Credit the editors

A proposal for The New Yorker, Substack, and wherever else writers write

William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987.

A while ago, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about dehumanization. One paragraph begins with a description of people being treated as less than human, and goes on to argue that such treatment often assumes humanity on the part of the victims.

The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

Many people liked the piece, and I received compliments on the writing—and, in particular, on these sentences. On a social media site (I forget which one), someone quoted the passage above and described it as “great writing.”

I agree. It is great writing. I’m comfortable saying this because I didn’t write it. The sentences were put in by my editor, Henry Finder.

Everything I’ve done for magazines and newspapers has been edited. Sometimes it’s a light touch—a suggestion for rewording here and there. Sometimes it’s more intrusive, and there are times when such edits have made things worse—more than once, I had to fight the editor so that my piece wasn’t ruined. Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer, recounts his own battles with editors, citing this as one reason he has given up on magazines and now exclusively writes for Substack.

Most of the time, though, I’ve benefited from working with editors. And in my experience writing for magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, the editors there helped me strengthen the ideas in my pieces, and provided extensive feedback at the sentence level—often suggesting replacements for my writing, as in the passage above. The improvement can be striking. Reading a New Yorker article with my name on it is like staring into a mirror and having a better-looking version of myself stare back.

It’s strange, then, that editors get no credit for their work. If you go to the online version of this piece, here’s what you’ll see.

My editor’s name isn’t there. It’s not at the end either.

I propose that we change this. The editor should be named. Maybe at the beginning, maybe at the end—whatever. If you read it and like it, you’ll credit the editor as well as the author. If you think the piece is tendentious, dishonest, or poorly written, you’ll know who shares the blame. This isn’t a hard call. People deserve recognition for the work that they do.¹

It’s not just newspapers and magazines; it’s also Substack. Sometimes I’ve read a post and seen mention of an editor—once in the context of “Please sign up for a paid subscription—it’ll help me pay my editor.” But I never see the editor’s name.

This is one of the rare instances where academia does it better. Journal articles include footnotes and acknowledgment sections where authors thank those who helped them with the paper.² More generally, there is a culture of citation, where the source of every finding, theory, and example is credited to whoever thought it up first. Perhaps magazines and Substacks should move in that direction. But right now, I’m asking for something simpler and more realistic: Credit the editor.

Apparently, editors are supposed to be invisible. The New Yorker recently published an article by Jill Lepore called The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker. (Subheading: “The magazine has three golden rules: never write about writers, editors, or the magazine. On the occasion of our hundredth anniversary, we’re breaking them all.") It begins with this:

Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors—only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name.

But why? Why should nobody know an editor’s name? My guess is that people like the idea that what they’re reading is the product of a single person’s effort and imagination, particularly if they see the person as a genius. Here is a piece by Salman Rushdie—not: Here is a piece by Salman Rushdie, written with the help of someone you’ve never heard of. Perhaps some writers would be annoyed if crediting the editor became a common practice; maybe some readers would feel a bit let down. Maybe some editors are uncomfortable sharing credit with Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Margaret Atwood, and the like.

I get this. But, still, pretending that the authors did it all themselves is a dishonest and unethical practice.

The Jill Lepore article is a hoot, by the way. I loved the gossipy stories about the struggles between writers and editors. It turns out that some famous writers, like John Updike, are endearingly nervous and eager-to-please in their dealings with editors. Others are pompous and arrogant, sometimes comically so.

Martin Amis once replied to editorial notes sent to him by Deborah Treisman by notifying her that she appeared to be under the mistaken impression that what he had sent her was a draft.

The article has just one flaw. In a couple of places, Lepore makes jokey remarks about the editor of her article, such as “(I promise that my editor did not write that last sentence—he doesn’t even agree with it.)”.

But she never tells us his name.

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1. What about when a manuscript is so fine that the editor does nothing at all, and just sends it off for publication? (I doubt this ever happens, but I guess it could.) What about cases where there is bitter conflict and the editor or the author (or both) are deeply unsatisfied with the final product? There will be tough cases. But these always come up when giving credit—their existence isn’t an argument against doing so.

2. Academics don’t typically thank the journal editors, but that’s fine. Unlike the sorts of editors that I’m talking about here, journal editors don’t usually give extensive comments on manuscripts. The reviewers do the real work of evaluating and improving journal submissions.