don't do it, nobody will and the world will suffer. So getting you your first job is the most important thing for everybody. If you can believe that, you'll get your job. It's the same way that, when you believe that whatever story you're working on is the most important thing in the world, people will drop what you're doing to help you.