Wanted: Editors

(Proofreaders Need Not Apply)

 

Once upon a time in a place called Journalism, there were editors.

 

Editors were powerful. It was they who decided what was important enough for print or broadcast, and how important it was in relation to everything else that competed for attention.

 

Editors were wise. They had lived long enough to spot most frauds, whether it was the kind that got elected or the kind that had a sure-fire investment scheme.

 

Editors could be blunt. Louis Clifford, city editor of The Cleveland Press, told a cemetery owner who complained about a story on vandalized graves, “We’ll run our newspaper and you run your God-damned cemetery.” The damp-behind-everything cub who had written the story won’t ever forget that.

 

Editors could also teach, threaten, cajole and demand until they got more excellence out of you than even your mother thought might be there.

 

But editors weren’t immortal, and they’ve joining the long, sad line of the Pre-Internet Old shuffling into darkness to make way for the Insistent Internet New.

 

The number of eyeballs that pass on a story before publication is often just the pair belonging to the writer. The sense of what ought to be published and what should be ignored has given way to the fickle guidance of focus groups and consultants whose only bedrock principle is that the check clears. They are offering guidance to editors so green they need a note from their parents to work the overnight shift.

 

You can see the evidence all around you. Here’s the mighty Associated Press on its internet front page proclaiming itself as “the essential global news network,” telling us that in Clarksburg, W. Va., mail delivery “to seven homes on Milford Street was halted because of the 20-pound  terrier.” That’s the news, except that the dog is named Cozmo, he hasn’t bitten anyone and his owners are looking to find him a new home.

 

Maybe he can become a web editor.

 

Online readers of the Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen had their lives enriched May 11 with the news that police arrested a woman in Clearwater, Fla., for being naked while knocking on a stranger’s door to ask for cigarettes. That was another AP story, although it was first reported May 8 by the St. Petersburg Times.

 

Maybe the Tucson editors were just being prepared in case the woman, who was charged with disorderly conduct, decides to hitchhike naked to Tucson.

 

A Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette report on May 11 that an Otsego woman had died in a chain saw accident while cutting a tree with her husband was legitimate local coverage. The AP ran a much shorter version and it appeared the same day on wltx.com in Columbia, S.C.

 

Maybe the folks at WLTX were just interested in promoting chainsaw safety.

 

And maybe this is all just the grumbling of an old has-been who doesn’t understand that the Age of The Internet has made us all editors.

 

But if that’s the case, we’re sure doing a lousy job.

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