Category: Newspapering

Write No Evil

The most productive reporter I ever saw never came up with anything embarrassing about anybody.

On run of the mill stories he was a machine. He wrote almost every day, two, three stories, sometimes, for The Charlotte News. And during his lunch hour he wrote a daily column. OK, OK, not a very good column, but a column nevertheless. Two or three stories a day and a column? That’s not easy.  A daily column all by itself it not easy. No, sir. Ask anyone who has written one.

But he never hung anybody out to dry.

I don’t know how you do that. Never? Embarrassing stuff falls in your lap sometimes –you find it without looking– and then what do you do?  Ignore it?

One day I asked a colleague who had known The Machine for years why he never dinged anybody.

“He used to,” my colleague replied, “until a guy he wrote about killed himself.”

NOTE: I was going to post the “surprise” today but I couldn’t get it written in time.  It’s coming Monday for sure.

Calm Down, Pat

During the 42 years I worked as a newspaperman I made a couple of wrong turns into editing, once for eight months, once for 18 months. I thought it was time to try to start working my way up the management ladder. I had done all right at reporting so they pretty much had to give me a shot.

I didn’t like editing and, truth be told, I wasn’t all that good at it.

As a reporter it got to the point where I rarely had to work with anybody I didn’t respect, who couldn’t carry their end of the stick. As an editor it wasn’t that way, I had to make do with the reporters I was given — some of whom were excellent, some of whom were, I’m being generous, pretty average.

There wasn’t anything I could do about that. It was frustrating. I couldn’t fire them or discipline them. And I didn’t have the temperament for holding someone’s hand, coaxing good work out of them or, at least, better work.

This is what one reporter said I needed.
A reporter told me I needed less of one and more of the other.

Maybe I was a little too intense.

I got into a dispute in The News & Observer parking lot one afternoon with another N&O employee who had parked in my spot twice.

“You better calm down,” he told me, “before you have a coronary.”

A reporter who worked for me, at least in theory, told me the same thing, but more gently. He said I ought to get a dog and quit drinking coffee.

Coming Friday: A Language He Understood