February 21, 2024
The Art of Editing
Henry Finder
Editorial Director, The New Yorker
The Art of Editing
Henry Finder
Editorial Director, The New Yorker
Minutes of the 19th Meeting of the 82nd Year
President John Cotton convened the nineteenth meeting of the Old Guard’s 83rd year. Julia Coale and Frances Slade led the invocation. Barry Breen read the minutes of the February 7th meeting. President Cotton asked for moments of silence in memory of two members who passed away in recent months, Richard Bergman and Lawrence Parsons.
One hundred two persons attended the session. Nancy Becker introduced her guest, Jessica Murphy. Marcia Snowden introduced her guest, Kate Skrebutenas. Scott McVey introduced his guest, his wife Hella.
George Bustin introduced the speaker, Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker since 1997, who graduated from Yale’s distinguished Pointer Program in Journalism in 1986. He has compiled and edited—sometimes in partnership with New Yorker Editor David Remnick—nine anthologies on very diverse topics covered by the magazine over the years.
Amplified by his responses to questions from his Old Guard audience, Finder summarized how the special ethos and culture of the New Yorker evolved from its inception to now as it enters its 100th year of publication. When the magazine was founded in 1925, there were a good many different approaches to journalism in America ranging from Nelly Bly to Richard Harding Davis to Lincoln Stephens to A.J. Liebling and others. In 1923 Henry Luce and Briton Hadden had founded Time and Life, stipulating in their style guide that their reporters and writers should reduce to the lowest terms, be specific, be impersonal, not be too obvious or redundant, and appear to be fair. For the New Yorker’s first editor, Nebraska-born Harold Ross, that Luce approach was a perfect foil and he proceeded to instill quite contrary standards at his new magazine.
First off, he insisted upon actual accuracy backed up by rigorous research and fact-checking—no rumors, lies, or innuendos. Don’t join or follow the lemmings. Finder cited a series of instances over the years in which many in the media had perpetuated, without checking, stories that proved to be false. A frequently repeated claim that doctors had discovered that placebos benefited almost as many patients as prescribed medicines turned out to be based on one lone mistaken paper published way back in 1855. Similarly, reports of hordes of alligators living in the sewers of New York, a purported national epidemic of kids on crack, and panicked reports of thousands of missing children in New York City and throughout the nation, parroted by many in the media, all proved to be wrong. Accuracy does not necessarily mean “balance.” Though the magazine should certainly have a viewpoint, it should not sacrifice its values in pursuit of “objectivity.” The magazine should report what can be seen and proven. “Two sides-to-a-story” and “objectivity” are not necessarily roads to the truth. The New York Times devoted over 70,000 words to coverage of the Whitewater controversy during the Clinton administration. Its facts were right, but it got the story wrong.
Nor did Ross have any truck with Luce’s concepts of prose compactness or modernized spelling. He thought the latter an abomination—an “industrialization of prose.” As for compactness—which Finder compared to how most of us clip tiny bits of parsley onto our salad or entrée—leads to disaggregation. “Narrative is critical to whatever we do,” Finder said, “not synopsis and digestion. You cannot replicate on Google the experience we try to give.”
The goal is to provide readers with a literary experience in a search for the whole truth, which translates into a highly rigorous process of copy-editing and a stable of truly fine reporters and writers. Early on, Wolcott Gibbs, writing in 1937 about the theory and practice of editing New Yorker articles, lamented that “the average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate, using three sentences when one would do. The more “as a matter of facts,” “howevers” and “for instances” you can cut, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Finder then displayed instances of the magazine’s intense copy-editing at several levels: fact-checking, eliminating repetition, improving sentence structure, correcting grammar—all done on paper, not computer. “A print magazine should be edited on paper where it is read;” he said, you see more. The cardinal rule is not what you cut, but what you keep.” During the editorial proceedings author and editor engage in dialogue and ultimately settle on what seems right, but as Wolcott Gibbs had said “the goal is to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.” With a stable of superb writers/reporters, the editors at The New Yorker try to do just that. After the process is concluded, it is then posted online.
There are the cartoons, of course, and lots of humor intended to leaven the serious essays with send-ups of current life. Over the years these have evolved along with society. During the 1960s and ‘70s, they shifted away from a focus on the guy with the watch fob, and there are more women cartoonists and far broader targets now.
With the coming of the Internet and micro-journalism, it seemed that publications like the New Yorker were dinosaurs doomed to extinction. But as the years passed, it and others like it, such as The Atlantic and Harper’s, have become valuable and survived because their kind of journalism has become scarce. Millions of highly intelligent readers have turned to them to escape disaggregation and fragmentation in the information world. In consequence, there is a close bond between those who report for, write for, and edit these publications and their readers. “If we don’t like a piece, it’s very likely our readers won’t either,” Finder said. “There is an intimate overlap between us. We identify with them. If that relationship ever collapses, then we are in trouble.”
Respectfully submitted,
Ralph R. Widner
One hundred two persons attended the session. Nancy Becker introduced her guest, Jessica Murphy. Marcia Snowden introduced her guest, Kate Skrebutenas. Scott McVey introduced his guest, his wife Hella.
George Bustin introduced the speaker, Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker since 1997, who graduated from Yale’s distinguished Pointer Program in Journalism in 1986. He has compiled and edited—sometimes in partnership with New Yorker Editor David Remnick—nine anthologies on very diverse topics covered by the magazine over the years.
Amplified by his responses to questions from his Old Guard audience, Finder summarized how the special ethos and culture of the New Yorker evolved from its inception to now as it enters its 100th year of publication. When the magazine was founded in 1925, there were a good many different approaches to journalism in America ranging from Nelly Bly to Richard Harding Davis to Lincoln Stephens to A.J. Liebling and others. In 1923 Henry Luce and Briton Hadden had founded Time and Life, stipulating in their style guide that their reporters and writers should reduce to the lowest terms, be specific, be impersonal, not be too obvious or redundant, and appear to be fair. For the New Yorker’s first editor, Nebraska-born Harold Ross, that Luce approach was a perfect foil and he proceeded to instill quite contrary standards at his new magazine.
First off, he insisted upon actual accuracy backed up by rigorous research and fact-checking—no rumors, lies, or innuendos. Don’t join or follow the lemmings. Finder cited a series of instances over the years in which many in the media had perpetuated, without checking, stories that proved to be false. A frequently repeated claim that doctors had discovered that placebos benefited almost as many patients as prescribed medicines turned out to be based on one lone mistaken paper published way back in 1855. Similarly, reports of hordes of alligators living in the sewers of New York, a purported national epidemic of kids on crack, and panicked reports of thousands of missing children in New York City and throughout the nation, parroted by many in the media, all proved to be wrong. Accuracy does not necessarily mean “balance.” Though the magazine should certainly have a viewpoint, it should not sacrifice its values in pursuit of “objectivity.” The magazine should report what can be seen and proven. “Two sides-to-a-story” and “objectivity” are not necessarily roads to the truth. The New York Times devoted over 70,000 words to coverage of the Whitewater controversy during the Clinton administration. Its facts were right, but it got the story wrong.
Nor did Ross have any truck with Luce’s concepts of prose compactness or modernized spelling. He thought the latter an abomination—an “industrialization of prose.” As for compactness—which Finder compared to how most of us clip tiny bits of parsley onto our salad or entrée—leads to disaggregation. “Narrative is critical to whatever we do,” Finder said, “not synopsis and digestion. You cannot replicate on Google the experience we try to give.”
The goal is to provide readers with a literary experience in a search for the whole truth, which translates into a highly rigorous process of copy-editing and a stable of truly fine reporters and writers. Early on, Wolcott Gibbs, writing in 1937 about the theory and practice of editing New Yorker articles, lamented that “the average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate, using three sentences when one would do. The more “as a matter of facts,” “howevers” and “for instances” you can cut, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Finder then displayed instances of the magazine’s intense copy-editing at several levels: fact-checking, eliminating repetition, improving sentence structure, correcting grammar—all done on paper, not computer. “A print magazine should be edited on paper where it is read;” he said, you see more. The cardinal rule is not what you cut, but what you keep.” During the editorial proceedings author and editor engage in dialogue and ultimately settle on what seems right, but as Wolcott Gibbs had said “the goal is to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.” With a stable of superb writers/reporters, the editors at The New Yorker try to do just that. After the process is concluded, it is then posted online.
There are the cartoons, of course, and lots of humor intended to leaven the serious essays with send-ups of current life. Over the years these have evolved along with society. During the 1960s and ‘70s, they shifted away from a focus on the guy with the watch fob, and there are more women cartoonists and far broader targets now.
With the coming of the Internet and micro-journalism, it seemed that publications like the New Yorker were dinosaurs doomed to extinction. But as the years passed, it and others like it, such as The Atlantic and Harper’s, have become valuable and survived because their kind of journalism has become scarce. Millions of highly intelligent readers have turned to them to escape disaggregation and fragmentation in the information world. In consequence, there is a close bond between those who report for, write for, and edit these publications and their readers. “If we don’t like a piece, it’s very likely our readers won’t either,” Finder said. “There is an intimate overlap between us. We identify with them. If that relationship ever collapses, then we are in trouble.”
Respectfully submitted,
Ralph R. Widner