Kathryn Auten, a UNC-Chapel Hill business journalism major, interviewed Wyndham Robertson, who was the first female assistant managing editor at Fortune, about her career.
Here is an excerpt:
Auten: Could you tell me about some of your experiences as an editor?
Robertson: I liked being an editor. I was considered a very heavy-handed editor. I think I was probably too heavy-handed, but Fortune was a pretty heavily edited magazine. And there are always writers who do not like editors, period. I always loved being edited, so I think that was another thing that made me heavy-handed is that I never resented an editor taking something I had done and making it better. And I always loved having a good editor. There were not very many…I actually one of the things I really loved was…I was the editor for some young people who… there was a group of people kind of trying out to be writers and at this point some of those were men and some of them were women because by the time I was an editor we had writers who were women and researchers who were men. And so there was sort of program under which researchers could try being writers and I was the editor for them. And I really loved that and some of them did very very well and are still… and have wonderful careers. Being an editor really is more about working with, trying to get the best out of the team, the writer and the researcher.
Read more here.
