Edit High #0: Ctrl-Z
First And Last, Doest Thou No Harm.
We had a guru among the newspaper subeditors in Johannesburg. I knew him first as a musician, the ace guitarist and bass player of a reggae/ska band called Splash, which I always managed to miss. They were the one band the apartheid government actually jailed because of their lyrics. Brett, the only white guy in the band, wasn’t sleeping at his own house the day the others were arrested in his basement, some story like that. Brett used to sit in with our band, The Honkies, during the early 1980s.
I am not revealing any secrets when I say that the subediting world in Johannesburg runs on more hard drugs than any other cohort I’ve worked with, by far, including rock musicians. Brett told me a funny story about another guitarist, who was eventually persuaded by his wife to give up rock ’n roll, because of the late nights, the hard drugs, and the dodgy friends. So he became a subeditor, one of the best. The story went that after discovering the extent of the later nights, the harder drugs, and the far dodgier friends among the subeditors, his wife then begged him to go back to rock ’n roll. I don’t know if the story is true, but if you ever watch the great documentary Searching for Sugarman, one of the best videos ever on music, you’ll see Willem, he was the guitarist in the band that backed Rodriguez on his first tour to South Africa. Willem says in the video that they still didn’t believe Rodriguez was actually alive and it was really him, until he walked into the studio straight from the plane, singing the song they were busy practising. You can see Willem give Rodriguez a salute at 4:08 in the video of their first concert in South Africa in 1998. Rodriguez didn’t believe there would even be half a dozen fans: there were thousands, all of whom knew every song. They helped him with the lyrics when he forgot them.
Now, Willem told me that he actually rated Brett as the best rock guitarist in South Africa. You could always tell when Brett was in the newsroom, the one Internet cafe machine was always jammed on VintageGuitar.com, where he would be researching issues like the exact strings that Jimmi Hendrix used to get a certain sound.
During the late 1980s, I often also used to meet Brett in the education NGOs, like an an awful CIA-run place called SACHED. He was the IT guru then, one of the few people who could keep a network running in those days.
When he turned to subbing, therefore, he had an enormous advantage in being completely in control of the IT environment, which is about nine-tenths of surviving as a subeditor. You learn very fast, as I used to tell trainees, that “Jesus saves, and the sub saves” — you learn to save everything you do. Not necessarily where anyone can see it, but you save it.
I was actually working two newspapers down, in the entertainment section, when I first started subbing. As we were leaving for the night, my friend Brett would arrive, he liked to do the revise editing after everyone had gone home. So I often used have a chat with him in the smoking room — I don’t smoke, but somehow all my most interesting conversations were in that room — and ask him all my most vexing editing problems. There were many. He knew absolutely everything about absolutely everything, as far as I could tell.
When someone has been convicted of kicking a pregnant woman on the ground, among other violent offences, you can safely call him a “thug” in a headline without running the risk of being sued; but make sure that security is good on your floor of the building, was one piece of advice I got from Brett.
So one night, when we were discussing addictions and how in the old days he used to track shipments of cocaine up the coast as the arrests came in over the newswires, and estimate when it was worth visiting his dealer, and what a shame it was that he could no longer edit the way God intended, late at night, with no one around, and in a great rush of white powder, because he would drop dead if he did again, and he didn’t want to be another subediting corpse found in the toilets of that building, because there had already been more than one: in this context, he said something memorable to me. Which I have tried, at some tedious length, to commemorate in the title of this informal series on Editing, the ins and outs thereof, and how to avoid “out” being feet-first under a white sheet.
There were two theories about the creative process, he said. “Write high, edit straight; or, write straight, edit high.”
If you do both activities straight, you’re boring as hell. If you do both high, you die young and have a bad-looking corpse. You have to choose your balance. This is the basic truth table for being a writer or musician.
For me, there is no real issue. Editing, by its very nature, is a “higher” activity; it’s where you try survey a completed work, engage what I called a “controlled psychosis” to enter into the fabric of the whole saga and try imagine all the possible reactions of all kinds of other people who will read this story — not least, all the implicated parties.
Hence: Edit High, my tiny contribution to Medium. I don’t often write original articles, I tend to comment, but I’ve been planning this series for a long time, so here goes.
This zeroth edition contains the very first piece of advice I would generally give to newbie subs, and I had to do far more training than I ever wanted to do, or was paid to do, just to keep the place running.
I taught myself layout from a very good book called “Teach Yourself QuarkXPress in 14 Days” by Kate Binder, and my first piece of advice actually comes straight from her. She said, you can always tell the professionals: they are the ones who use the keyboard shortcuts. And from then on, I made it a habit when I was learning any new system, to start with the list of keyboard shortcuts. Not only do you look like a professional from day one, but it’s often a really quick way to learn all the important aspects of a package.
One of the vast advantages to using keyboard shortcuts is that you don’t take your fingers off the keyboard to find your mouse. You remember that three-letter acronym (TLA) used by “Sheldor” in The Big Bang Theory, when he’s playing a game online: AFK. This means “Away From Keyboard”. Every single time you use your mouse, you should actually type “AFK” first. The mouse is actually one of the dumbest devices ever invented, in my opinion.
I learned to touch-type from a little hardback yellow “How To” book I bought when I was 15. That was the year 1972. I was planning to go to sea as a ship’s radio operator, I was not interested in going to university. I wanted to see the world and become an expert radio man. I had learned Morse code ten full years before that, at age five. I know this is true, because I was taught by a radio operator with the Gordon Highlanders, who came to suppress a strike in the country in 1962 and ended up mostly giving terrific parades for the kids, with bagpipes and sporrans and all. He made me a buzzer with a beautiful professional Morse key and taught me how to articulate the rhythms: you never say “dot-dash-dot-dot”, it’s “di-dah-di-dit.” I literally learned Morse code as I learned the alphabet.
But to be a ship’s radio operator, you not only had to take Morse code at 20 words per minute: it had to be done on a typewriter. So I learned to touch-type, taking Morse code off a Mozambican news wire service, in Portuguese. This way I learned (i) Morse code (ii) touch-typing (iii) Portuguese (iv) radio propagation and (v) the news, all with my eyes shut. I remember several stories about atrocities and massacres carried out by the Portuguese army in Tete province at that time.
I never went to sea in the end, but the following would actually still be my very first piece of advice to any aspiring editor, especially a newspaper subeditor: learn to touch-type properly. You truly cannot acquire the “sub’s ten-thousand-yard stare” as you look into the mists of your PC screen, trying to find a headline that will fit a hostage drama in Borneo, if you have to keep looking at your fingers. You just stare at the screen enough, your fingers move, and eventually — magically — the right headline finally appears.
Unless, as Brett says, you find you’re “headlined out”, which is a really bad form of burnout we all eventually suffer on the desk.
Once you can touch-type, and you have learned never to take your fingers off the keyboard unless you absolutely have to (the only time I use a mouse by choice is when I’m eating with one hand, and I use the mouse to copy and paste one letter at a time, instead of typing…) — you are in a good space to learn the keyboard shortcuts.
So where does the editing syllabus begin? This zeroth edition has no hesitation. The first thing I teach anyone, is how to undo the thing you’ve just done. First and last, doest thou no harm. Do not mess anything up. If you’re in doubt, hit Ctrl-Z and undo your last move. This also means the change will not be tracked. No one will know what idiotic thing you just typed.
At Farmer’s Weekly magazine, a new sub was looking in absolute panic at her screen. Everything had vanished, the entire article, which she had been editing for ages, had totally disappeared. This kind of thing can easily happen, especially under pressure. If you hit Ctrl-A — “select all” — and then accidentally bump the space bar, everything will vanish in just this fashion. So I told her, whatever you’ve just done, I don’t even need to know what it was, you can just undo. And I hit Ctrl-Z. It was definitely one of my better teaching moments, she was so relieved to see the text reappear.
First and last, unless thou hast no choice under sun, doest thou no harm. The trouble is: as a newspaper subeditor, at least back in the old days when the newspaper was made of paper, you had to cut stories to fit. And this created the eternal war between reporters and subeditors, in which I tried valiantly to be a conscientious objector. Because you can never cut anything without the reporters sighing and rolling their eyes and telling you this is the most important part of the story, can’t you tell.
The most egregious such case I ever encountered was a writer called Darrel Bristow-Bovey, who fancied himself as both extremely clever and highly humorous. He openly and widely tendered his opinion that all subeditors were cretins, and said in one of his books that he couldn’t wait for the seventh trumpet to sound and for all subeditors to be thrown screaming into the flames. His pieces would arrive with instructions like this: “Now listen here, sub. I have used some Latin in this piece, sub. When I say ‘Machinae ex Deus’, I am talking about the aircraft in the story that come out of the sky, sub. Do not change my quote, it is very clever, sub, so don’t try any of your stupid tricks, and just leave this article the way it is, sub.” This is more or less verbatim.
I told the chief sub that I wasn’t prepared to be insulted like this, and that he could find someone else to edit Bristow-Bovey’s work. I said: this guy is going to cause trouble, and I don’t want to be blamed for it. Either by leaving something in or for taking it out.
Not two weeks later, Darrel Bristow-Bovey was bust for plagiarism in his latest book. I had the pleasure of editing that very article, it was written one newspaper down in the same building. I made sure the story was tight. An intern had been given two books for Christmas, one by Bill Bryson, and the other by Darrel Bristow-Bovey. Our intern was a fast reader and couldn’t help noticing the passages with lengthy statistical findings and humorous conclusions that Bristow-Bovey had pinched word-for-word. The only explanation for this is that Bristow-Bovey thought South African readers were so dumb that no one around there would have heard of Bill Bryson, let alone read his books.
So for a short while, anyway, poor Darrel Bristow-Bovey was suspended as a columnist. And he was short of money. And so he was offered a little job to tide him over this rough patch. You can guess: he was invited to be a subeditor on one of our papers for a few weeks.
He spent those weeks with the keyboard on his lap, his feet on the desk, and a posture that radiated all kinds of attitude. I was working with a supplement editor who had to sit near his upraised feet, and I nearly removed them from her face for sheer rudeness, but I was enjoying the situation too much to interfere with the scene. Oh, and he wore a hat and kept chewing a toothpick. I’ve always loathed people who chew toothpicks or matches, it looks so dumb. If you have to masticate, that’s why chewing gum was invented.
So one day, there was a big calamity, and I heard the chief sub phoning the IT department. No, a terrible disaster had happened. Hours of work had been lost. Something had to be done. There must be a back-up. How can all this work possibly just disappear. And I saw Darrel Bristow-Bovey looking very agitated.
The whole IT department came, and stood around Bristow-Bovey’s computer, sadly, shaking their heads, including Jimmy, the absolute wizard of that department, who could fix just about everything. Very, very sadly shaking their heads. Every picture tells a story, I thought.
I hope Darrel Bristow-Bovey learned from that experience, that being a subeditor is not a job for morons and cretins. That knowing every rule in the English language, knowing the names and portfolios and spellings of every member of the South African Cabinet, knowing the units of radiation at Fukushima, knowing the laws on defamation and avoiding them, knowing who said what to whom in a corruption trial the day before yesterday… is just the beginning of the job. The most important part is to keep the system stable and the content secure. Apple Mac crashes are entirely different to PC crashes — they happen much more suddenly. You can generally feel something going wonky on a PC before it crashes. That smoking bomb used to appear out of nowhere on the Macs we used almost throughout the industry. You learn to live on your nerves, and you learn to save, save, save. Jesus saves and the sub saves, Darrel. And it keeps us safe from the flames of hell, even from those columnists that wish us there.
So here we are. I was persuaded once to write a short series of articles on newspaper subediting, in a forum far, far away and long, long ago. I called it: “How I Learned to Use My Paranoia and Psychosis to Make Money in My Spare Time — And You Can Too.” I argued that many mental disorders, like OCD, are actually required traits to be a good subeditor. South African newsrooms have always crawled with spies and disinformation merchants, paranoia is an absolutely necessary trait in that environment, even more so today than under apartheid.
And I can never get over this sense of subbing as being a kind of controlled psychosis. You look at a picture, and know that everyone in this scene will be reading your headline about them tomorrow. How will they feel? Will they curse you for getting their name wrong? Or are they crooks, and will be furious with you for getting their name right?
We had an outraged family member from a Mafia gang who got past security on to the floor of the Saturday Star newsroom on a Monday, to try assault the journalist who had written a story that weekend revealing their years of skulduggery. He should have realised that the Saturday edition journalists get Mondays off. I would always tell reporters, that’s your name on the story, not mine, so make sure you’re happy with the headline. But you can’t always check. As subeditors, you get all of the blame (any mistakes are always “introduced during the editing process”) and none of the credit. That’s your job description. So you need to stay on your toes, even if it’s not your byline on the page. You never know when someone will arrive seeking justice for a caption kicker for which you really are to blame.
A few days later, our journalist’s source phoned and told her to get off this Mafia story: one person she’d quoted had been shot in the head and killed.
So it goes.
As more and more people try to write, there’s more and more work for editors. For the last few years I’ve been working as an academic editor, mainly fixing papers written by Japanese and Korean academics for journal publication. I’m taking a break, basically burned out by fixing Chinese population statistics at 3 a.m., the deadlines are just insane.
This whole experience has taught me one thing about myself, however, so let me come full circle. This is a big confession, so let me get it over with. My drug of choice, when the time comes to Edit High, is nothing dramatic or illegal. It’s just Coffee. Endless coffee. I have once given myself acute caffeine poisoning by drinking one too many cup late at night, it’s a really awful feeling, I couldn’t eat a thing for three days.
However, I can testify that if there is one drug on which every newsroom runs, it is, in fact, coffee. The subs’ room at The Star newspaper had that big French Revolution poster, with the title as given below. I could really identify.
In his Lectures on Lecturing, the best set of lectures ever given, Rudolf Steiner says that journalists drink coffee, because it makes them logical while focusing on one story, while diplomats drink tea, as they have to chit-chat lightly while flitting from one subject to the next. The last time I checked, journalism was the profession with by far the highest use of coffee as a stimulant.
Coffee is the second-most traded commodity on this planet by value, after oil. In fact, coffee is the fuel on which much of humanity runs. I have found, absolutely, that I can survive without just about everything — food, shelter, human contact, all other drugs and stimulants including alcohol, absolutely everything and anything, just as long as I have some coffee. It’s a proven appetite suppressant, ask any ballerina. At stages in the newsroom when I had no money to buy food, I would easily drink 14 polystyrene cups of coffee in a day. I’m certainly not recommending this, and this wasn’t even when I poisoned myself, I’m just saying: it’s been the one absolute constant in my editing life.
My plunger broke and I found myself using a Japanese teapot someone gave me. It’s become the centrepiece of my very rapid Japanese Espresso Ceremony every morning. I always try put some fresh cardamom in my coffee, it’s the Sufi way. The Book of Sufi Healing by Shaykh Hakim Moinuddin Chishti states: “Coffee is a corrective for dysentery, relieves thirst, and is said to produce wisdom. It should be used sparingly.” So, there is your official health warning.
Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia; it is Africa’s greatest gift to the world, after rhythm. And coffee may help you find your rhythm, if you find yourself at the desk, trying to disentangle someone’s knotted thoughts. Rhythm is all-important in editing. This is why I sit with my fingers on Ctrl-S the whole time. Type, save, type, save, type, save, save again. You learn the rhythms of each system; one (news24.com) would freeze every hour on the hour, as the machine did a big backup. Another (iNet Bridge, a business wire) would go slow at 5 p.m. on a Friday, just as the Jo’burg Stock Exchange was closing and we had to work at our fastest, putting out all the final numbers and sector reports for the week. That was the exact time that this IT department had decided, in its wisdom, was the best to back up. All our arguments and pleas were in vain. You just learn to be patient under vast pressure.
Everyone is talking these days about content validation. This is what we subs used to do, before newspapers were done away with and most of us were fired worldwide (the cull appears to be continuing…)
Now people are finding a need for us again, coming full circle, as the world gets flooded with fake news. In 12 years of subbing, I kept a completely clean sheet — not one case of defamation, not one major complaint of any kind. One newspaper told me I’d saved them hundreds of thousands of rand, that was their normal annual fee for legal services. This number had fallen to zero.
I edited a story for a business paper about the closure of a huge clothing manufacturer in Cape Town. The story also mentioned the closure of another, smaller company. I looked everywhere online, I could find hardly any references to this company, and none about it being in any trouble. I was short of space, so I just cut that second company out, something felt wrong.
The next day the editor came to me in a huge panic. The Cape Town newspaper that originated that story had it wrong. The second company was not closing at all, but they were now inundated with calls from panicking employees and clients to find out what was going on, and were threatening to sue the newspaper. Alide was terrified that we had printed the same story. I told her, I took that other name out, it didn’t look right. She couldn’t believe it. How did you know, she demanded. I said: it just felt fishy, I was short of space, and it didn’t check out. So I made the call.
You have to make thousands and thousands of calls like that, as a professional news editor. You have to make them fast, you have to make them clean, you must cover your back, but not your tracks: you have to own up if it was you that stuffed things up, each revision is recorded on the system. You cannot hide, you are duty bound literally to yell “Stop the press!” if you realise a really disastrous error is about to be printed on the page. And those presses are huge, they are more difficult and dangerous to stop in the middle of a run than an oil tanker.
I actually only did this once. We were giving free hampers to people who bought the Saturday Star at certain supermarkets. We therefore printed a picture of them holding up the previous week’s paper. We had printed a lead story about a jailed rapist who was petitioning for chemical inhibition of his sex drive. Our managing editor had a taste for what he called “not a quiet headline”. Therefore our prizewinner, a sweet little old grandmother, was holding up a newspaper with a huge banner reading: “CASTRATE ME!”. I was not the person who put that picture on the page, I only noticed it after the paper had been sent. I didn’t hesitate. We stopped that press and cropped that picture. And I had another cup of coffee and waited to see if there were going to be changes for the second edition, sending up my silent Friday night prayer: let no one famous die, let no wars start, let there be no train crashes. Cherie Blair, please have your damn baby after midnight, was the prayer one evening. (She did. My “Cherie Blair in Labour” headline stood.)
And that, ladies and gentleman, is editing high.
PS: I had vague ideas of writing for reward for Medium when I joined this platform, but Stripe — their payment service — will not pay anybody living in Africa a penny. They’ll take my money, all right, but the flow is strictly one way. So much for globalisation, I always wonder when they’ll try it. This series is therefore being written as a public service. It will, of necessity, be extremely sporadic, but I am already planning a proper first edition. It will be called: Editing High #1: Know What You Don’t Know More Than You Know What You Know.
Stay wired.
PPS: Casting my mind back, I’m wrong, wr-wrr-wrong, I did not sub the initial article about Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s plagiarism, it was actually a surprise to me in my own paper, they probably kept it quiet from me because I was working across both titles. In fact, as I recall, it was not that well subbed, and it took me a few minutes to realise what was going on and how busted this fine fellow was. I edited the aftermath on both newspapers, however, there was a minor media feeding frenzy over the whole affair, the media is/are/always will be incestuous everywhere, so I did take pleasure in keeping the facts straight thereafter. You do not want to be on the wrong side of this pack of schooled sharks, which is why I’m clarifying things here. As I say: you can cover your back, but you can never cover your tracks. You are either able to handle this kind of pressure or you can’t. This is one of the great beauties of the subbing game, like working in a restaurant kitchen. There is no way you can fake it on the desk, not for one hour, let alone one day. Blockchain was invented for the likes of us. We’ll soon see who can take the heat. People who can touch-type, I’ll wager.
