Most of your ideas are crappy
Why you need to edit with humility.
Whatever type of publication they work for, editors—like the journalists, authors and creators they work with—are always scouring the world for ideas. They read books, they sift through the broader media, they study research and dig into journals, they talk with sources and experts, they purloin other people’s concepts and remake for their own. And they probably listen to lots of pitches.
And sometimes—quite often, as it goes—they have ideas of their own.
Thing is, when an editor has an idea, they can get really attached to it. I know I do. Sometimes that’s for good reason: An editor is generally experienced, smart and knows their audience (both their external audience out in the world and their internal audience at their place of employment.) They have a distance that means they can often see patterns and ideas with clarity — AKA the conceptual scoop.
But like everybody else, they also have bad ideas. Sometimes they conspire with their writers to have the same bad idea. And maybe, as an editor, you have more bad ideas than usual, since you are just spitballing and are able to let your mind wander further than usual. (For example: I got obsessed for a not-short-enough period with ways to produce a data-driven about Kim Kardashian story which would generate a graph that looked like a butt. I probably wasted a couple of days on that terrible idea.)
But because you’ve got the power to assign, you’ve already passed one important check in the production process (convincing you that this story’s worth it).
And that’s where things sometimes go wrong.
Over the weekend you have noticed this remarkable story from the New York Times:
Basically this was a tone-deaf hot take on the Women’s March which decided to examine how a group of well-heeled fathers coped with the clear trauma of their childrens’ mothers going away for a few days to protest for their rights (don’t worry, the kids seemed to make it to ballet classes on time.)
If this had been a weekday, the absence of women would most visibly have affected the commuter trains, workplaces and schools. On a Saturday, however, there were other matters to navigate: children’s birthday parties, dance performances, swimming lessons, and lacrosse and indoor soccer practices. Growling stomachs required filling on a regular basis.
Usually, these chores and deliveries were shared by both parents, in a thoroughly modern way. On this day, many dads were left to juggle schedules on their own.
Was it a joke? Was it just wildly misjudged? Either way, it was a massive, hairy, carbuncled foot placed directly into the Times’ gaping maw, a piece of astonishing fuck-you to the women who were protesting their poor treatment in the pages of the Gray Lady.
You don’t even need to guess that this was a story driven in major part by the desk—the editors and writer have already apologized.
“It was a bad idea from the get-go,” said Wendell Jamieson, the editor who oversees the Times’ Metro section, where the story appeared on Sunday. “It was conceived with the best intentions, but it fell flat. And I regret it.”
This, I think, is where the hot take really comes from. Editors, well tuned to the wants of their audience, come up with ideas that they know will generate attention and try to assign them to people who can deliver (or they encourage writers to supply them with ideas that fit this narrative approach).
From The New Republic’s A History of the Hot Take:
Whether you call it a “hot take” or whatever, everyone really is trying to point out something that has not been pointed out a million times before. But a lot of writers also want it to get clicks and have their work read and keep their jobs, so you have to put topical #viral stuff in there too. So writing a headline like “Is Autism the New Gangnam Style” or “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Teaches Us About Ferguson” or whatever, it makes a point that probably hasn’t been made before… but that might be because it’s dumb as hell.
I have never been a great editor of opinion pieces, but I definitely assigned and wrote my fair share of thinkpieces that matched a narrative that was clearly disputable: “Is X company dead?” is one that comes to mind.
There was a really interesting observation in a recent Deadline piece by Michael Cieply, on the soul-searching being done by one of his former employers in the wake of the Trump election:
The New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
I don’t have enough experience of the Times to comment on Cieply’s specifics (although the Montclair parenting story seems like a fair example), but the general sense is true: it often happens that an editor gets over-attached to their own ideas, to their own sense of narrative.
And of course, it’s not just the editor who takes the hit. The writer, the people in the stories, the sources, the audience—everyone is given a walloping by this kind of story. Some of my most irritating, frustrating, saddening moments as a writer have been when my editors stuck to their ideas over mine — for example, being balled out by Tim Berners-Lee for something a desk editor did to my story and having to suck it up.
Adam Tinworth pointed out a version of this problem quite concisely in the comments recently, in response to my point that good editors really know their audience:
it’s worth noting that a good editor knows when they are NOT representative of the audience, and how to compensate for that. We often aren’t particularly representative, and have to work with and intellectual understading of their needs, until experience makes it more instinctive.
So… how do you battle it?
I’d suggest at the very least that this is where you take advice. Listen to your reporters about what they’re hearing, and (crucially) be prepared to change your mind. If you’re producing a story about a specific and sensitive subject (race, gender, politics) make sure you get advice from somebody who is actually part of that group. Then think a lot about the reception and timing of what you’re doing. What else?
That’s not to say that all your ideas are going to be bad. You just need to be able to understand when you’re in danger of fucking it up.
