My diary title has nothing to do with Obama. Sorry if you were misled.
It has instead to do with ... my job.
I edit the news. My paper has a daily circulation of 20,000. The paper's editor and city editor, along with a very few other people, decide what goes on the front page.
I decide, space permitting, what wire news goes inside.
Some days, it's a walk in the park.
And some days, it's hell.
There is a story about the Khmer Rouge. A picture shows a sign that details the reason barbed wire was strung inside the prison -- to keep the condemned from killing themselves by jumping from the balconies three and four stories high and ending things, finally, mercifully.
(I wrote a diary on that, and it very quickly became angsty and self-important. I wonder sometimes if anyone will find my old diary drafts once I die. I wonder if they will someday just up and disappear. But if I open one, I will get sidetracked. Even thinking of one has caused this much distraction.)
And I ... wanted to make sure our readers would be able to read that sign. To see what happened.
I wanted, with the best (so to speak) intentions in mind, to maybe give a couple hundred people some nightmares courtesy of the remnants of a long-ousted group of thugs whose effects are still being felt in that one of innumerable incredibly poor countries.
Some days I get to run stories about research into flying cars.
Other days, there's a piece on autism research.
A few Sundays ago, I had a cancer page. Same writer, same dateline. Stories on breast, lung and skin cancer.
The news teaser read, "CANCER RESEARCH ADVANCES."
I felt pretty good about myself. I like to feel like I'm helping people when I pick stories. I look for stories about medicine and other kinds of research because maybe that's someone's kid's gonna live.
And because too often, the news is someone's kid died.
A lot of someones. A lot of kids.
The centerpiece on Page 2A today was going to be the bomb that went off in Pakistan. (Pakistan, right? India? I know it wasn't Iraq. Too many bombs, these days. Someone ought to do something about that.)
Then the Chrysler thing happened, and that was too big for it to be just a brief on Page 2A, which is a centerpiece, a bunch of briefs and local/interest stuff.
But it wasn't sufficiently local to make the front page, where the lede (newsspeak for "Buy the paper to read the rest of this story") was about how one of the local schools can't manage to get about 200 high school students' English good enough to pass a standardized test. (The method they're going with -- shunning the students' dominant language in favor of their weaker one -- seems to me to be about as dumb and detrimental as possible.)
On any given day, there are four to 12 stories about groups of people being killed.
My heart used to break when I read those stories. But at a half-dozen or more a day, you get numb to it.
Have to.
Have to work. There's a paper to put out, and nobody's buying "All this death just broke my heart."
One day, when we had the Pittsburgh shooting and the Baltimore shooting and some other shooting, Page 2A felt like Page 5A (crime).
I wanted so desperately then, as I want from time to time when things get really bad, for someone to write a story about all the people who lived.
But that isn't news.
"5 Pakistanis killed in car bomb" is news. But the Pakistani girls being taught to read in dark corners of nowhere, half a mile from "Did we take a wrong turn?" and three miles from a security checkpoint staffed by a 12-year-old lieutenant whose gun weighs half of what he does ... that isn't a story.
Because nobody's telling it.
Because that way, the girls still get to learn how to read.
Fear sells. Anger sells. Shock sells. Death, explosions, violence, they sell.
The good stories -- about the good people who are doing good things, and the people who are triumphing in those villages half a mile from those dark corners of nowhere -- those come once a week.
Once a week, I get to do the Sunday paper. As a friend and co-worker put it, I get to run "good reads."
"People are looking for a good read," he told me as he guided me through, a year or more ago, what putting together the Sunday paper was like.
And in the space where we'd normally run two or three or even four stories, I put one.
It was about a Holocaust survivor and one of the three people who kept her hidden from the Nazis.
The parents -- all the parents -- were dead, of course. The survivor girl's parents had died in a concentration camp, and the savior girl's parents had died of old age.
Once a week, the living get to tell their stories.
And the other six days of the week, you can't spit in the wire service (Associated Press) without hitting a story about someone dying.
Another thing gets me about this business is the impermanence.
A month from now, not a goddamn soul is going to remember the stories we ran. Hell, a week from now, I won't remember.
People are being blown to increasingly useless bits by other people, for various reasons (people spend their lives studying these conflicts to get an idea for which side is right, as if it matters to the people dying or to their grieving relatives), and a week from now, I might remember it being a rough week for Afghanistan roadside bombs or a hotel in India.
And the way I choose is divided in twain, but without the humor.
I take the top stories as listed by the AP, MSNBC and Google News. If something's up top there, it's probably pretty important.
And once I have the most important four or five stories, I go through the international wire (the death thing is much more prevalent on the international than on the national wire) and choose the stories with the most writethroughs. (A writethrough is where more information has been added, of varying and impossible-to-predict importance.)
Because the story with the most writethroughs is clearly more important, or the information is easier to access, or something.
I'm under no delusion that this method is perfect or superior or even useful. But there have been no complaints so far, so that must count for something.
I really hope you're not looking for me to come up with some novel and profound thought at the end of this diary. I might not even publish it. It might just get relegated to the list of things I wrote when I needed to say stuff, but I didn't quite want other people to see it.
Yet. Or ever. I have no idea. I used to -- I used to have stuff written like whole cloth (which isn't written, but you get the point) in my head.
But this, not a chance. This could end here, or it could end in a page, or it could just get put on ice, like the diary about the concentration camp liberator who lives in my town or the Sri Lankan kids I went to school with whose parents likely fled at or near the beginning of that civil war that just ended.
Because there is just so much death and destruction going on in the world, I've considered making a list of the violent places and assigning them their days. Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka on Saturdays, THE LIVING on Sunday, Afghanistan and Iraq on Mondays, etc.
Trouble is, for all the death, it doesn't work like that. Fifteen people die in an IED explosion (as opposed to an IED asking a lance corporal on a date, I guess -- which would probably be a Sunday story) in Iraq ... that doesn't exactly beg to be sat on until Iraq's day.
Or what if on Iraq and Afghanistan Monday, only three people die in those countries (I laugh at typing that because laughing is easier than becoming more despondent), but seven die in Malaysia?
Ah, but we don't have a military presence in Malaysia. And that was just a mudslide.
Or what if India is peaceful on Friday but extra-bloody on Sunday? Should it get to trade places like that?
Or what if my readers (they're all mine, you see; you are, too, but in a different but no less important way) get accustomed to India Saturday and happen to notice one Saturday that I didn't include the roundup of Indian carnage?
I don't know how I'd handle someone calling to ask if I'd forgotten to check the news for any mass deaths in India.
Actually, I lie. I'd walk them through the wire, and we'd talk about what had happened recently in India, what with whatever deaths and such, and then they'd have their information on who, if anyone, had died in an explosion or spate of gunfire.
Just like that. Businesslike, with a bit of humanity thrown in because talking so abstractly about death leads a person to invent ways to make it different because how can anyone take this much death without changing?
(Somewhere, I can only hope, a veteran of this business who went through the same thing is keying up my e-mail address, ready to send a sympathetic note -- or maybe a note telling me I have no professionalism, that I shouldn't treat the news so trivially.
So to head you off: Yeah, I treat it trivially. It's that or I go even more nuts. Not professional? Damn right it's not professional. I don't have the professional training to be able to handle such abject slaughter every day an hour and change after waking up without doing something to shield myself from it. Want to pay for therapy so I can talk more usefully about how it shoots philosophy in the head by making me realize that these lives have been examined and yet someone still felt they weren't worth living? No? Then fuck off, you little shit.)
You never see -- or, at least, I never see -- "4 buried in Pakistan."
"4 killed in explosion in Pakistan," sure. But nobody ever writes articles about the funerals. Nobody ever covers -- unless it was a lot of people -- what happens after.
That's someone's relatives. That kid who lived but had his right leg blown off ... who's going to get him crutches? Why aren't y'all writing any stories about that?
And then there are the stories in which violent and traumatic death is not the focus. (Half the international wire is, at any point, focused solely or at least significantly on who died and how violently.)
Elections in India? In France? We had the EU elections recently.
I'm pretty glad there weren't three stories about 40 people dying in IED explosions (as opposed to proms). That would have been a tough call -- four stories for the area (state, national or international) with the centerpiece, three for the area of secondary import and two for the "Oh, by the way."
I don't normally put any stock in "You must have five years of experience to be able to do this job" when it comes to editing, but for deciding what international news is important, I wouldn't mind magically growing two years' experience overnight. It's absolute hell to have 10 stories worth running -- and to have to toss four or five of them in the trash because there is no room. Being able to do it with a little more confidence or composure sure would help.
But I'm not sure I want to get over how all of this rips into me. There's a certain humanity to being profoundly bothered by this whole process -- from deciding a violent act is worth perpetrating to deciding a violent act is worth validating in newsprint.
Reminds me of the scenes in "Dead Poets Society" (brutal movie; go see it now if you haven't already) in which Keating and that other guy address the notion of a poem's greatness based on its technical merits and the importance of its subject.
Poems are great if they connect us to the poet or the event. They're shitty if they do neither. "Greater poem" ignores the entirely subjective nature of poetry, which is simply to make you forget about everything but the words you're reading.
I'm publishing this diary because maybe it will help someone. Writing it has helped me a touch, but I'd already thought of most of this (minus the DPS bit) while walking home nights a month or more ago.
Funny thing will be if this get Rescued. The Ranger and editor will, with the best of intentions, come up with a credible summary such as this:
"iampunha gives us insight into the pain and gruesome nature of editing in [The audacity of the news]."
Lest I offend, I should note with all the sincerity I can summon, having just gushed cynicism and pain for the last however many hundreds of words, that I've deeply appreciated every one of the 60-plus Rescues I've gotten in my year-plus here. There just seems to be no useful way to summarize this diary other than:
Insight, nothing. Reading about death takes its toll on anyone who is of sufficiently sound mind. That shouldn't surprise or significantly educate anyone. Death hurts us. We have to cope with it in ... ways that work. 's a pretty fundamental message.
The end.