The managing editor had a strange request. He wanted me to come and stand outside his office. I don’t remember if he asked me to lean on the closest reporter’s desk, or if I just did. It was a long time ago, and some details are sharper than others.
He couldn’t have asked me to come and stand in his office, because the place was full. Eight feet square or so, if memory serves, and filled already with seven or eight people. Plus a desk, and a computer terminal, and a filing cabinet where he stored badly written letters about my shortcomings as his city editor. There were probably other things in there as well, but that was all I ever saw him file.
Despite my shortcomings, he still let me run those parts of his newsroom that no one else did, and he let me stand outside his office when he wanted it to look like there was somebody besides him in the newsroom. Because those people in there were mortally angry. You could look in the door and tell that it was the kind of atmosphere where somebody was about to throw a punch or something else, and maybe nobody would cross that line, but they would stand there a long time with their toes touching it.
A member of the family had died, and a reporter had asked a state policeman how he died, and the trooper said the deceased was drunk and passed out in the road and a truck ran over him. And the family understandably weren’t happy about that, but the only thing they could think of to do about it was to come and tell the newspaper to take it back.
The managing editor, to his credit, didn’t back down or even argue with them very hard. He just kind of took it, and because he used some sort of rub-on skin dye that was supposed to look like a savage tan, we couldn’t really tell that his face was flushed.
I gradually put together the gist of the controversy as I sorted out the players. I remember one person who was inconsolable and angry and planned to make her point repeatedly until she wore the editor down. Another person was the reasonable one. Calmer, but no less certain that we’d been dead wrong, so to speak, with the story.
While I was waiting, the wire editor came in. He was four inches taller than me, and bearded, and had a bad temper, but I’d worked in a union shop before, so he wasn’t that scary. I nodded him over and told him why we standing purposefully in one place, and he joined me and we chatted. He laughed at one point and I started to suggest that he keep a sterner face, but then thought about how he must look to someone who’d never worked in a union shop and I decided not to say anything.
I would eventually spend a lot of time that evening trying to find out if there had been an error and, if so, who had made it. The easiest thing, the route the managing editor often took, was to blame the reporter or editor. That way he had power over the only person he had to do anything about. If the source was not an advertiser or didn’t run with anybody who might be, he might blame the source. I had a different responsibility in that I had to make sure the error didn’t happen again. Finding blame was not enough. Knowing how it happened was critical.
Sometimes the answer was simple. Like the skiing fatality. Someone had died at Massanutten ski resort, and the company’s PR person told us the deceased was the second person ever to die in a skiing accident there. It turned out he was the first. It was an awful day. I had to call the Associated Press and tell them someone we’d reported dead was alive. And I had to explain to a colleague why we wouldn’t be sued. (Because we hadn’t said that anybody did anything, except die, and you can’t libel the dead, so it’s probably the worst thing you can accuse somebody of doing without creating any legal danger for yourself.)
We sat the reporter down and we reviewed his notes. And the managing editor made a speech and wrote a letter. And I wrote down all that happened and walked through it in my head a few times. And I asked the reporter about his notes again, and I thought about it and talked to more people in the newsroom, and oddly none of them could understand my relief when I finally figured it out. I told the managing editor what had happened, and he made another speech. I told the reporter, and he got it, but he was still feeling like crap because the story was wrong and had his name on it.
But he got it. The PR person hadn’t said the deceased was the second person to die at Massanutten (although by then, the next day, she was denying that she said anything at all.) What she had said was that the deceased was the second fatality.
Reporters have to learn the jargon of a lot of trades, mostly in government, and translate that jargon. Utilities have raw water, the opposite of which is not cooked water, as one might expect, but finished water. A budget amendment is not the same as an allocation, even though they do the same thing. And nobody ever dies. They become fatalities. And you just never know when you’re going to use an expression that you think a person of average intelligence should understand, and they don’t.
The PR person didn’t know what the word “fatality” meant. Accept that, and the whole thing made sense. It was unfortunate that the managing editor was already in blame-the-staff mode, presumably because somebody should have told the woman what the word meant, and so he continued to look for a solution in that direction, mostly by writing letters to newsroom staff people. It didn’t keep that particular error from happening again (not trusting that PR person accomplished that) and it probably wouldn’t have kept the error from happening in the first place if he had sent the letters in advance, but we’ll never know.
And sometimes finding the error is that simple. And sometimes it’s not. What it finally came down to with the story of the guy laying down in the middle of the road was that the reporter had made it up, or the trooper wished he hadn’t said it. And the general rule of thumb is that even the worst reporter, and this one was one of the best, won’t flat out fabricate something unless he thinks he can get away with it. But even a state trooper with a badge and a gun can white-eye when faced with an angry, bereaved family.
All of which is not what I remember the most about that incident.
What I remember is the edge. The newsroom looked like an office, and people wore neckties, and most people sat and worked at a terminal all evening. But this was different. The edge was usually one off. The murders and the wrecks and the arrests and the trials and the politics and the fights were always one removed. But this story, if it turned into one, would happen right there where we typed. It wasn’t the edge of hoping that something would happen. It wasn’t the edge of fearing that something would happen. It was the edge of not knowing what would happen, and all the hope and fear that’s folded into that.
The family finally left, but the woman who thought she could wear down the managing editor stopped on the way out, and said in a voice everybody in the room could hear that she hoped one day each of us would lose somebody, and she hoped somebody would tell a lie about them that nobody could do anything about. Then the family ushered her out and that seemed to be the end of it. But after the family had left and we could gather near the managing editor’s office to talk about what had happened. But the one thing neither would talk about, and avoided when I brought it up, was the theatre of it all. They talked about the journalism of it, even though neither knew much about it, but not the excitement, the uncertainty, the edge. I think they couldn’t admit that’s what it was. Perhaps because they couldn’t admit to doing journalism for the edge. Perhaps because what they’d felt was fear, and they couldn’t admit that or the frisson that came with it. But good journalism was always about looking for that edge. In some instances it came to the verge of violence, to whether everything would go to hell or not. And often it came to the edge of truth, to knowing if a thing had happened or not, and being willing to go with it with or without confirmation, to build a story around a fact you knew was true and let the journalistic practice catch up. Maybe they liked the edge, but they couldn’t admit it.
Because the most memorable moments in many people’s lives are the moments when nobody will admit what’s really going on. Two guys who aren’t going to admit they’re afraid are like two lovers who won’t admit that the next piece of clothing to come off won’t be the last one and that the endearments are just a little bit exaggerated. Admission would spoil the mood, defeat the purpose, cheapen the experience.
Or maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t talk about the edge. Maybe they just didn’t know about it. Maybe the headlines and the layouts and the editing and the cropping weren’t just something you had to do well and often in order to be there for the chancy moments. Maybe that was the only reason they did it, and they were just fine without the edge. I suppose I could have asked them, but if they didn’t know about the edge, how would they know whether that was why they were in journalism? Maybe that was why they didn’t talk about it.