By Kodi Barth
Everyone needs an editor. Everyone. This is a top rule taught by Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Seventeen years since graduating from the J-school, as New Yorkers call it, I still can’t quarrel with this rule. Any piece I write, even for an off-the-beat newsletter, I want a fresh set of eyes to take a look at it.
This habit was born out of trauma. The first day a gaggle of us 16 cocky journalists entered Columbia’s revered Reporting and Writing class in late July 2002, we dismissed our first assignment as a joke.
Person on the Street, the first assignment was called. Or, fondly, just POS. We were required to hit Manhattan’s hot summer streets and come back with a story, any story, from interviewing complete strangers.
Piece of cake, we all thought. Look, I had already notched up three years of reporting from all the former eight provinces of Kenya. One of my classmates, Noel Pangilinan, had been editor in five major Philippine newspapers for 13 years. Yet, when we handed in our POS stories, Columbia’s UK-born Professor Helen Benedict returned them all with brutal edits, in red, from top to bottom.
Instant mood in the new writing lab? Crestfallen. I was traumatised. Lesson learned? We knew nothing. The message was that we had each come to Columbia to be stripped down, then rebuilt.
Over the years, it became clear to me that, heck, sometimes even editors need an editor. Today if, say, I edit a report originally written in Arabic for the United Nations, chances are I will leave a note to the effect that quality may improve if another set of eyes with more intimate knowledge can dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
What about columnists? Do columnists need an editor? Yup, same rule. Columnists, however seasoned, shouldn’t have free reign in a newspaper.
Sample a few columns out of Nairobi on Sunday, November 22.
The Sunday Nation featured opinions by, among others, Kwendo Opanga and Professor Makau Mutua, both household names in the business.
“Catholic bishops were right to point out flaws in the BBI report,” said Opanga’s piece on page 26. Yet, out of 19 paragraphs, only the 18th mentioned Catholic bishops.
How did one seemingly random paragraph produce a headline? Well, that’s where copy editors come in. Chances are, Opanga did not write his own headline. A seasoned copy editor can yank even one sentence out of a column and turn it into the heart of the story, by slapping it into the headline. It’s a cool editing skill.
Makau Mutua’s piece landed alongside the autoreactive editorial section, on page 16. Titled, “Fired! Trump’s shameful weapon,” Mutua argued that the US President relishes publicly humiliating others.
But Kimathi Street forgot to fix glaring typos in the story, some right off the gate.
The intro said: “Some people believe in the afterlife,but others don’t. For many people,life on
earth is Hobbesian – nasty,brutal and short.”
See those three instances where no space before a comma created unknown words in the English language? Failure to catch such basics happens when editors assume that a piece by a seasoned writer will be flawless.
Such mistaken assumption ends up embarrassing both the columnist and the newspaper. Or was it bad formatting that resulted in those kinks?
On the other hand, the Sunday Standard published opinions by Isaac Kalua and Norman Mudibo on page 15, humourlessly christened at the top, “Columnists.”
Kalua’s piece, “Surgeon’s scalpel better than a politician’s axe,” began with this line: “Kenya is currently going through stormy waters.”
That’s a cliché. Some editors may not want a story to get off the gate with a cliché, a tired phrase that tells readers nothing new.
Mudibo’s opinion, titled, “On Covid-19, leaders must heed call for personal responsibility,” opened with an apparent reading of the President’s face at a recent press conference.
The columnist started: “During his 13th national address on Covid-19, President Uhuru Kenyatta was not amused.”
Is that a fact? But opinion doesn’t need facts, does it? Well, sharper editors may tell you that even opinion writing should spring from journalism’s foremost cornerstone: facts. Show, don’t’ tell.
