When editing a story, all questions must be answered

What you need to know:

  • In commercial newspapers, editorial material is always involved in a losing battle with advertorial material because adverts fetch money at a much higher rate than news, features, commentaries and other editorial material.
  • A sub-editor requires extraordinary social knowledge and technical skill to be able to judge accurately what information to sacrifice on the altar of pace, and to present what remains as attractively as possible to lure as many readers as possible.
  • Sub-editing is the ability to knock a story into a fetching shape and size and yet maintain its whole essence.

As information merchants, our newspaper editors can be frustratingly vague about their merchandise. For instance, from page 28 of the Daily Nation of August 17, I plucked the following words: “A woman in Britain was jailed today for subjecting her children to unnecessary medical procedures so that she could claim hundreds of thousands of pounds in state benefits.”

The question stares at you like Gorgon’s face. If information is what, as a newspaper, you are in the marketplace to sell, what kind of information is “a woman in Britain”? For one thing only, how does “a woman in Britain” differ from a British woman?

Here, the most likely answer is that “a woman in Britain” is not necessarily a British woman. She is probably a foreigner living in or just visiting Britain.

Indeed, were she an African — a Kenyan, say — the Western wire agency correspondent would have found that a compelling detail and put it very high up in the story.

Deep in the subconscious would have been the inexorable urge to highlight it in order to link the woman’s bizarre behaviour to her “African-ness” and thus to achieve a succulent headline. As we may remember from the TV series Amos n’ Andy, it was habitual, before the black American rebellions of the 1960s, for US television to depict black characters as bumbling, if amiable, idiots.

SPACE CONSTRAINTS

Western correspondents based in Third World capitals remain notorious for it. In the above case, the original copy probably included the woman’s nationality or country of origin. It was probably a Nation sub-editor who — faced with space constraints — chopped off such details. In principle, I have no quarrel with that.

For, in commercial newspapers, editorial material is always involved in a losing battle with advertorial material because adverts fetch money at a much higher rate than news, features, commentaries and other editorial material.

Cutting stories is thus an important daily duty of a group of newsroom word technicians called sub-editors.

Theirs is a thankless task because the writer, not the sub-editor, is the one who may get the by-line (“By Ndugu Fulani”) for what finally appears.

But a sub-editor requires extraordinary social knowledge and technical skill — including mastery of the newspaper’s official language — to be able to judge accurately what information to sacrifice on the altar of pace, and to present what remains as attractively as possible to lure as many readers as possible.

As an art, sub-editing is the ability to knock a story into a fetching shape and size and yet maintain its whole essence. I stress that it requires extraordinary social knowledge and language skill — two commodities that are rare in countries like Kenya, in which the newspaper business was introduced only a century ago.

Among the problems is that, whenever you thus chop off editorial material, you must ensure that you properly bung the hole you have just created.

The sentence before the gap must flow naturally into the next sentence in order for you to make the necessary sense.