Post-Journal Journalism (Part 4)

Deca’s Marc Herman on editing in the digital age, and these difficult & experimental times

We continue our interview with Marc Herman, one of the journalists behind Deca Stories. Here we talk about the barrier to experimentation, and how far Deca are able to do this because of the absurd amount of experience they all share. We also get into another interesting question — when your group is structured as a collective and your goal is to produce good journalism rather than, necessarily, sellable stories, how do you work together? Who does what?

Enjoy.

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REEDSY
[Autobiographical digression by interviewer]
It’s difficult not to hear you saying this and become more optimistic about the possibility of doing something journalistic like this myself. Which, you know, is a conversation I’ve had before with friends, but we’re still unwilling to jump in — financial reasons not being the least of it.

MARC HERMAN
Keep in mind that this is a market that is not there yet. Think about what the musicians did. The first musicians that said “Screw it! We’re not going to take a record deal. We’re going to put it up on a website and you can download it. Give us a dollar.” I’m sure they all went broke. Honestly. But then, what, was it Radiohead who were the first big band that actually did it themselves? They had an existing public, so everyone went crazy. Or Louis CK, the American comedian. He sold downloads of his show for five bucks, and again he sold a million of them or whatever, and suddenly it becomes possible. Everybody who came before, they had to figure out other ways of supporting the experiment because nobody’s heard of them and if you don’t bring an existing public into this, it’s a really steep hill to climb. A lot of our legitimacy comes, frankly, from the fact that we have long histories at known 20th Century print publications. Insofar as that’s still relevant, you haven’t really changed anything yet. The only reason anyone’s interested in us doing this is because one of our writers has a story in national geographic this week, and you’ve heard of National Geographic.

REEDSY
There’s this perception that when writers self-publish, what they produce can have this quality of sometimes reading as ‘under edited.’ How do you avoid having that happen, without a centralised ‘Editor’ tying things together?

MARC HERMAN
Mac, Mackensie Funk, edited the first story with Mara. Mine’s going to be edited by Delphine Schrank, who was with the Washington Post in Burma for a long time. We’re all partnered with each other, then after one story we all move over one spot like a volleyball team. Everyone ends up edited by somebody else. But bottom-line, yeah, you to have some pretty good group dynamics because if you just say “Oh well, I’m gonna blow it off” then the whole thing falls apart. There isn’t somebody whose job title is ‘Editor’, going to work everyday with the understanding that their job is to move sentences around.

I think particularly in book publishing editing has kind of become a secondary or tertiary role compared to acquiring books and marketing the books. The editors who really go far tend to be the ones who can get their authors onto the front page of the New York Times Book Review, onto Fresh Air and that kind of stuff. That’s not to say I haven’t worked with editors who take out their blue pencils and do good work, but I don’t think that’s actually the primary part of the job description anymore at a book publisher.

We all saw the edit that Mac did on Mara’s story. They worked for weeks really hard. We’ve all been through this with big magazines. We all came up in the 90's and thousands doing this with some really good editors, maybe the last generation of really serious, top-notch magazine editors. We know how to do this and we hold each other to a ridiculously high standard. And we give a percentage of the sales to the editor so they have a financial stake. If the story’s not very good they’re not going to sell very many, and they’re not going to make money.

REEDSY
How about the role of the editor for the reporter on the ground? Does the editor come in before the reporting begins as well as afterwards when working on the text? I don’t even know what the standard workflow process is when you work at a magazine, but how do you guys do it?

MARC HERMAN
Typically if you’re out somewhere reporting on something, and someone tells you something or something happens, then the story can go one way or the other. It’s entirely reasonable to have a conversation with an editor at that point and say “You know, I was here on this river, and then there was a giant accident and someone dumped a bunch of poison in the river, and now all the fish are dead. Should the story be about that now?” And you talk about that. Once your reporting’s done you talk about what story it’s all added up to, since frequently the idea you start with is not the reality you discover at the end. Then you’ll write something down and you pass that on to an editor and you go back and forth.

Typically you go through a first and second draft where you bounce things back and forth. One big difference in our case is we’re using a program that lets us work on the document in real-time, so when you get into line-editing — where you’re talking about whether one word is better than another word, whether a clause should be erased, that kind of stuff — and these are, you know, they’re 20,000 word documents so with that kind of detail it takes a while to get through all of that stuff — you can do it with a little chat function. It’s amazing. Normally you weren’t able to do that. You’d send it off to your editor in New York, and they’d write back hopefully a very specific email or set of comments, but usually a set of vague, passive-aggressive comments, and then you’d sort of try to get at whatever it is you think they want, and it goes back and forth as many times as was necessary. But now we’re doing a lot less of the back and forth. We’re mostly doing as though we’re both sitting in a virtual room and just talking about what might work and what wouldn’t work, experimenting at the same time.

REEDSY
I think I remember reading somewhere about a New Yorker editor who would go through an article with the writer, reading every sentence aloud and have a discussion about it. What you’re talking about sounds similar.[1]

REEDSY
Doing it in text is really helpful. A lot of the administrative meetings we’ve done on Google Hangout. It works pretty well, but it’s only as good as the bandwidth that all of you have. But if you’re working in text you can see someone change a paragraph around and you can type back “Yeah yeah, that works better” or “No, put it back how it was,” and go through it. And also, at the point where such close collaboration is necessary you can write the other person a note where you say “OK, I’m going to lunch. Fix this and I’ll come back and read it.” It’s good.

The reading-out-loud thing I think is sort of a classic, and probably we all tend to do it ourselves anyway. We did an interview with the Neimen center where we put the questions they asked us on Google docs and everyone just like commented and took shots at them. People put their name and said “This is what I think” and someone else would chime in “Are you sure about that?”, and it ended up being published as a conversation between five or six of us. That was a very cool thing that couldn’t have happened five years ago.

REEDSY
How are you marketing? When you’re promoting, are you doing it story by story, or are you promoting Deca itself?

MARC HERMAN
The editor for each story ends up wearing the publicist’s hat. Everyone is good at different things to different degrees. I don’t know who our best salesperson is but certainly some of us have to be better at it than others. I think we’re going to learn very quickly how to start designating tasks to play to our strengths.

For the moment what we’ve did was dump everyone we know onto a spreadsheet, wrote some press releases, and sent them out. We went to a couple of conferences and acted kind of inappropriate, walking up to people and saying “Hello, we’re doing this thing and we don’t have business cards yet, can we call you?” It’s all very sort of silly but I don’t know — is any of this stuff really that hard? I don’t want to undermine the talent that’s required to promote things or market things and all that kind of stuff, but on the other hand it’s not sorcery. Make something that people want, put it in front of them, and hopefully they like it.

[1] It turns out the anecdote comes from Henry Bromell. There’s a blog post related to a story published in The New Yorker where it comes up here.
Relevant anecdote:
“Every time I work with a writer on a TV show, I am channelling Rachel MacKenzie. I do it just the way she did a manuscript with me. We sit side by side at a little table and we start with the first sentence and we read it aloud and we stare at the wall and we go, “I think that’s a good sentence” and we move on to the next one. And that’s what she’d do with my stories. It would take two days. And we’d stop for lunch, walk across the street to the Algonquin. I never had a jacket, so they had to give me a waiter’s jacket every time. It was great.”

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This is part four of our interview with Marc Herman. Keep going with part five. Start from the beginning with part one.