I don’t know how much the real world cares, which is one reason I’m late to this, but the newspaper world has been abuzz about an actual fight that broke out in The Washington Post’s newsroom a few days ago. The subject was a “charticle,” a kind of hybrid story/graphic (and we’ll leave the merits of that genre for another day) that two reporters had put together for the Post’s Style section. The Style editor, Henry Allen, told the reporters it sucked. Actually, according to one source, he called it the “second-worst piece I’ve ever had handed to me in 43 years.” (What was the worst? Patience, dear reader; we’ll get to that.)
One of the two reporters, Monica Hesse, asked for the piece back so that it could be reworked. The other, Manuel Roig-Franzia, apparently said, “Oh, Henry, don’t be such a [rude name for a serial performer of a sexual act that was illegal in many states, including North Carolina, until a recent Supreme Court decision].” Whereupon Allen hit Roig-Franzia in the face and it was on, briefly, until Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and others separated the two.
A number of bloggers have had things to say about this episode, but so far the best take I’ve seen was by the Post’s own Gene Weingarten:
The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. …
… if you’re a Henry Allen, or if you’re a Manuel Roig-Franzia, what is happening now [to the newspaper industry] hurts.
I don’t know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday — for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry’s cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word — what we put in the paper. It doesn’t surprise me. “What we put in the paper,” used to be a sacred term in most newsrooms, back before things began to change and some mediocre stuff began to appear with regularity. Back then, the meaning of “the paper” was completely different, too.
The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There’s been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things — killed for unworthy reasons — have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.
I hope Henry is invited and welcomed back to the newsroom; if anyone deserves a little slack, it’s him. I hope he and Manuel bury the hatchet. I hope neither of them loses one ounce of passion and I hope each of them remains privately convinced he was right.
Well, Weingarten can hope, but hope is not a plan. In fact, the Washingtonian blog post linked up top says this: “Brauchli called Allen into his office and closed the door. Allen’s contract is up later this month. Few Style writers expect to see him again.”
Weingarten explains well how such an incident is a natural, if not inevitable, byproduct of newsroom culture, at least up until a few years ago when the industry started making like the Titanic.
But you also need to know that running a newsroom can be a little bit like what I imagine running a kindergarten class is like: You’re responsible for a bunch of people with the maturity level of 5-year-olds who like to color outside the lines, people who may or may not work and play well with others on any given day, people who are, by and large, id embodied and very little else. As in kindergarten, at any given time there’s at least one person in the room who’s angry, bitter and disgruntled and may even have soiled his/her drawers. And as in kindergarten, newsroom disagreements are frequent and sometimes sharp, typically of short duration and usually forgotten by the next day.
In 25 years in newspapers, I had my share of sharp disagreements. I raised more than my share of voice more than my share of times. And yet only two incidents stand out in my memory, neither fully focused.
One involved a story I was writing with another reporter who wanted us to make a factual claim that might or might have been true but which was not supported by the data on which we were basing the story. As I recall, perhaps imperfectly, aspersions were loudly cast upon both my race (the story was about racial disparities in home-mortgage lending) and my intestinal fortitude.
The other, when I was an editor, involved a shouting match with a photographer who didn’t want to do a particular assignment I’d made or found the scheduling inconvenient or some such. Just the day before, I had written that same shooter’s editor a memo praising him for the quality of work he had done on a different assignment, so I was feeling betrayed as well as annoyed when I let loose on him with a diatribe that ended with the phrase of direct address, “you [copulating] ingrate!”
True to form, I had forgotten all about the incident by the next morning. But the rest of the newsroom, it seemed, was buzzing with the story when I came in to work. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would care until I heard the coda: Apparently, after our shouting match, my co-worker walked back into the photo lab and asked a colleague, “What’s an ingrate?”
Managing people like that in a culture like that is at least as much art as science, and while I’m grateful for the science part of the management training I’ve received over the years, both literal and metaphoric, I wonder whether the gradual encroachment of the science on the art hasn’t contributed in some small way to newspapers’ current woes. I always thought a good newspaper company should resemble most other professional businesses but that a newspaper newsroom should more closely resemble a scrappy, improvisatory rock ‘n’ roll band — sometimes sloppy, true, and not, shall we say, unfamiliar with failed experiments and improvisation gone horribly wrong, but also usually capable of great initiative, teamwork, creativity, passion, compassion, endurance and grace. A friend once asked me why I’d given up radio for journalism, and the first words out of my mouth were, “It’s rock ‘n’ roll by other means.” It sounded facile even then, and like most ex-newspaper people I’m capable of oversentimentalizing and over-romanticizing the job, but at the time and for years afterward, it was true, at least for me.
But whether Henry Allen stays or goes, both he and Roig-Franzia were fighting the wrong guy. And the real enemy is one they probably could never defeat.
* * *
So, if this story that Allen and Roig-Franzia fought over was the second-worst story Allen had seen in his 43 years in the bidness (or second-worst he’d ever seen at the Post’s Style section; accounts differ), what was the absolute worst? No one knows for sure. The Washingtonian solicited nominations. I’ve seen references to a piece on Paul Robeson that was so bad it never saw print. Weingarten has his own nomination, and after following his link to it and reading it, I’d say it’s definitely a contender.
Why? Well, editors don’t just edit stories. Good editors, anyway. They also edit ideas. And this was a story that begged to be killed at the idea stage, strangled in its crib, gutted with a fileting knife. the remains to be sauteed in butter, lemon, white wine and capers, then served with some fava beans and a nice chianti.