Reuters editor in chief: My colleagues made me better

Reuters editor in chief Stephen Adler has posted on an internal website about the skills he learned in various journalism jobs he has had in the past.

Here is an excerpt:

Reporting style is as personal as a fingerprint
Sitting in the open pit of The Wall Street Journal newsroom, I could eavesdrop on dozens of reporters’ phone interviews. I quickly discovered that, among the very best journalists, no two had the same reporting style. One eagerly swapped personal details, another shouted out his pure delight when someone told him something interesting, another bored in forcefully with fact upon fact, yet another was so smooth that she seemed to pick a source’s pocket of delicious details without the source’s even noticing (hint: she works here now). What I realized was that each shared one attribute: authenticity. It turns out that great reporting is highly personal, requiring each reporter to tap his or her own personal strengths and to avoid imitating anyone else. For me, unsurprisingly, the trick to getting people to talk was to be the earnest student: showing that I had done my homework and that I probably wouldn’t miss the significance of their words, or gloss over the nuances. It worked for me, but there’s no reason it should for you. Your style is yours.

Never be intimidated by the person you’re editing
This, too, was an American Lawyer insight. The first chapter of the lesson came with the first story I edited: one by now-New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson. Jill was a great reporter, but this story-like any I would write-needed some work. I realized this but held back and did a very light edit because I knew of Jill’s great reputation. I was rewarded with the words “Pretty bad first edit” scrawled by Brill over the copy. I took it back, hunkered down, and did a much better job for myself, for Jill, and for the reader.

The second chapter came a couple of years later when I became the editor of Brill’s front-page column. One month, he wrote a very tough piece about then-Time Editor in Chief Henry Grunwald. The piece — headlined “Say It Ain’t So, Henry” — was a bit of a diatribe, and didn’t seem entirely fair, but I didn’t push Brill nearly hard enough to strengthen it. Shortly afterwards, entirely coincidentally, I was set up on a blind date with his accomplished daughter, Lisa, to whom I had a bit of explaining to do. I must have talked my way out of it ok, because we ended up getting (and staying) married-but that’s hardly the point. I should have done a better edit.