Edit High #1: Know What You Don’t Know More Than You Know What You Know
Only Ignorance Is Invincible.
My first subediting job in mid-1999 was in the entertainment section of a major Johannesburg newspaper. I quickly learned how to pick up a story in Quark CopyDesk, cut it to fit without mutilating it too fatally, and write a headline, caption and pull quote. The next morning, that headline would be in fat black inky print all over the region, including neighbouring countries. I found this both exhilarating and totally terrifying. Any errors you made just jumped off the page and into your eyeballs. The very first word I was told not to misspell was “millennium”, it was everywhere looming wrong — wrong year, wrong spelling, wrong abbreviation (as an old physics teacher, I explained that “Y2K” — anyone remember all that hoopla? — was wrong, because “k” as in “kilo” as in “2 k” as in “2000” is supposed to be lower case.)
No one struts their stuff, there are no songbirds on these arts pages, were my final marching and hacking orders. Think of some new clichés.
The layout subeditors, who placed the stories in text boxes and then agitated for you to finish editing so they could send the page and go home, could easily work with earphones plugged in and music playing. In 11 years as a copy sub, I found I could never do this, even when I was being driven mad by noise in the newsroom. You simply have to hear what’s going on, because people are always asking questions, or just making comments, and you need to be in the loop. Names, details, the capital of this, the abbreviation for that, which guy did those other things, what’s the slug on the little picture. Everything is processed so fast, the pressure of deadlines is so relentless in a daily paper, that you need to work in dense parallel tangles and wait for the screaming and cursing to subside before you ask the next question.
In the big UK tabloids, they have separate subeditors for headlines, caption kickers, captions, pull quotes, graphics, and text. There’s a revise editor who oversees the whole page and makes sure everything hangs together and doesn’t clash. The first thing readers look at on the page is the main picture. If this interests them, they look at the caption. These are the first words they read, even ahead of headlines. Therefore, great attention is paid to captions in the major media operations. Images are the ultimate currency and everything is structured around the visual impact.
Whatever you think you know about the media — and as a lifelong newspaper reader, I thought I understood the processes of The Press fairly well — all your beliefs completely fall by the wayside after a few hours on the desk. If you ever see a newsroom that’s not looking chaotic, you can be pretty sure that there’s a real crisis on hand and everyone’s in quiet shock, like when they have to report on the sudden death of a colleague. (The only time I ever saw the Big Editor on the floor at this particular paper, in four years, was when a long-time sportswriter died of a heart attack at the desk. An honourable way to go. We had a minute’s silence.)
The other thing I learned immediately is that you can make the most horrendous mistakes and get away with them, because no one even notices, while you were certain you were going to be fired the next morning and spent a sleepless night making other career plans. Meanwhile, on the entertainment section, the very very very worst thing you can ever do is get the crossword puzzle answers mixed up. The sub I was replacing had, in exhausted error, published the wrong solutions for the previous week’s puzzle just before he left on holiday. We got these puzzles from the Daily Mail in the UK and they had to be matched up very carefully, it was easy to get them out of sequence.
The phone rang off the hook, not for days, but for weeks afterwards, as first the quicker and then the slower puzzle-solvers realised we had confused the answers. Our intelligence was roundly insulted and people bemoaned how much time they had wasted, trying to understand what was going on and make sense of these completely incomprehensible solutions.
I thought you liked puzzles, I was tempted to say.
In all my newspaper time, apart from whenever the vexed and hexed issue of evolution was raised in the correspondence columns and we would eventually have to shut down an increasingly divergent and rancorous slanging match, I never saw so much trouble as with the crosswords. Nor heard crosser words.
Having retired undefeated as a heavyweight physics teacher (I managed to bash some science into everyone who crossed my path), the very first thing that hit me on the news desk was the fragility of my knowledge. So many times when a question was raised, I would immediately find myself saying, “I think it’s…” — and immediately realising this was absolutely no use, even worse than useless. You either KNOW or you DON’T KNOW. There is no grey zone on deadline. And when push came to shove, so often, I found that I just did not know.
Fortunately, there was a brand-new company around that was making a stir at the time, it was called Google, and trendy people were beginning to use its search engine. This was way before they offered an email service (for which you originally had to be recommended by someone who already had a Gmail account, you were made to feel part of a special-by-invitation-only club when they first started Gmail, anyone remember that?) I had been using Alta Vista as a search engine up to then, it seemed the least creaky. Google really was something else when it first appeared and it was a godsend for the subeditor. Thus the long, exhausting process of fact-checking began, and went on unabated for 11 years, until I was truly Googled through and through and headlined out and under.
Very early on, I made a catastrophic blunder which taught me fortunes. In the back of my head, it’s always been the best example for me of knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know. So forgive me if I tell this story at length. The issue was the name of the CEO of a company called Primedia, which owned several major radio stations and just about every eyesore billboard in South Africa. His name was William Kirsh. And I thought his name was spelled Kirsch, and changed it accordingly in the copy.
I grew up in the Kingdom of Eswatini, then called Swaziland — we just reverted to the precolonial name in 2018, after 50 years of independence. Now, the guy who ran Swaziland for years was called Natie Kirsh, today a global real estate magnate who can seriously challenge Donald Trump for the size of his projects. So I knew all about the Kirsh clan. I had been to school briefly with one of them, Steven Kirsh, who had long dark flowing locks and was thus nicknamed “Guru”. The family got their start in wireless with a station called Swazi Music Radio, beaming rock ’n roll into South Africa, which had banned the Beatles and sundry other unwholesome acts. I actually visited the SMR transmitter around 1974, out on the border with South Africa, just to check it out. It was in the middle of absolute nowhere. A lone American engineer managed the station and slotted in eight-track cartridges (I kid you not) of DJs playing music, all recorded in America. There was no live programming at all.
SMR was direct competition for LM Radio, based in Lourenzo Marques, now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. The Portuguese fascists who ran Mozambique cleverly allowed LM to play rock ’n roll, so the station was very popular in South Africa and was loud and clear across the region on the short waves.
Later, Primedia started Talk Radio 702, a talk and news station based in Johannesburg. It’s still running, you can find them broadcasting online. This station always credited itself with being part of the discourse that brought apartheid to an end, with blacks arguing with whites live on air. From 2007, the Kirshes have tried the same thing in Israel, with Ram FM Middle East Eyewitness News, which promised to create a “bridge of understanding” between Arabs and Israelis, and in 2008 found seven of its staff in court in shackles for allegedly broadcasting without a licence. The Israeli authorities did not take too kindly to on-air fraternising between the communities.
Apart from trying to bridge the divide, Natie Kirsh is also a major shareholder in the company that supplies electronic fences for the West Bank wall. Donald Trump could learn a few tricks from a businessman from the tiny Kingdom of Eswatini, not least about building walls while hedging bets.
My points are: (1) I really did know about this family, far more than the ordinary person would; (2) these are not people with whom you wish to make a mistake, especially with their names. I discovered that the rich and famous and powerful are as childish as anyone about getting their names and faces in the newspaper, maybe even more so, and they really and especially hate it when you get their details wrong.
And yet — just because I thought I knew all about this family — (3) I got it all wrong and changed the name. Fortunately, the chief sub was awake and changed it back. I saw it the next day, got indignant, checked, and found that I was wr-wr-wrr-wrrrong. Dead wrong. Shockingly wrong. And yet on this, of all things, I was so certain that I was right. Simply because you’re close to something, you assume that any nonsense rattling in your head about it, maybe dating from years back, must be correct. And you don’t bother to check.
Consider, please, this lengthy quote:
Is it not remarkable that a man can know something, can as it were have the fact within him? — But that is a wrong picture. — For, it is said, it’s only knowledge if things really are as he says. But that is not enough. It mustn’t be just an accident that they are. For he has got to know that he knows: for knowing is a state of his own mind; he cannot be in doubt or error about it — apart from some special sort of blindness. If then knowledge that things are so is only knowledge if they really are so; and if knowledge is in him so that he cannot go wrong about whether it is knowledge; in that case, then, he is also infallible about things being so, just as he knows his knowledge; and so the fact which he knows must be within him just like the knowledge.
And this does point to one kind of use for “I know”. “I know that it is so” then means: It is so, or else I’m crazy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel #408.
Never, ever, discount the fact that you may indeed have gone completely crazy, and what you thought was the most obvious fact upon which everything hinged is, in fact, just plain wrong. Very soon on the desk, you will start seeing things that make you doubt your sanity. This is the beginning of true professionalism, this is becoming wise to the game. When you start praying that you’re crazy, is when you finally understand what it means to be one of those fey and fated people who knows too much.
In Edit High #0, I indicated that paranoia is an essential working tool of the subeditor, especially in the era of fake official news about official fake news. One of the top seven habits of successful paranoiacs is that they cover their backs. This is an essential part of the job of being a subeditor. In essence, all you are ever doing on the job is covering your back. Whenever I established a fact on the Internet, I would always paste the link into a note in the article, just in case anyone queried my source or wanted to check it for themselves. Whenever I had any doubts, I flagged issues and ruthlessly cut things out.
Most important of all: if I didn’t know something, and couldn’t find it out, I would say this very loudly and clearly. For me, the very best part of being a newsroom professional is that you really learn to be honest on the job. If you’ve made a catastrophic mistake, and the only way to fix it is to get on your desk and shout “Everybody stop! Hands off keyboards!” at the top of your voice — then that is what you have to do. (That exact cry was a frequent instruction at another newspaper, which had a very dodgy operating system called Herman. If anyone touched a key during rebooting, Herman would crash even more spectacularly.)
Ask any diplomat what the single most important tool of their trade is, and they will answer, “Plausible deniability.” The art of being a diplomat is not so much about what you know, as about what you know that you don’t know. You are kept in the loop by being kept very much out of the loop.
In a long-ago novel about the Cold War, the fictional head of the British Secret Service puts up an ornate wrought-metal sign in his office. It reads: “Only Ignorance Is Invincible.” This is now the modern corporate credo, with CEOs being paid vast amounts of money to be totally ignorant of the health effects of their products, and the bribes their salesmen are paying, and the money-laundering arrangements at their Swiss bank’s handy office at Zurich airport.
“Ignorance” is an interesting word. To ignore something is actually a deliberate act. You can’t ignore something of which you are not conscious. To some extent or other, true ignorance is always willful.
This is why I say, it’s much more important to know what you don’t know, than to know what you do know. Learn the secret of top CEOs and guard your areas of ignorance as being among your most valuable assets. Seriously, the moment they know you know something, you’re finished. It’s either your head on a platter, or it’s your job forever. And if you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted. And it’s endlessly tedious to have to conceal your knowledge and hide the scars on your tongue. So: preserve your areas of ignorance. Profess your ignorance with pride. Research is all about timing. Every day on the desk is an exercise in fact-checking triage: you have to save your energy and attention for where it’s needed the most.
When the time finally comes for you to bite the bullet and establish exactly who said what to whom at that goddamned First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, an infamous case of fake news that still bothers the scribes — you will feel it. And you will find it.
