Cross my fingers and hope not to lie...
A month or so ago, a couple of friends brought my attention to a contest that The Washington Post was having to find America’s Next Great Pundit.
There were a lot of reasons not to enter. For one thing, I doubted they wanted an actual professional journalist. For another, the contest rules were reminiscent of a Reality TV game show, rather than the more dignified process for choosing op-ed material to which I was accustomed. Then, there was the fact that you could only submit one opinion piece, and it had to be less than 400 words. That last one was a killer. Yes, I can do Twitter, which means that in a pinch I can express myself in 140 characters (it would be strange if I couldn’t, after all those decades of headline-writing). But “pundits” write columns. And 400 words do not a column make. My own columns in The State were on the long side — around 1,000 words (I was the editor, so I made the room). A typical column in The Washington Post runs close to 750 words. In 400 words, you have no room to develop a topic, support it with argument, and throw in grace notes (the digressions that I love) that make the piece worth reading. (Interesting side note: The official rules of the Post‘s contest ran 3,883 words — almost 10 times the limit those very rules required me to stay within.)
But I entered anyway, grumbling all the way. And here’s the piece I entered:
The first casualty of unemployment is the truth.
OK, maybe not the first. First there’s the blow to one’s bank account. Then the loss of self-confidence. But truth is right up there. Especially for me. Until I was laid off in March, I was editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper. A colleague once said to me, accusingly, “You don’t think this is the opinion page. You think it’s the truth page.” I just looked at her blankly. Of course it was the truth page.
Readers expected me to tell everything I knew, and plenty that I only thought I knew – about South Carolina’s feckless politicians (Mark Sanford, Joe Wilson – need I say more?), or whatever struck me, without reservation. And I delivered.
My reputation survives my career. Recently, a friend warned me that people feel constrained in talking to me, because their confidences might turn up on my blog. After all, bloggers tell all, right? Ask Monica Lewinsky. Ask ACORN.
“HAH!” say I.
As a blogger who answers to no one, I am not nearly as frank and open as I was as a newspaper editor who thought he had a secure job.
I haven’t disclosed whom I have worked for on consulting gigs since leaving the paper, because my clients haven’t been crazy about the exposure. Every word I write, I think: Might this put off a prospective employer? And I know it has, despite my caution.
There are things I have not written – pithy, witty, dead-on observations on the passing parade, I assure you – because I think, “Do you have to write that and run the risk of offending this person who MIGHT point you to a job? Can’t you just write about something else?”
And where am I applying for jobs? Well, I’m not going to tell YOU, am I?
People used to praise me for my courage for taking on powerful people at the paper. But I was taking no risk whatsoever. As long as I was supported by advertising, a transaction I was ethically barred from even thinking about, I had impunity.
But an unaligned blogger still trying to function as a journalist stands naked and alone, and is not nearly as free and honest as he was writing from the once-impregnable citadel of an editorial page. At least, this one isn’t. Keep that in mind, citizen, as newspapers fall around you.
That piece was 399 words. It didn’t make the cut, which didn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t have wanted to publish that little chopped-down fragment, either. It never had the chance to get rolling and get interesting.
But I offer it here because I wanted to share the point of the piece with you — the fact that a lone blogger, if he hopes to find employment anywhere, is a lot more constrained than a journalist who is paid a good salary to write his honest opinion about anything and everything without consideration of where the chips fall.
Sure, there were constraints in being the editorial page editor that I don’t feel now. For instance, I had to keep in mind that I should not embarrass my colleagues, or put them in an awkward spot. I think Cindi and Warren (and Mike and Nina, back when I had a full staff) would have felt a little uncomfortable, for instance, with my honest assessment of the intellectual capacities of the candidates for governor. They might have felt like it made the paper look like it wasn’t considering the candidates with an open mind. It wouldn’t have meant that, because I change my mind about candidates all the time (and besides, as I said in that post, intellect isn’t everything in a candidate). But because I was the editorial page editor, they would have worried about the appearance of the thing. And they might have talked me out of it, even as a blog post. And I almost certainly would not have written it in a column at this stage in the campaign.
So it cuts both ways.
But I feel far more constraint out here alone and naked, without the salary and license I had. In fact, I am acutely aware that the very fact that I blog and express opinions at all is a huge turnoff to some employers, including some for whom I’d like to work. I keep blogging anyway (my attitude is, I can stop the minute you hire me, if that’s what you want; in the meantime, it keeps my name out there), and I pretty much always shrug off my misgivings and go ahead and say what I think anyway, but I do have that hesitation that I never had before. This matters because any journalistic process involves, at its first stage, deciding what to write about. And that entails deciding not to write about the rest of the universe. And what I can’t tell you for sure — to what extent is any of us totally honest with himself about his own motives? — is to what extent that extremely complex process is or is not influenced by my concerns about putting food on the table and paying the mortgage.
About all I can do is cross my fingers and hope not to lie. And I wanted to disclose that.
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I have found the same thing. There are many things that I want to write, but I have to censor myself, because I don’t know if a prospective employer could be reading it. It is a sad commentary on our lives, but it is also a reality.
A Story You Won’t Find on Fox. Apparently Fox Pundit and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee communted this guys sentence. Now he’s gunned down 4 police officers in cold blood.
By Rick Anderson
You can read dueling reports this morning on whose justice system is responsible for the deaths of four Lakewood police officers. The P-I’s Joel Connelly says it’s ex-Arkansas Gov. and presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee, who once commuted the sentence of future alleged cop killer Maurice Clemmons. The Times’ Danny Westneat less specifically says it’s “We,” our system that let Clemmons out of jail six days before the Lakewood officers were mowed down in a Pierce County coffee shop. And the News Tribune reports that Pierce County officials are blaming Arkansas, which is blaming Pierce County.
Very interesting post. Reading your blog, I often wonder how you handle the issue of current and/or perspective employers considering that even admitting to having an opinion seems to be enough to disqualify you from employment these days.
Correction: prospective
I wasn’t two sentences into the above post when I was thinking the average syndicated column is about 750 words, which you noted also.
Imagine a debate in which each person is given ten seconds.
A common lawyer’s quip is the if you want it shorter, it’ll cost you more. It takes a lot of time and careful discretion to hone a document or essay down.
…but it can be done. You start longer and sand it down.
How long was the max. for an op ed piece? I don’t recall….
My usual length was about 1,000 words. And it took me a LONG time to get it down to that; my rough drafts were usually about 2,000.
Honing it down to 1,000 usually improved it. And in a pinch — if we had a demanding layout that day — I could get one down to 800 or 750 and still have it be readable. But taking a column down to 400 destroys it; there’s not enough left to read.
On very rare occasions — like once every few years — I’d write an extended piece that went well beyond column length. My special pieces last year on Obama and McCain (each of them just under 2,000 words) were examples of that. But usually I stuck to 1,000 or less; that was a good length for me.
How did I keep to that length? By telling myself that if I had more to say (and I always did), I could say it the next day — or put it on my blog. I had to say, “I’m only going to get this much of it said today,” but I would still hone and hone to try to get as much of it in as possible.
Having the blog helped, because I knew that I’d be posting the column on my blog, and there I could provide links to all sorts of stuff I couldn’t spell out in the column itself. It got to where I relied on that (linking, for instance, to previous columns so I wouldn’t repeat myself in building upon an established argument), and I came to view the actual print version of the column as a lesser instrument. I wanted people just to read the blog version, because I was able to pack so much more into that — background, supporting material, video and audio clips, etc. That’s why my footer at the end of columns always asked people to go there, for more…
Remember that John Edwards column of mine that made such a splash in 2007? The print version of that, which also ran on thestate.com (and much to my disappointment, that was the one that Drudge linked to, so most of the heavy traffic went to that version), was to my mind too short to read smoothly. There just wasn’t enough room for those three anecdotes and decent transitions in 1,000 words. I posted a slightly longer version — more than 1,200 words — on the blog, and that one read better. (I posted it on the blog as the “Director’s Cut” version. Of course, I had cut the print one to fit, so I couldn’t blame anyone else; but the longer one was better.)
but how many words did you permit your guest writers?
Good call on Edwards, as it turned out, huh?
We would ask them to hold to 600 words. I didn’t like doing that, but if we didn’t, it meant not being able to fit that AND a syndicated column on the op-ed page. If they couldn’t keep it down to that — if it needed to be 800 or so — and it was a piece worth running, we held it for a day when we had the room. Frequently, guest pieces that needed to run longer ran on Sunday for that reason.
My 1,000-word pieces were a big joke in the department. My colleagues would razz me for my lack of discipline. But the thing was that by the time I got to working on a column on Friday, with everything else I was doing (plus the blog, which was not terribly popular among my colleagues for the time it took, but I thought it time worth taking, and still do, because it gave me the chance to learn and grow and do something MORE for readers at a time when we were cutting back on everything else), I simply didn’t have enough time to write a shorter piece. The old joke is perfectly true. Nearly half the time I spent “writing” was actually spent editing my copy down to the space available. A lot of those 1,000-word pieces (which I had laboriously shaved down from 1,500 or 2,000) could have been 800 words with another hour to work on them, but at some point you’ve got to get the pages out while everybody’s still around to read proofs.
I smile a bit now because Cindi and Warren — especially Cindi — are now running columns longer than mine. But I don’t smile for long, because I know the reason why: They are simply too harried to spend the time editing them down more tightly.
Another excuse for my prolixity (or, one may less charitably call it, my logorrhea), was the fact that I seldom had a single point to make. Usually, I was making several, and the column was about tying them together in a way that made sense only if you read the whole thing.
For that reason, I used to have a hard time telling my colleagues ahead of time what my column would be about. I’d ramble for several minutes about my various points and how I thought they were related, but often the thrust would change in the writing, as I discovered what worked and what didn’t. In fact, many times I would emerge from my office with something that bore no resemblance to what I had set out to write. It was very organic. And even after I had written them, if someone asked, “What was your column about today?”, I’d have trouble telling them, and would ask them to read it. My columns tended to be hard to explain in less than the full 1,000 words — at least, that was true of the ones I liked. (Am I sounding like a self-absorbed prima donna or what? But it’s just a personality trait, and perhaps a personality flaw, that I thought holistically about the columns, rather than thinking of them as pieces that could easily be separated or boiled down. A copy editor at another paper once told me that my stuff was very hard to cut because of the way every paragraph was tied to, and dependent upon, its neighbors. I thanked her for noticing. Most copy editors didn’t, but firmly believed that either everything was inverted pyramid, or should be treated as though it were.)
The funny thing about that is that I found it very easy to dictate editorials for others to write in a very organized manner, off the top of my head.
Similarly, I found it much, much easier to cut other people’s copy to whatever length than to cut my own. Frequently, when I was running really late on a Friday, I would give up trying to cut mine the rest of the way and give it to Cindi to do the last couple of inches for me. A fresh perspective helped. It also helped that she wasn’t as in love with the words as I was. It’s a tribute to her editing skill that I usually didn’t miss what she cut.
Everybody needs an editor, as you can no doubt tell reading this blog.
About the same time The State was busy tossing out the people that made the paper unique, our paper blew up the entire OpEd department and went for “edgy” (read, snotty) sniglets and “punchy” editorials combine with gigantic generic graphics. To make room for all this, they began cutting (not editing) syndicated columns down to about 300-400 words. Readers began calling, saying they couldn’t figure out what points were being made as continuity and logic were abandoned. Welcome back my friend to the show that never ends.
Funny–I used to find the same “changing while writing” when writing critical analytical essays on poetry…
Here’s an irony: one can easily read syndicated columnists on the web, but local viewpoints are exclusive. Maybe you should have run longer/more op-ed pieces and editorials.
I have been enjoying the longer editorials, actually. More to chew on.
Wordiness and an inability to stick to the subject — are you sure you’re not running for office?
What’s a sniglet?
Brad can’t decide whether to be the male Sarah Palin or not….
Burl, debates lasting 10 seconds used to be called “duels”. Bang! Bang! with 9 seconds left to examine the body of the loser.