Advice for young journalists from NPR’s White House reporter: Don’t be a pain

This is a few months old, but I just saw it this week: An Open Letter to Young Journalists by Tamara Keith, NPR’s White House correspondent.

The letter, posted on her personal Adventures in Radioland blog, actually started out as a personal note to a young journalist Keith corresponds with, she writes. But she thought the advice in it was “a really important thing they don’t teach in journalism school or intern orientation,” so she posted it on the blog.

The advice: “Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

Specifically, the advice is to be easy to edit. Don’t be a prima donna with your editor:

Edits can be negotiations. But they should never be battles. Resist all urges to be defensive. Treat every editor as a mentor. Sometimes this is hard to do, especially if you don’t actually have a ton of respect for the editor. But realize you can learn something even from a mediocre editor.

Of course, Keith writes, you can push back, and you should fight to resist errors being inserted into your copy or words being put into your story that you would never write. But “there is always a way to push back without being a jerk about it.”

I’ve spent a lot of time on both sides of the editor-writer relationship, and I think this is pretty good advice, even though I’m an accommodating, writer-friendly editor and a screaming terror of a writer, willing to go to the mattresses over every last golden comma that emits from my keyboard. I’ve had some poor editors, and I’ve had some great editors, not all of whom I’ve treated well. But I think Keith’s right: I either did or should have learned something from every one of them.

On the other hand, I’m not sure about this judgment from Keith. Writing about working with interns on a podcast she used to produce, she says:

The people who were somewhat unpleasant to edit, or fought over every word or came off like they knew it all … I’ve watched their careers derail. Not a single person who I edited who I thought “damn, I didn’t enjoy that and I’d rather not edit them again,” not one of them has had a successful career in public radio or even journalism.

I think that’s a sample size issue. I can think of a few young writers I found unpleasant to edit, uncooperative, not as good as they thought they were, who went on to successful writing careers—sometimes with me as a fond reader. I don’t think being a pain in the ass during the editing process necessarily derails a career.

But it does mean you have to be that much better than writers who aren’t one. And it makes the workday of at least two people more unpleasant than it needs to be. So my advice is to at least try Tamara Keith’s advice. Don’t be a pain in the ass for a while. See how it works.

I might even try it myself.