When editors were gods

One successful freelancer's formula for dealing with editors

"There is a certain mathematics in dealing with editors. If you give an editor one idea for an article, he is going to reject it. If you give him ten ideas, he is going to be so overwhelmed by the bounty that he is going to reject all ten. But if you give him three ideas he is going to turn down two and accept one." — Rex Lardner, writing in the Saturday Review in 1971. Presumably the idea for that article was one of three he'd submitted to Norman Cousins or another editor there.

Lardner was a longtime author and magazine freelancer with a specialty in golf and other sports. His 1998 New York Times obituary noted that, "A man for whom writing came easy, Mr. Lardner worked out an agreeable regimen for himself. Getting up early to work out with weights in his basement (he believed in preparation), he would then play tennis, come home to type for a while before lunch and, perhaps after a nap, play some more tennis followed by more typing, dinner and still more typing."

He was also a nephew of the writer Ring Lardner, who once offered this advice for dealing with editors.

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #7

Magazines' websites have become a convenient venue for hoaxes in recent years, not always with the happiest of results. For example, in what must have seemed like an inspired idea at first, Car and Driver posted a prank item on April 1, 2009 claiming that the Obama administration had insisted Chevrolet and Dodge end their participation in NASCAR. At the time, you may recall, the government was spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the U.S. auto industry, so the story had at least a thin veneer of plausibility.

While some people seem to have enjoyed the joke, it appears to have caused considerable upset in NASCAR circles. Car and Driver pulled the piece and reportedly apologized for “going too far.”

Driver Tony Stewart got the last word in many reports on the hoax, saying, "When you’re dealing with a nation that is going through tough economic times and you have major manufacturers and millions of people [who] are relying on them and you see that happen…. I'm even smart enough not to do that, and I do a lot of stupid stuff."

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #5

Admittedly inspired by Sports Illustrated’s famous Sidd Finch hoax of 1985, Sporting Classics magazine followed suit a dozen years later, reporting on the supposed catch of a world’s record largemouth bass in its March-April 1997 issue.

Editor Chuck Wechsler attributed at least part of the delay to technical difficulties. "I couldn't do it until we had technology to make a 13-pound, 4-ounce Florida bass look like a 22-pound, 7-ounce bass," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The photo in question shows the magazine's circulation manager's dad, under an assumed name, proudly holding the fictitious fish.

Perhaps borrowing a page from professional con artists, who know to keep their claims reasonably plausible, the magazine's record bass was just 3 ounces over the previous recordholder. A 22-ton, 7-ounce bass, for example, would have been pushing it.  

Not everyone was impressed, however. "One Ohio columnist said it was the single greatest breach of journalistic integrity he had ever witnessed," Wechsler told the Associated Press. "I wanted to tell him to get a life."

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #2

The most successful, or at least best hyped, magazine hoax of the late 20^th century came in 1985 when, in an issue of Sports Illustrated cover-dated April 1, writer George Plimpton introduced the world to a 28-year-old, New York Mets pitching phenom named Hayden "Sidd" Finch. Among other screaming clues to his inauthenticity, Sidd (for Siddhartha) was a Harvard dropout, a French horn virtuoso, and, one source believed, an aspiring Buddhist monk. He was also capable of throwing a baseball at an unheard-of 168 m.p.h., despite the fact that had never played the game before.

The story, 14 pages in length, was embellished with photos of the supposed Finch as well as quotes from real-life Mets, including manager Davey Johnson, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, then-rookie Lenny Dykstra, and owner Nelson Doubleday. Stottlemyre called Finch’s unusual wind-up and delivery—which one batter likened to Goofy’s pitching in a Disney cartoon— as "the most awesome thing that has ever happened in baseball."

Apparently some people were fooled by the story, and many went along with the joke.

Asked to comment once the hoax had been revealed, SI’s managing editor, Mark Mulvoy, explained that, "I publish 550 stories a year. So much of what we do has to do with things like drugs, salaries and now, point-shaving, things we have to do. But for once I wanted to have fun."

He added: "We've never done anything like this and probably never will again."

The “Curious Case of Sidd Finch” is available on the magazine's website, along with a recent reminiscence by two of the key players.

 

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #1

Back in the days when the world took print media seriously, some newspaper and magazine editors couIdn’t resist putting that at risk by perpetrating the occasional hoax. Usually they did it under the cover of April 1, but some seem to have gone ahead whenever an idea occurred to them. Typically these pranks were all in good fun and did no damage to people, animals, or editors’ careers. Today, in honor of April 1, we begin a series about the great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes.

In its first April issue for 1971, the Saturday Review published a letter from one K. Jason Sitewell, calling attention to a bill in Congress that ostensibly proposed to limit the size of private parks but was really intended to abolish golf courses and ultimately destroy the sport itself. The congressman sponsoring the bill, the letter writer contended, had a burning hatred of golf, which he blamed for the death of both his grandfather (who died of exasperation in a sand trap) and his father (dead after driving 19 balls into a water hazard on a par-3 hole).

The letter drew concern and outrage in the halls of Congress as well as the golfing community before the Wall Street Journal revealed the hoax and Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins confessed to being Sitewell.

"The reason for the letter is that it is part of the Saturday Review's editorial philosophy to place the highest value on laughter," Cousins wrote after the incident. “SR is a serious magazine and it deals with serious issues in a serious way, but it tries to make a distinction between being serious and being solemn. In the catalog of human assets, few things provide people with greater strength than the love of life, of which the ability to laugh is a prime manifestation."

Cousins went on to become a leading proponent of laughter as a medical cure, particularly in his popular 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness.

How an editor is like a trout

“Consider the expert angler. He always opens the stomach of the first trout of the day in order to learn what the fish are ‘taking.’ Then he digs down into his fly book to find something that looks the same and is almost as good. (I see now that my metaphor is unfortunate; far be it from me to hint that any editor is a fish.) What I really want to get at is this: The magazine is the editor’s stomach. Open it and see what he is buying, then proceed…” — Charles E. Van Loan, writing on “How I Broke Into the Magazines,” in the American Magazine, 1918.

Van Loan was a popular writer of the day, primarily on sports topics.

Those snobbish New York editors

"Many of the editors of New York magazines are atrocious snobs. A good club and a good suit of clothes have probably sold a lot of the poor stuff now being printed." — John R. Tunis, speaking to Columbia University students, as quoted in the Columbia Spectator newspaper, November 22, 1934.

Tunis was a widely published magazine writer and author, best known for his sports fiction and nonfiction. 

The editor who loved hate mail

"You can't get too much hate mail to suit me — it means you're doing your job." — André Laguerre, legendary managing editor of Sports Illustrated from 1960 to 1974, quoted by Dan Jenkins in the latter's 2014 "semi-memoir," "His Ownself." 

A spirited writer who liked some editors more than others, and some not at all, Jenkins seems to have been particularly fond of Laguerre. "To those of us who admired him," he wrote, "he was our Harold Ross–Max Perkins–H. L. Mencken." 

Jenkins died this past Thursday at age 90.

A magazine hires a real heavyweight, 1941

On this day (January 7) in 1941, Liberty magazine announced that former heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was joining its staff as sports editor, to “write on timely sports topics and… supervise other sports stories for the magazine.”

Though perhaps an unlikely editor, Dempsey wasn’t a total stranger to the magazine game. He had entered the ring in 1938 with “Jack Dempsey’s Sports Magazine,” which seems to have published at least two issues.

Editors and the freedom to make mistakes

"A good editor anywhere, especially if he is expected to be creative, has to have freedom to make mistakes." — Sidney L. James, founding managing editor of Sports Illustrated and a longtime Time Inc.'er, in his 1994 memoir, "Press Pass."

On this day...

... in 1998, ESPN The Magazine made its debut.

On this day...

... in 1998, ESPN The Magazine made its debut.