The Printer’s Devil

As you probably already know, David Halberstam, one of the great modern American reporters, died April 23 in a traffic accident in California.

I won’t rehash his books and career, distinguished as they were.

He was always interested in helping other reporters become better reporters.

In that spirit, here are a few things about him I found of interest.

If you read my previous post, you’ll know that for newspapers to move things along and push their communities along the path of progress, they have to question authority and make pests of themselves. It, by the way, doesn’t make newspaper reporters the most popular people in the room.

Halberstam got his start covering the civil rights movement with Emmett Till’s lynching.

Halberstam and other reporters — as he recalled, many of them were young white Southerners who had served during World War II and were fed up with Jim Crow and segregation — and they intended to do what they could to bury them.

Halberstam also noted that their editors didn’t have the same outlook. They were older and they had grown up with segregation and didn’t see the need for ending it.

Nevertheless, many of those editors had the sense to stay out of their reporters’ way, allowing them to write the truth as they saw it — and allowing themselves to change their minds about segregation and what a tragic waste it was.

As I’ve found out as an editor, often the smartest thing you can do is stay out of the way of your reporters.

And Halberstam’s “fact dense” writing is a worthy one for your reporters to emulate. I know, in these days of “give the readers what they want,” that’s not fashionable. According to all the experts, the readers seem to want “news they can use” such as the latest pop princess’s underwear, or lack thereof; how to make your bed (I actually read a full-page story, with photos), or how to get dates via the Internet written at the third-grade level.

In my book, reporters are supposed to explain complicated things for readers.

If they don’t know what they’re writing about, they’re not going to explain it for their readers.

Better too many facts than not enough. When you have too many facts, once you start picking out the most important items, the story writes itself.

As a reporter, my readers often criticize me for cutting too much from my stories. Better that than being told I don’t know what I’m talking about.