From the Calvin Trillin profile of Edna Buchanan (linked via Romenesko and newsdesigner yesterday) comes this bit about editors:
There are editors who want to cut a story even though it was virtually ordained to run at least sixteen inches. There are editors?often the same editors?who will try to take an interesting detail out of the story simply because the detail happens to horrify or appall them. “One of them kept saying that people read this paper at breakfast,” I was told by Edna, whose own idea of a successful lead is one that might cause a reader who is having breakfast with his wife to “spit out his coffee, clutch his chest, and say, ‘My God, Martha! Did you read this!’ ? When Edna went to Fort Lauderdale not long ago to talk about police reporting with some of the young reporters in the Herald’s Broward County bureau, she said, “For sanity and survival, there are three cardinal rules in the newsroom: Never trust an editor, never trust an editor, and never trust an editor.”
I guess if we had a whole newsroom full of Ednas it would take the charm off, but I bet more people would read the paper. Now, back to finishing the article.