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Breathless and grateful: An editor on the job

At the launch of the Monitor's global series about young people adapting to climate change, an editor reflects on the nail-biting, behind-the-scenes decisions that propelled the project.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Reporter Sara Miller Llana (left) and photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman share a selfie from their June trip to Arctic Canada.

My favorite image of journalists in popular culture is the "Bobby!Bobby!Bobby!" scene from the James L. Brooks movie "Broadcast News." It’s a nail-biting 90 seconds featuring Holly Hunter and Joan Cusack as TV producers – the broadcast equivalent of my job as a newspaper editor – in the chaos of deadline. They hurdle babies, dodge file cabinet drawers, fidget, scream, and manically rally a videotape editor named Bobby.

As I write this "editor on the job" column, I’ve just rolled out of the very real "Bobby!Bobby!Bobby!" moment of seeing the first installment of our Climate Generation global report go into print and online. (The Nov. 13 cover story about a young Namibian climate activist is the second chapter of the project.)

Our reporters and photographers worked for nine months – traveling around the world – to uncover how the next generation is pragmatically coping with the climate crisis. How, you might wonder, did we face such a manic deadline if we had nine months to do this?

Behind every article is a fusion of dozens of key processes by talented Monitor professionals: reporters, photographers, copy editors, designers, graphic artists, audio and video technicians, an animation artist, and promotion teams.

But suspended among those professionals is me, the project editor – juggling, hand-holding, dealing with our Pulitzer Center funders, suggesting story direction, writing headlines and captions, editing every line, and trying to remember to thank everyone at each intricate step. (Reporter Stephanie Hanes offered me ice cream if I got the phrase "herding cats" in here.)

My favorite part of the job is hands-on editing – helping with the puzzle pieces of storytelling flow or coaxing colorful anecdotes. I love imagining what my correspondents are experiencing – from tropical heat and Arctic cold to earnest young people – and asking the right questions. Sometimes my own experience helps. When Sara Miller Llana described the outside of a home in the Canadian Arctic, I wondered – from my own Russian Arctic reporting years ago – if there were animal carcasses in the front yard. Why, yes, they are ubiquitous – hunted caribou being the primary protein source.

My least favorite part of the job is trying to capture a story in a six-to-10-word headline – yes, editors write the headlines; reporters don’t.

Then there are the inevitable dramas of the job, fielding the complications that become tales you can tell at dinner parties in reverent gratitude or just for a good laugh. In this project, there were last-minute bureaucratic heroes getting us visas; there were hairy airline flights – one with turbulence that destroyed a reporter’s laptop, one a Dhaka, Bangladesh, flight diverted by weather to Kolkata, India, and by a near-diplomatic crisis with restive passengers held on the plane for six hours.

After all the "Bobby!Bobby!Bobby!" moments, everything came together in this Climate Generation project. I hope you find real value in what we’ve all done to make it happen.

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Mark Sappenfield
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Dear Reader,

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