A nod to editors, who catch reporters’ srcewups … and ire

It was my first bylined story for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: A former Junior Miss America — who once sang “Dixie” at Gov. Joe Frank Harris’ inauguration — was getting out from a short prison stint. She’d been tossed behind bars after wrecking a car and irking a judge.

The Junior Miss had been a brat, according to Cobb County officials, and had been taught a lesson for not performing her court-ordered community service. Upon release, she was hopping mad and ready to complain.

The story deserved — in my mind — a light touch, with a side order of absurdity.

After it was edited, however, it read like a vanilla cop blotter item. My witticisms and descriptions of the inanity were excised. I argued with the editor, to no avail, so I shrugged and headed home after a day’s work.

But a bug got stuck in my brain: If my new editors could roll me over that easily, then I’d always be a patsy. It’s like if you go to prison you’ve got to fight someone. I don’t recall if Junior Miss told me that. It’s just something you know.

I pulled over at a gas station, got on a payphone (this was 1990) and appealed to an editor up the food chain. I explained the situation, that the story needed a bemused tone of ridiculousness.

My appeal failed. Well, I figured, I tried.

In the 1985 newsroom at 72 Marietta St., editors could read stories on the ATEX system computer (foreground), but often printed them out and marked them up on paper. (AJC file)

Hours later, I got a call from Jack Warner, the famously grouchy, gravelly voiced night editor. “Bill,” he said with an exasperated pause, “it reads kinda flat. You leave out anything interesting?”

Well, yes, I did, I answered. We resuscitated the story.

I hung up thinking that I now toiled in Screwball Land.

A couple years later, I was the paper’s lead reporter in the Fred Tokars murder case, where a lawyer had his wife killed. It was a very competitive, sensational case and I butted heads repeatedly with another editor. Later, I heard through the newsroom grapevine that I was considered a whiner, which irked me to no end.

Admittedly, I do complain, cajole, grumble, yell, wheedle and even mutter. But whine? That’s a toddler. I operate on at least a high school sophomore kvetching level. The editor and I parted ways and I became known in-house as a pain in the rear.

That might have been true. But it came from a good place. I’m obstinate and protective of my copy.

I do understand the need for good editing. They can save you from embarrassment.

Still, I like to tell the story of an editor and reporter who got lost in the desert and grew hot and thirsty. They saw an oasis across the sands and ran there, the editor arriving first.

When the reporter got over the last sand dune, he saw the editor standing knee deep in the water, peeing.

“What are you doing?!?” the bewildered reporter demanded.

“Making it better,” the editor said.

AJC columnist Bill Torpy's badge for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. He figured looking crazy with a ponytail and Fu Manchu 'stache might keep editors at bay. (Courtesy of Bill Torpy)

As the AJC heads for the sunset of print on Dec. 31, many of my colleagues past and present have reminisced about newspapering.

So I will explore the essential, yet sometimes uneasy, relationship between editors and reporters.

The job of reporters is to go out, dig up news, look at records, interview people and give a fair and readable assessment of what they’ve found.

An editor’s job is to make it better.

For two decades, I would sometimes hand off stories to David Gibson, a droll and unflappable editor, who is, let’s just say, seasoned.

As he edited my stories, I’d often shout across the newsroom: “How’s the story going?”

“Makin’ it better!” he’d invariably respond.

It’s a fine line between editing a story to improve it and cutting out facts and phrases to make it, well, different.

There are many components a good editor must juggle — story focus, accuracy, fairness, spelling, grammar, AP style and keeping the newspaper out of court. And in a business occupied by smart, driven — and often peculiar — people operating under unrelenting deadlines, there’s going to be a rub.

To reporters, it feels sometimes like turning your child over to a babysitter. And you don’t like seeing them abused.

I must admit, it cuts both ways.

Then-editor Charlie Gay (standing) oversees changes on deadline. "I got along great with Charlie, except he kept insisting I stick 'nut grafs,' paragraphs that sum up a story, into each yarn," Bill Torpy says. (AJC file)

One friend, a solid reporter, took on an editing job at the AJC years ago. A month later, I asked how it was going.

Her eyes widened. She said she couldn’t believe the pitiful state of raw copy she sometimes received from reporters, some with fairly renowned bylines.

“It’s almost like seeing them naked,” she said.

Gibson worked as a reporter for a decade and three more behind a desk. The good thing about editing, he said: It was cool in summer and warm in winter. The bad? He wasn’t out in the action.

He grew to enjoy it. “You could experience more range working with younger reporters and help establish them and make them grow,” he said.

Also, you usually have a hand in several stories each day, where as a reporter, you’re generally pumping out one at a time.

In that way, you can make a bigger impact overall.

Being an editor lets you have your hand in more projects each day, said David Gibson, who spent three decades at the AJC "making stories better." (Ben Gray/AJC)

One of my favorites was Jim Walls, the now-retired city editor, a hard-nosed newsman who didn’t suffer fools. I called him to ask about his “20% rule,” where he said he could cut 20% from any story “without losing any meaning.”

“Actually, it was the 30% rule,” he said.

Yes, reporters can be wordy.

For a while I worked for Walls on the special projects team, where we’d report for weeks at a time and write long narrative stories or investigations.

Somewhere in my voluminous pile, I have a printout of a version of a story heavily marked with Jim’s red pen.

“Bill, I don’t mean to be unkind but … ” he wrote on the top, adding I needed to take another whack at it.

And, as I recall, it turned out better.