Edit High #2: How to Acquire an Infinite Capacity for Intellectual Brutality

Fear is all you need.

I did my teacher training at King’s College, London, over 1978–79. This episode included the Winter of Discontent and the election of Mad Maggie Thatcher. I spent two out of three terms being torn to shreds by working class kids in Tottenham, still one of the roughest boroughs in the city for teachers.

One of the few things that kept me sane was the Penguin edition of the collected writing of George Orwell, including all the newspaper columns he wrote during World War 2 and many of his letters. I have a vivid memory of him saying that in order to be a writer in those times, you needed an “infinite capacity for intellectual brutality”. I can’t find this saying anywhere online, and those books disappeared from my shelf decades ago. But while I still think Orwell was absolutely right for his own era, what he said is far more true now. In this age of the tweet as a weapon of mass destruction, only the strong of mind survive for long in the media maelstrom.

There was a saying in our Johannesburg newsrooms: a journalist is someone who goes from knowing nothing about a subject, to being the world expert, in three days. I would counter this by saying that a subeditor is someone who goes from knowing absolutely nothing about a subject to being the world expert in three minutes. When you are on deadline, and a quote in a story that’s just dropped is not clear, you phone that politician in Pretoria, you get him out of bed if necessary. You call that professor in Australia, even at 4 a.m. their time. I’ve literally done that.

And in each and every case, they’ve actually thanked me profusely for calling them to get it right. These were life and death situations, careers on the line, war and peace. You don’t mess around. And I would tell newbie subs, you do not hesitate if you have to make that call. There’s supposed to be a sign on the door of the personal apartment of the President of France, saying that he’s only to be disturbed in the event of world war. You, the sub, are one of the few people in the world who can order them to ring that bell. You make clear to the chain of the command exactly what’s on the line and whose head will be rolling down a corridor in Paris tomorrow morning if the information you’re about to print is wrong. Fear is all you need.

Much of my editing was done in business news, and here you have to be especially careful. The cosy relationship between the corporates and business journalists is a minefield, fraught with all kinds of dangers. Much of the copy is just recycled company PR. Major business figures are given breathless treatment, especially if they are “charismatic industry leaders”. And there’s a distinct elitist attitude among many business journalists, with far more clever repartee and witty comebacks and literary allusions than from the arts reporters, in my experience, the latter being much more into serious drinking, hard drugs, and sexual shenanigans.

So when you are dealing with a smart-arse reporter on deadline and trying to get a fact straight over a cellphone that keeps breaking up, you need to be able to cut to the chase. This doesn’t mean being rude. You, as the subeditor, are the person who has to pull the story together in the end, make it coherent, give it a beginning, middle, and end, while still cutting to fit and making space for a picture and syncing the headline with the caption. You need to be able to walk people through their own narrative, smart and sharp, with the clock ticking. Often it’s just a single number you’re trying to pin down.

The reason I’m writing this series on editing is that if I look carefully at the way society is being directed, just about the only job I can see left for actual human beings will be in the realm of correcting the autocorrect. Proper editing, true oversight of documents and the effective framing of meanings, is going to come back into fashion, after they fired all the subs from the newsrooms because we just took up time before the story was banged up on the website, now without any need to cut. And with a headline written by an algorithm.

I worked for two years at a major business wire. Their developers were always messing with something useless or other. Then one day, we got a storm of phone calls, we had just put out a story saying that a particular mining company was firing thousands of workers.

The story was three years old, but it had been filed in the system without a date. The “smart” algorithm they had implemented took stories without dates, put today’s date on them, and published them in the current news feed. This incident caused untold chaos. That mining company, I knew for a fact, would never fully trust our newswire again. Our credibility took a huge knock. All because a system got automated and no one was watching what was being published.

I wrote elsewhere that for me, a true and valid Turing test for AI in mimicking human beings would be: can you get a machine to edit a newspaper article? Can you cut it to fit, without mangling the story, and write a catchy headline that will sum up the narrative, while intriguing readers and drawing them in? I know Mark Zuckerberg believes you can get an algorithm to write headlines. But just stop and think. Most of what people remember of a story is the headline. It needs to make sense. It needs to be compact. It needs to be idiomatic. It needs to draw on contemporary culture, tunes and TV shows that are current. Or it needs to rework an old cliché, or use clever alliteration, or a deadly pun.

Let me give you one recent example. I am sometimes called on to provide a headline at very short notice for our weekly astronomy column. I am never told the subject of the column until it’s been written, to prevent any jinxes. So on deadline a few weeks ago, I was told that the topic was that NASA were now planning to build a new-generation supersonic jetliner, a successor to the Concorde.

We have very, very little space for headlines, so you can try think of one yourself, while I tell you a little story. I’m a great fan of the Irish writer Marian Keyes, including her collected journalism. She talked in one article about the days when jet travel was seen as exotic and sophisticated, and you aspired to be a member of the sexy jet set, while now it’s a nightmare with screaming children in a cramped metal tube with plastic food.

The moment I heard the topic, her story flashed into my mind, and I said: “Supersonic jet set.”

I’m not saying it’s the best headline in the world: I’m just saying, it works, at more than one level. Unusually, I could even track some of my thought processes in producing this one, normally I have no idea where headlines come from. Understand, in setting this as an AI challenge, that this kind of routine subediting is a task that many of we humans literally do in our sleep.

I have a special line in intellectual brutality that is reserved for exactly those people who think you can shadow experts like me, to work out an algorithm for how we produce headlines and replace us with machines.

Machines do not know what words mean. They only imitate patterns of expert users, human beings. Machines do not have senses of humour, senses of pity or irony or contempt or bemusement or wonder or shock or awe. I had to write a short headline for an online item on an orphaned baby elephant that was being moved to a new reserve, along with a crate of powdered milk. My headline was, “This baby packs a trunk.”

For a year, I edited the market pages of Farmer’s Weekly, the oldest magazine in South Africa and a total nightmare to sub. The very last box on the last market page was Fresh Produce, and one week I was gifted a headline in the copy: “Potatoes are volatile.” Would a machine have picked that one out?

They want to automate the newsfeed, but so that you still catch the fake news, write good headlines, pick out the interesting and relevant stories, avoid idiotic phrasings and contradictions, make sense. You think you can train a machine to pick out what’s crucial and what’s peripheral in a story, what’s colour and what’s the payoff line and what’s the subtext and what’s the journalist rambling again? Remember: news changes from one hour to the next. What was crucial yesterday may not even feature on the radar today.

Unless, of course, you automate the people, so that everything runs to a clockwork. All companies report in the same way; murder reports are routinised; the sinking of a shipload of refugees has its own algorithm to make sure the victims are given the approved politically correct designation.

In every newsroom I’ve worked in, there were people I did not speak to, or who would not speak to me. One book editor was terminally offended because I wrote a review without going through him. A heroin-addicted reporter was convinced I had shopped him for his drug habits and threatened me publicly with a knife. I had not only done no such thing, I had actually helped rehabilitate him after he was bust. One chief sub was so threatened by me that I eventually ceased asking him anything, because he was always giving me contradictory information about style and was clearly trying to sabotage me.

You choose your battles on any given day. And it’s worth remembering who you’re really fighting for, and that person is the reader. Anything that makes their life a little clearer, a little cleaner, more concise, cannot be bad.

So, to conclude this essay on intellectual brutality, let me pose my own little riddle. It goes like this. What is the opposite of a lawyer? Think hard.

One of the nastiest single intellectual run-ins I had in my time on the desk was actually with a lawyer. I’ve forgotten his name. He was legal counsel to a chicken franchise called Nando’s, whose idiotic adverts are common subjects of office chatter in South Africa, this is what now passes for popular culture in that country. So Nando’s runs a fake advert for “Wando’s”, a clear ripoff if you see the advert. Which I did not, because I never watch TV, very specifically to avoid seeing Nando’s adverts.

Anyway: Nando’s put out an official press release saying they would not tolerate this brazen infringement of their brand, and quoting their legal counsel saying they would take action against Wando’s. And this drops on my desk just before close of business on a Friday (the media pages were in the Saturday paper, I edited them for years). I ask around the office, a couple of people have seen this ad, they’re pretty sure it’s a spoof. But the article is hastily written by the media editor and is not at all clear. So I phone Nando’s and ask them to clarify if their lawyer is serious or if he’s joking about suing Wando’s. And he refuses to comment. And you only get one shot at an answer on deadline.

I left the story vague, simmered down, and then took the lawyer to the Law Society, saying he was using his legal standing to tell lies and perpetuate a dumb hoax, and arguing he had wasted fifteen minutes of my time on the desk on deadline, when I have serious issues to deal with, like real crimes and real lawyers. I forced it all the way to a formal hearing of the Law Society in Pretoria, where I finally got to see the dumb ad, as the lawyer played it for us on his laptop. The Law Society arbitrator made a big point of laughing uproariously at the video and insisting this was all just a big joke, couldn’t I see this, and the lawyer was let off without even a slap on the wrist.

But I made that bastard take an afternoon off, and come and face me in a dusty room at the Law Society, and explain how he thought he could waste a subeditor’s time with his clever tricks. It gave me enormous satisfaction just to harass them. I managed to nail Nando’s later, they used the Dalai Lama’s name to sell chicken pieces, not knowing that the Dalai Lama had specifically spoken out against eating chicken, saying it was crueller than beef, because more animals had to be killed. He really did say this, I checked it out very carefully, and I got Nando’s to withdraw that ad pretty smartly. They didn’t want my information on growth hormones and antibiotics in chicken meat to get anywhere near the press.

OK, that’s enough of a gap to give you my answer, what is the opposite of a lawyer. The opposite of a lawyer is a subeditor. Lawyers are paid large amounts of money to take the simplest issue and put it in such complicated language that only another lawyer can understand it. The longer they take to do this, the more billable hours they clock up, the more they’re paid, and the greater the esteem in which they’re held.

Subeditors are paid very little to take any garbled writing on any subject at all, including the worst legal gobbledygook, and turn it into something that the ordinary person in the street can read and understand. We do this on vicious deadlines where if you take any appreciable time to think about anything at all, you’re likely to be fired. I can’t think of anything more opposite to a lawyer’s life.

But let me tell you one thing: the world would be a better place, with more peace, love, and understanding, if there were more subeditors around, and fewer lawyers.