OMG, there's more of this?

Although he wasn't the legendary Bigfoot, Gil Spencer was
the second best legendary editor I worked under.



See earlier posts:

Another One Bites the Dust

And Another One...And Another One

Editors Shmeditors 

 

 

   In 1984 Gil Spencer came to the Daily News as editor, with Jim Willse as his managing editor. Spencer had that old-time newspaper aura about him, and was probably second only to Paul Sann among the editors I've worked under, although I only had one face-to-face encounter with him and when he came to the Bergen Record to give a talk many years later he didn't remember who I was. C'est la vie.

   As for that encounter, I was working in the features department under a department head named Guna Bite, pronounced not like Bite Me, but with an accent aigue over the e, so her name was pronounced Bitee. Guna was of Latvian descent, tall, with relatively short blond hair.

   I can't say precisely why, but Guna had come over from the news copy desk to be head of the features copy desk, which was a promotion, but the job came with a lot of pressure, and after about a year it was more pressure than Guna could bear. So she went to Spencer and asked to be removed from the department head position and he removed her all right; he fired her.

   She was pretty broken up over that, and a couple of days later I knocked on the door of Spencer's office, he said come in, and I asked him if instead of firing her he couldn't simply reassign her to her former position on the news desk. I don't know if I had anything to do with it but that's what happened. I never said anything to anyone about having saved her job.

   A few months later I was approached by one of the managers and asked if I'd like to work on the suburban news copy desk. I said I'd think about it. The next day I was working on the suburban news copy desk. Unbeknownst to me, at the time, there was a young lady on the suburban news copy desk who previously had a reputation as being, well, maybe a little loose is the way to put it, but then she was involved in a serious auto accident and became a diehard feminist. She also either had filed or was about to file a sexual harassment charge against the head of the suburban copy desk, and the solution was to transfer her to the features department which meant sending me to the suburban copy desk, so it already was a fait accomplis when I was asked if I'd consider it.

   Not that I'm complaining. I loved working on the suburban copy desk, and later the main news copy desk.

   I'm going to backtrack a bit now, and begrudgingly admit that I may have been wrong about Spencer's managing editor, Jim Willse, who was hired at about the same time.

   I wrote a previous blog entry about the following incident so I'll keep it short. The Daily News had a company Christmas party shortly after the tandem was hired and of course they attended, or at least Willse was there.

   The News had recently published one of those screaming tabloid headlines about a gay bar called the Mine Shaft which apparently was owned by a city official and was granted tax-free status. The headline went "How the city got shafted," that may not have been the exact wording but the word "shaft" was there.

   Now euphemisms have always been one of my favorite headline writing tools, but the word "shaft" is a euphemism for fucked, no two ways about it, and this was the Daily News, which, although times have changed, at the time considered its quintessential reader to be a housewife in Queens.

   So at the Christmas party I approached Willse and asked him if he didn't think there was something wrong with using "Shafted" in a page one headline, or any other headline for that matter.

   No, he said, he thought that was a very good headline.

   I immediately formed a negative opinion of Willse, who did go on to be the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger and the paper even won a Pulitzer Prize during his tenure. So I may have been wrong about Willse; as for the headline, it nevertheless sucked.

  

(to be continued)

Toity

My entry into the newspaper business came with a question on a copy editing test at my college paper, The Campus, some 43 years ago.

The question: What is bfulc?

My answer: Those were the glasses Ben Franklin invented.

My exit from the newspaper business came with an email from the editor of a midsize newspaper: "Thank you very much for your interest in our page design/copy editing position. We had a flood of 80 applicants including many who were highly qualified and it was a very difficult choice, but we have filled the position."

That's it for me. Ten four, out the door. I used to tell kids if they could write a good headline, they could always get a job in this business. That advice is now as useless as this blog, although some copy editors might still learn something from my occasional entries.

My former newspaper, the Bergen Record, would like to consider me retired, but I'm not. I'm just beginning my second career, reinventing myself as it were, as an oral historian. It's an uphill climb, but I need the exercise.

When I started in the newspaper business, as a cub reporter at my college paper, there was a tradition when seniors graduated, or even if they didn't graduate but finally moved on to a real newspaper after six or seven years dodging classes in the school paper office, a little hole in the wall, capacity about eight with a couple of desks and a few typewriters and paper all over the place, look at this, a run-on sentence, tsk, tsk, I must be getting copyheimer's disease, but anyway, they got to write what was known as a "Thirty" column. I wrote one in my fifth year when I finally negotiated my way into a degree, trading all my "incompletes" for F's and emerging with a 2.1 grade point average, a smidgin above the requirement to graduate. I forget what I said in my Thirty column.

By the time I graduated I was already working full-time, at the New York Post, where I started as a copyboy in the summer of my freshman year.

In real businesses -- newspapers, after all, were never real businesses, still aren't, although they've come to think they are -- people get a gold watch after 25 years. In newspapers, whatever the number of years, they got something much more personal. The cartoonist would do a big drawing and everybody would sign it. When I was at the Daily News there was one fellow who up and went to Hollywood because an old friend of his was now a famous screenwriter and was going to help him get started. The staff held a party for him and the artist, I think it was my alltime favorite newspaper artist, Jerry Schlamp, did a big caricature of him lying in a king-size bed with a horse's head sticking out from under the sheets, two empty bottles of booze with three x's rising from the top of each, and a nurse wearing nothing but panties with a red cross on them and a bra and saying "Now about that screen test ..." I got to sign that along with everybody else, although I suppose if he were to look at that today, he wouldn't know who the heck I was.

That's what I aspired to in the newspaper business, but it never came to pass. I left the Post in the exodus that followed Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper, and went to the New York Daily News. Ten years later I left the Daily News in a mass downsizing and wound up at the Bergen Record. I left the Record twenty years later in a "restructuring," please step into my office, you're not being offered a job, goodbye, a few days later some of my copy desk colleagues took me and another laid off copy editor to a diner and that was it, no cartoon. They did get me some kind of Hallmark card and signed it, but that's not the same.

"Thirty," in the Pleistocene Era of Journalism, is what reporters would put at the end of their story so that the people working the linotype machines would know that it was finished.

Oh, and bfulc stood for bold face, upper lower case.

Early to bed ...

It is with some sadness that I write this post, because I take no joy in knocking my former colleagues on the copy desk. The news editors, assignment editors, supervisory personnel, the managing editor and editor, they're all fair game, but I'd like to see the copy editors turning out sparkling headlines even at the cost of proving my job was superfluous.

I don't see the print version of my former employer, the Bergen Record, very often. I don't take advantage of the employee subscription discount to which I'm entitled, and when I have breakfast at the Plaza 46 diner my favorite waitress, Ella, usually plunks the New York Daily News or the New York Post in front of me at the counter to read with my eggs over easy, dry whole wheat toast and coffee, hold the potatoes, thanks. Not that I don't like the potatoes, but it helps me pretend I'm trying to watch my weight.

Speaking of which, weight, that is, today she plunked the first two sections of the Record in front of me, because the worst snowstorm in several decades had interrupted delivery of the Post and Daily News, and I was amazed -- you could almost say flabbergasted -- at how lacking in content the paper was. The Post, the News, I can sit there for half an hour reading meaty story after meaty story, stories buried on Page 8 that on a slow news day would be all over Page 1 but there are no slow news days in New York anymore. Today's Record was like Where's the Beef?

It's a funny phenomenon. You look at the Bergen Record from a few feet away, there it is, lying on the counter at the diner, it looks like a newspaper, like a damn good newspaper, a big, splashy picture on Page 1, big headline type, catchy-looking things we used to call ears and refers (pronounced reefers) promising goodies on the inside, informative-looking briefs running down the left hand side of the page.

Speaking of snowstorms, the Daily News used to run the comic strip "Annie," later the basis of a Broadway musical, and I won a monetary prize once, somewhere between $5 and $15, for a headline I wrote when the city was blanketed with upward of a foot of snow. "Bleepin' blizzards" was the headline. I was always kind of proud of that one. But I digress.

The first thing I noticed about today's Record was how vacuous its lead story was. I forget the headline, but the point of the story was that New Jersey is getting almost as much federal stimulus money for highway projects as New York and Pennsylvania (eight hundred and some million for New Jersey and a little over a billion each for New York and Pennsylvania), yet the number of jobs created in New Jersey is strikingly less. So the writer quoted this official and that official as saying that this is only the beginning, and that more jobs will be created down the road, no pun intended. But NOT ONCE did the writer even hint at the possibility that greedy contractors in New Jersey might be pocketing a much bigger chunk of the stimulus money than their counterparts in New York or Pennsylvania, or otherwise try to explain the discrepancy except to say more workers would be added in the future. Not one worker was interviewed, no salary figures were given. And to me the 800 pound gorilla in the article was the possibility that organized crime, not an unfamiliar entity in the state of New Jersey, has its scoop in the pie.

That was the first thing I noticed. But lest my critique run longer than the article itself, I'll move on to the preprint. The preprint is a holiday tradition at the Record, and I don't just mean at Christmastime. Every major holiday, when advertisements swell the paper in size, a part of the news section is printed on Friday night while the rest of the paper is printed Saturday.

The wire editor, as he goes through the day's stories, selects so-called "timeless" features, or long stories that won't fit in the regular news hole and can hold for a day or two without losing their value, and places them in a separate file. These stories are called "evergreen." Then when a holiday rolls around, the wire editor is given a preprint section to fill. It goes in the back of the main news section, and usually contains six to ten pages of what are called "shelfs and rails." A shelf is a story that goes above an ad that fills the width of the page but leaves about a three-inch-deep hole for news at the top. And a rail is an ad that comes to the top of the page but leaves a single column for news running down the side.

A good news editor, with a batch of evergreen in the queue, can lay out a six-page preprint in about two minutes.

I used to like editing preprint stories partially because they were usually from a wire service and were better edited than the staff copy, but mainly because the headlines on the shelves were usually six columns and no larger than 36 point, which gave a copy editor leeway to tap into his or her creativity.

Today's paper, this being the Sunday before Christmas, had a preprint. I daresay, when I opened it, I was terribly disappointed. I knew all the stories already because I'm an Internet news junkie, but that's not what disappointed me.

What bothered me is that the headlines were padded.

Now a little padding can be very attractive in certain parts of the body, if enough clothing is worn to disguise the padding, but there's no excuse, to me, for padding a headline with extraneous and unnecessary words. Well, there is an occasional excuse, if an extra word is needed to keep a line from breaking badly in a two- or a three-deck headline, you may have to choose between the lesser of two evils. But padding a six-column 36 point headline, there's no excuse.

These are the two headlines that bothered me the most.

1) Uproar in N.C. over atheist taking oath of office." What's padded about that, you might ask. "Taking oath of office?" At the very least, the copy editor could have written "Uproar in N.C. over swearing in of atheist," and the N.C. isn't even necessary. The key words here are legislator (which isn't in the headline), atheist, and oath of office. There are a hundred poignant headlines you could write with that kind of space.

2) "Judiciary acknowledges prisoners were beaten to death" -- this I knew to be a reference to Iran, although you'd think the copy editor would have mentioned Iran in the headline (there was a little "world" overline called a "bug" over the headline). Judiciary acknowledges. If that isn't padding, I don't know what is. I'm not saying he was right, because it was one of those rules that are made to be broken, but I once had a copy chief who banned headline words of more than two syllables because he wanted headlines to be easy to read. There is a place in headlines for polysyllabic words and I've used them myself on occasion, but "Judiciary acknowledges"?

During my last few years at the Record, the copy chief, V.B., used to send me headlines that other copy editors had written and ask me to massage them. And I've been out of the newspaper business for a year and a half. But I've got an idea. I just might try revising my resume, and instead of listing my job title as "copy editor," I'll list it as "masseur." Maybe I'll get lucky and my resume will wind up in the hands of an editor with a stiff neck.