Debbie & Me, or, How to Write a Q & A and Not Get Ripped by the Public Editor

Back when I was still a slave to newspaper deadlines, I got worked up about a thrashing delivered to New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon by the paper’s hired dean of conformity, Public Editor Clark Hoyt.

My view on this matter is no secret to friends in the Oakland Newsroom of the Detroit Free Press. I sounded off at the time about the hypocrisy and outright stupidity of condemning a writer for doing what the paper, through its unwritten code of deadlines and story length limits, forces writers to do: Namely, shorten everything, including direct quotations, and re-arrange them for dramatic effect and logical continuity. I’m writing about this situation in my journalism textbook, SHOESTRING REPORTER: HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY NEWSPAPER REPORTER WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL, AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO! Watch for it!

Deborah Solomon was pilloried by Clark Hoyt for what I and many other writers do all the time. We condense, we delete, we re-arrange direct quotations.

Horrors!

He admits that in writing?

You betcha. And I would have written about it at the time, except back then I didn’t own my own newspaper. Now I own joelontheroad.com and print what I please.

No, I didn’t write this at the time and submit it to the Free Press. You might chide me for this: Since I didn’t write the essay and submit it to the paper, how can I say for sure that it wouldn’t have been published?

Good question. Glad I thought of it. Okay, here’s my response: I can’t be sure. But I promise you, my readers, small in number though you are, that in the near future I will begin posting as occasional features ACTUAL STORIES that I did write and submit to the Free Press, which censored them. And to the journalists who might be reading this, please think back through your careers. Have you ever had stories censored? I’d like to read them, hear the circumstances. I’m writing another book, BLUE NEWS: STORIES TOO HOT FOR AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS TO PRINT.

But the threat of censorship is not the only reason for not submitting that story to the paper. The other factor is control, or loss thereof. Once you send the story to a newspaper, you have no control over where or how it is played. You have no control over any changes editors might impose. As a staff writer, you have very limited power. If editors want those changes, even if they make the story inaccurate or stupid, you can argue, but you can’t change what they’re going to do.

Did I say argue?

Be careful! Argument can be construed as “insubordination.” The I-word can bring on discipline. I know a reporter who was fired at the Detroit News for slinging the f-word at an editor. Now to a lay reader, that may sound like intolerable behavior on the part of that reporter. But anyone who has spent half an hour hanging out in any newsroom in the country knows that foul language permeates the atmosphere, and that particular word is number one in the oral editorial lexicon.

Stories of how reporters are punished are common. Even before I joined the Free Press, I was hearing from reporters that my assignment to the Western Wayne Bureau was a second-class position. Staffers were put there for supposed misbehavior. Out of sight.  I always believed, though I can’t prove, that my tranfer to the Wayne County government beat in the early 1990s was punishment for arguing with an editor. Suburban bureaus were a trusty purgatory for uppity reporters.

Other punishments, well-known, were assignment to the night cops beat, which in the old days meant simmering in an overheated room in Detroit police headquarters competing for crime tidbits with the Detroit News reporter who sat at a desk about four feet from yours. Again, the unpopular reporter was out of sight of editors who lacked sufficient cause to fire him/her.

My first day at the Free Press, Nov. 12, 1984, an editor who forgot where I was assigned referred to the “Siberia bureaus.” I began my career with a demotion and worked several years in the Western Wayne Siberia Bureau. I thought I was immune to further demotion. Rob Musial, a former Free Press reporter, used to wisecrack, “What more can they do to me? They put me in Macomb.” I was wrong. They stuck it to me by putting me on Wayne County and making me work Sundays for two years.

You might call these prior restraints. Newspaper-imposed limits on writers’ free speech. Can’t put you in the stocks or flog you, but look out, or it’s night cops! I wrote a whole novel about this kind of behavior. It’s called CROSS PURPOSES: IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION. I’ll publish it one of these days, or maybe put it on joelontheroad.com as an e-book.

But what about Deborah Solomon?

Well, first, I’m not acquainted with her. As for Clarkie Hoyt, I am acquainted with him to the extent that we both worked for the same news organization at the same time. But while Clarkie was a big-wig executive at Knight-Ridder, I was merely a grunt reporter. While he went to meetings, I put stories in the paper. In other words, I never met Clark Hoyt. But look at us now: Knight-Ridder is dead and gone, a footnote in the history of American journalism. But joelontheroad.com is spiraling downward faster than Alvah Chapman ever dreamed for the Free Press. (More about the joelontheorad.com/Detroit Media Partnership later — talks are ongoing. More about the proposed Joint Operating Agreement later, but just remember you read about it first in JOTR!)

Oh yes, Deborah Solomon. I didn’t know her when I worked for the Times. Maybe that’s because it was ca. 1979 and the two freelance, no-byline stories ($75 each) I wrote for the Times were written in the attic office of our little house in Berrien Springs where my only colleagues were not Debbie Solomon, but a golden retriever named Lady Jessica Dog and a black and white cat we called Sancho Panza. Yes, I wrote a novel loosely based on this experience, too. It’s called STRINGER. Can you guess why?

Anyway, Deborah Solomon’s crime, as near as I can figure, was trying to make her writing conform to two opposing demands by her paper. First, she is required to be pithy, interesting and brief. Second, she must interview her question-and-answer subjects at length, so as to mine those pithy, interesting remarks which she must then somehow condense into the very few lines allotted to her in the Times magazine’s tightly-controlled news-space budget. She must take what might add up to hours of audio-recorded conversations complete with ands, buts, ums, ers and ahs, plus the odd cell phone ring, clinking of silverware and background noise if the interview is conducted over lunch with a drawn-out argument over who gets the check; then she must sift through all the verbiage for the pithy, interesting parts, try to massage some grammar into them while keeping the meaning, then compress it all into the tiny space her editors choose to alot her. It’s a lot of work, folks, and it takes a lot of sifting and compressing.

Now I want to say right here that it’s not right, fair or honest to misconstrue someone’s remarks. It is an immutable rule that we never quote someone in a way that inaccurately reflects his or her remarks.

But apparently Deborah Solomon ran afoul of interview subjects who got mad because not every wise mot they spoke showed up in the Q & A she wrote, or at least (since editors have lots to do with the final appearance of a story) the way it looked in print. Moreover, and this was perceived as a great sin in her case, the writer of the Q & A piece might actually include a question he or she failed to ask during the interview.

My God! What a terribly dishonest thing to do!

Not!

I did it now and then when I wrote my Free Press Five Questions pieces. What if you interview someone and they start talking about something you didn’t think to ask them about? Later, while writing, you think, Hey, that was interesting. But this is a Q & A. It’s so rigidly formatted that you can’t just plop somebody’s statement in there without the required question. In normal writing, you could, but in the tight Q & A, the subject’s remark has to be construed as the answer to a question, and if that is so, well, it better be preceded by a question. But you didn’t ask the question, and in Deborah’s case, it’s not on her recording. It would never be on mine, because I never record those interviews. I make hand notes, but that’s for another column. So what do you do? No question, so don’t use the remark? Not if I could help it. The solution is simple: Figure out the question that would have provoked the subject’s statement as an answer if it had been an answer to a question, which we know it was not. In short, you make up the question, which is, strictly speaking, fiction, so that the answer, which is strictly speaking fact, can follow naturally.

Dishonest? No. So long as the statement conforms to the subject’s meaning, it’s legitimate. The question is not more made up than the Q & A format. Sure, you could ban this practice of backing into questions. The effect would be Q & A essays that are less interesting. The reader would lose. If the quotation is correctly stated, nobody is hurt.

What we have, then, is a writer (actually writers, plural, because Deborah Solomon was not and is not the Lone Ranger in this practice) trying to please readers, editors, at the same time cramming as much information and pith into a short space as she can so she can go home and have a life.

Here’s what it comes down to: Anyone, and this includes editors as well as the public, who thinks these newspaper Q & A pieces are verbatim interview transcripts needs a quick trip back to first grade for a short course in reading.

Note: I wrote many, many Five Questions articles. True, some of the people I interviewed were dead, but that wasn’t my fault. Fact is, nobody, subject or reader, ever complained that I misquoted my interviewees.

Nor did anyone ever complain that I concocted questions to fit the answers.

Even though I did.

Now, I promised to tell how to write a Q & A and not get ripped by the public editor. Here’s how: It’s obvious that some of these editor-appointed ombudspeople need remedial help. Well, help is here, and it’s free. Simply sign up Clark Hoyt, or whoever your public editor happens to be, for a free subscription to joelontheroad.com and refer him/her to Joel’s J School. It’s called an RSS feed. Simple as that.

You may contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com