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.

Go Read Something Else (Wait! I don't Mean That)

A headline is supposed to entice a reader to delve into a story, ideally to capture the essence of that story in a few words. A caption is supposed to supplement a story; combined with a picture it offers, in new media lingo, a supplementary entry point into the story. A caption also is supposed to avoid stating the obvious. If the photo shows a man drinking a glass of water, for instance, the copy editor would not write "Man drinks glass of water," but rather something informative like "Unaware that New Jersey's drinking water contains particulates of thousands of antibiotics and prescription drugs that have been flushed down the toilet, man tempts fate with glass of water." I'm kidding, sort of. But I would need several hands and a couple of extra feet to count on my fingers and toes the number of memos I've seen sent to the copy desk reminding editors not to state the obvious in captions.

So imagine when a headline states the obvious. I passed one of those honor boxes with a stack of Bergen Records in it today and the headline marching across the front page read: "Anger at Fare Hikes." Hel-lo. The story could have been thirty column inches, forty column inches, sixty column inches with a fancy graphic, how many ways can you say commuters who ride NJ Transit trains and buses -- the likely fare increases of 30 percent led the paper and was all over the radio the day before -- don't want to see their fares go up. Of course they're angry.

Personally, I'd have fired not the schmo who wrote the headline but the slot person who pushed the typeset button who should know better. Unless, of course, the headline was dictated by the managing editor or editor, both of whom a former colleague likes to refer to as dysfunctional. It's one thing for morale to be so low, as the rumor mill has it to be at the Record, that copy editors don't give a s--t what they write and slot people don't give a damn what they typeset, but it's another thing to not take the least bit of pride in your work.

Any of a dozen heads would at least have given a reader cause to glance at the first paragraph, or to consider plunking 50 cents (or is it more now?) into the vending machine: "Commuters up in arms," "Riders blast NJ Transit." As Warner Wolf would say, "Come onnn!"

The Good, the Bad and the Copy Desk

This week I drove from New Jersey to Dallas. Sometimes on the open road, I'll turn the radio off and think. I'll thnk about headlines, and before I know it I'll find myself thinking about Hill 122, a book I've begun writing; then with no transition I'll be thinking about the Kassel Mission, the subject of this interviewing trip; and somehow the radio will be playing again and I'll find myself wondering how I never got diagnosed with ADHD.

I thought about my last blog post, the good headline/bad headline one, and something troubled me. I asked myself, if a headline shouldn't make light of injury or death, how is it that "Headless body in topless bar" is such a classic? Along with another of my favorite heads, written by the great Joe Percival, a longtime very low-key super headline writer at the Daily News when I was there. It was one of those little two-paragraph stories about a woman who advertised her colon-cleansing services in the back of New York magazine. One of her clients turned up dead and she was arrested. Joe's headline was: "Public enema Number 1." Was this just the breaking of a rule that was meant to be broken, or was something else at play?

The answer, I thought before turning the radio back on, was the latter. The difference between a driver getting his head squashed when a tractor trailer is blown onto the top of his Honda and a patron of a topless bar getting his noggin severed is the difference between innocent and maybe not so innocent, I mean, it's not like he walked into the strip joint to order a Diet Coke and watch a football game. Same thing with the guy whose colon was punctured under less than wholesome circumstances.

So I'll amend my recommendation for walking that line between humor and bad taste. People on the seamier side of life are fair game, whereas innocent victims of harmful events deserve a headline writer's sympathies.

That said, wasn't the Super Bowl great this year? I could hardly take my eyes off the game, although I did think the Diet Coke at Scores was kind of watered down.

The worst headline I ever wrote

The line between a really really good headline, the kind that makes readers say to their buds "Did you see that headline in the Such and Such?" as opposed to "Did you see that story in the Such and Such?" -- and a really really bad headline is a thin one, razor thin you might say. I walked that line for years and have the stripes on my soles to prove it. Figuratively speaking, of course, I mean I did tend to wear socks in the newsroom, although the Orange County Register used to take out a front page ad in Editor & Publisher showing its copy editors sitting at their desks on the beach, and I'll bet they have the jellyfish stings to prove it. But I digress.

Sometimes a headline looks good on a computer screen but loses in the translation to print, because a word is pronounced differently in common usage than it may appear phonetically on paper. That generally makes for a clunky, albeit not a terrible, headline. In general, really really bad headlines cross a different kind of line, not one that separates funny from not funny, but rather good taste from bad.

Which brings me to what I've always felt was one of the better headlines I wrote, and what I believe may be one of the worst. First the good one, so to speak. It never got published, but that's another story, which I'll relate here so as not to keep anybody guessing.

The Bergen Record was breaking in a new backup slot person, a young copy editor who'd been on the staff for a couple of years, a decent all-around editor although he tended to miss a lot of the nuances in stories that required massaging, and his headlines were somewhat less than inspired. But he had an affable personality and a seemingly good future at the paper, which has proved true -- he's now some kind of assistant news editor and is one of the few "good guys" on a largely dysfunctional editorial staff. But I was a former backup slot person and was perceived as a "loose cannon," and the copy chief and his deputy were wary that I might try to undermine the new backup's authority, which couldn't have been farther from the case.

However, I did give him a hard time over a headline. It was what in the vernacular was called an "overline" for a picture, the little headline that goes on top of a photo while the caption goes below. Honda at the time had a big advertising campaign for its redesigned Accord, and the theme was "Introducing the Honda Accord," which of course had been around for decades but the word "introducing" made it seem newer. The day of the headline in question was an exceptionally windy one, and a photographer had captured a picture of a parked 18-wheeler that got blown over onto its side, crushing an unoccupied Honda Accord. The key word here, to me at least, is unoccupied. The owner wasn't in the car, and wasn't even in the picture.

Sometimes you have to scramble your brain to come up with a good line -- I spent about eight months faithfully submitting entries to the New Yorker's cartoon caption writing contest and never even got an honorable mention -- and sometimes a headline "Wham!" just plain kind of smacks you in the head, no pun intended. This was one of those Whams. Onto my computer screen, almost without thinking, I typed: "Introducing the Honda Accordion." I then wrote a modest caption and hit the send button.

A short while later, my message light started blinking, and I called up a note from the in-training backup slot person, who often was given my copy to slot because it was generally clean and not likely to get him in trouble for missing the kind of stuff that might get the paper sued. "We can't run this," the note said. "Somebody might have gotten hurt."

"Might." This is the operative word here. Nobody was in the car, and, without thinking, I quietly went ballistic. I fired off a note to the copy chief saying "We've got to talk," and after the edition was put to bed -- another silly newspaper term -- the copy chief, deputy copy chief, new backup slot person and I had a conference, at which I went ballistic a little more loudly and the interpretation was that I was obviously attempting to undermine the new backup's authority. Which I can see made a lot of sense, but I was really only defending my headline. I later realized the dynamic at play and wished I had acted in a more subdued fashion. But in general I would prefer a copy editor to take enough pride in his or her work to argue over a rejected headline rather than "dumb it down" to avoid getting any grief.

But that is neither here nor there. If somebody was sitting in the Accord and had their head turned into a pancake, I never would have written a humorous headline. Unless, maybe, the 18-wheeler was delivering a load of maple syrup. Just kidding.

This episode, however, broaches the subject of good taste/poor taste, which brings me to what may have been the worst headline I ever wrote, several years earlier at the New York Daily News, not because it wasn't a clever headline, but because in this case, people did get hurt, killed even.

A couple of days earlier, there had been a deadly tornado in Texas, 24 people were killed. At the time, it was one of the deadliest tornadoes in years, although there have been many deadly tornadoes since. But it was big news at the time and stayed in the front pages for a few days. On the second or third day, somebody pulled a dog alive out of the rubble of a building. The headline I submitted, which wound up in the paper along with a picture of the dog and its rescuer, was: "Toto! Toto! You're Alive."

That was in poor taste. Very bad taste. I admit it. But I wrote it and learned from it, although I don't think the impact of the lesson sank in for several years, like an epiphany, I just woke up one day and thought, "Gee, that headline was in really bad taste."

Which is not to say that a copy editor shouldn't walk that line between good headline/bad headline, good taste/poor taste. It may take years to develop the instincts that keep you on the good headline side most of the time, but the journey is worth it.

Rhymes With Hyperbole

I once had an argument with a colleague at the Daily News Tonight. I don't remember whether I won the argument or lost it, but I think I won it not because I was right, which of course I was, but because I was in the slot. The argument was over the headline on a sports story about some big event, it might have been a Super Bowl or a World Series or a boxing match, and the copy editor wrote a headline stating something to the effect that this was going to be like "World War 3." I also forget whether he used the word "like," but I said to him, "You can't write that."

"Why not?" he shot back.

Now I might note here that this was at the height of the Cold War, or at least during it, since I really don't know where the height of the Cold War was, maybe the Bay of Pigs, or the shootdown of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane, or the Cuban Missile Crisis -- that sounds about right -- but I digress.

"This is a sporting event," I said. I might have used the word "game." "World War 3, that's atomic bombs blowing up all over the place, nuclear winter, your grandmother evaporating before your eyes, fireballs, hell on earth," and again, I doubt that I was quite so eloquent in my remonstrations.

"It's hyperbole," my former colleague contended.

"Hyperbole? Tell that to the poor schmoes who survived the firebombing of Dresden or the A-bomb at Hiroshima," and again, I'm embellishing my own eloquence here, I'm not even sure I'd heard of the firebombing of Dresden at that point in my life. But the essence of my point was something similar. "Tell them World War 3 is hyperbole."

When two journalists argue, no minds ever get changed, and the winner is almost always the one with the higher standing in the establishment's pecking order. So I'm sure whoever it was I argued with those 25 or so years before has gone on to write a dozen "World War 3" headlines that received nary a second glance from the slot.

I'm not even a hundred percent sure I'm right. I just know I'd never use the term "World War 3" to describe a sporting event, not even Ali-Frazier, Rocky Balboa and that Russian guy with the short blond hair, Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal, Britney Spears-Kevin Federline ... well, maybe that last one ... and if anybody challenged me on it, I'd say "Didn't you ever hear of hyperbole?"

Kinder, Gentler Fingernail Puller Outers

I admit it. I don't read the New York Times very often, so what I'm about to lambaste may be an aberration but the fact is I never liked their headlines. They remind me of the character in "Good Morning, Vietnam" who kept telling Robin Williams, "Now, this is funny."

I had little choice but to read the Times today while I waited for the auto repair shop to complete $792 worth of work on my car, which took from 7:30 a.m. until 2:15 p.m. I wasn't going to spend $1 for the Daily News at Starbucks, heck, I wasn't even going to spend three bucks for a latte, although I did eventually do that after spending about two hours ingesting four croissants at Bon Appetit in Mahwah, N.J. It was there that the woman at the next table abandoned her Times, and I stealthily slipped over and spirited it away before another patron grabbed it.

It was one of the front page headlines that made me wonder if some of their copy editors bother to read beyond the first paragraph of an article before firing off the head. Actually, I'm guessing some overpaid idiot patted him or herself on the back for this one. It was a single-column, three line head that said: "Taliban Using/ Lighter Touch/ To Win Allies." Oh, how clever.

Now, to that first paragraph, dateline Kabul: "The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image and win favor with local Afghans. ..."

They're softening their image, all right. Cut to the second paragraph, which outlines the new rules laid down by Mullah Omar: "The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues."

Of course the author qualifies this in paragraph 3: The code ... has been spottily enforced."

Spottily my eye, as my dear ol' mum used to say.

Give me my ear back, you Taliban cur. Haven't you heard about Mullah Omar's new dictates? What? I can't hear you.

The Civil War in Tweets

Just thought of a great idea for a book: The Civil War in Tweets. Fer example:

Bull Run no picnic, was like Roll Over, Pamplona

Little Round Top, like WOW, didn't know my uncle was in the Civil War

Appomattox, didn't his great-grandson pitch for the Braves?

Stonewall Jackson, bet he taught his cavalry horses to moonwalk

Spotsylvania, I dunno, looks like a GE lightbulb to me

General Lee bombed at Gettysburg but rocked in Dukes, right Daisy Mae?

Your suggestions and contributions are welcome!