On editors

Marty Baron, former editor of the Boston Globe and The Washington Post, is writing his first book, “Collision of Power,” about the Trump administration and the press. Hallelujah.

I talked to Mr. Baron twice in my life, and here is how the first time went.

I was a reporter and copy editor for The Brownsville Herald in Texas, just across the river from Matamoros, México. It was March 1989. That day the Mexican police busted a gang of mass murderers and drug dealers across the river, at a place called Rancho Santa Elena. Fifteen corpses would be dug up there, some of them missing fleshy parts, including the body of a U.S. pre-med student, Mark Kilroy, who had gone missing on spring break.

When the news broke, I was working on a hot story of my own and had just returned to a nearly empty newsroom. Only our city editor George Cox was there. He filled me in.

I stayed put and knocked out my yarn, taking calls from reporters in the field and spiking wire stories to clear out pages we would fill.

Waiting for our reporters to return with a deluge of copy, I called in a tip to the Boston Globe, and who should answer but Marty Baron. Neither of us knew the other from Adam.

“I’m calling from the Brownsville Herald in Texas,” I said. “Mexican police just busted a gang of mass murderers who apparently killed a U.S. pre-med student who’s been missing since spring break. Mexican federal police say the gang leader is a charismatic homosexual drug dealer who thinks he’s a witch and paid off city and state cops to run hundreds of pounds of drugs across the border, and he apparently … umm … ate some of his victims.”

It was late afternoon in Brownsville — getting close to copy deadline in Boston.

“Can you get us something short to run today, just a few grafs, and we can do a takeout tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“But don’t sensationalize it,” Marty Baron said.

“Umm,” I said. “How could I sensationalize a drug-dealing, homosexual, mass-murderer cannibal who think he’s a witch?”

That ended our first conversation.

I sent him the short and followed it up the next day, and Mr. Baron sent me a check for more than my month’s salary at the Herald, which was paying me $6 an hour.

So I’m a fan of Marty Baron. Not just for the money, but because his instincts were good:

“Don’t sensationalize it.”

Few editors become famous. Whether that’s as it should be, I know not.

Maxwell Perkins edited the terse Hemingway, the loquacious F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the running-off-at-the mouth Thomas Wolfe. Perkins became semi-famous, posthumously. Which, I guess, is as it should be.

Edgar Allan Poe was a terrific editor, though that’s not what made him famous, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked to work for him. But he taught me a lot, long after he was dead. (See: The Poetic Principle, and The Philosophy of Composition.)

As for editors I’ve known, my favorite was Charlie Hand. Charlie hired me 33 years ago to work for a string of weeklies in San Bernardino County, on the strength, or weakness, of a few freelance articles I’d sent him. My first morning on the job, Charlie tossed me a black-and-white photo and said, “Write me a cutline for that in 10-point Bookman, with a 14-point bold italic kicker.”

And I replied: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Charlie’s gone now, but if he were alive, and this column came out in print, I’m sure Charlie would blow his nose on it. “Too long, Kahn,” he’d say. “What’s your point?”

And I would reply, in the old newsman cliché: “I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

Charlie taught me another thing about being an editor, when he stood by me — in a way.

Came the day the publisher — the boss — strode into the newsroom and told Charlie he wanted a piece on the school board race — and how to write it. Oh, by the way, the boss’s wife was running for the school board.

Charlie nodded and said, “Sure, man.”

The boss went back to the ad section. Charlie said nothing. After a minute or so, I asked, “Uhh, Charlie?”

He looked at me across our facing desks. We were working on Apple’s first desktops: words on a small green screen, in yellow type.

“Look,” Charlie said, “if you stay in newspapers, sooner or later they’re going to make you an editor. And when they do, one thing you should know is, you have to blow off the boss when he’s full of shit.”

More silence, as we did our jobs.

“So, Charlie,” I said, “what’ll you tell him when we don’t do it?”

And Charlie said: “I’ll tell him you couldn’t get the story.”

I loved that guy.

Categories / Op-Ed