Toughest part of this job? The corner calls | Editor’s notes

Like a lot of you, our day begins with coffee. (By the way, for those of you who do not drink coffee, let me respectfully say that I do not understand you, and I probably never will.)

Anyway, this is the part of the day where the best of ideas usually emerge. For all the mentoring and planning that goes into this job, nothing beats a few journalists sitting together and brainstorming, with caffeine providing the rocket fuel.

This week, one such get-together led to a question from reporter Michael Weber. He directed it to weekend editor Evan Tuchinsky, who relayed it to me:

“What’s the hardest part of an editor’s job?”

Man. I was two-thirds of the way through my second cup of the day when I heard that, and my immediate reaction was, “I’d better go brew a third.”

My next reaction was,  “Well, it depends on the day.” Sometimes, the hardest part is dealing with the public (a task I almost always enjoy, believe it or not, regardless of how angry a reader may initially happen to be). Sometimes, it’s people we’ve reported on who demand we “retract and apologize for that story you wrote about me, or I’m going to sue.” And sometimes, it’s overcoming unexpected staffing shortages brought on by sickness or unexpected family emergencies. Life happens, but we still have a paper to put out.

Mainly, though, the toughest part of the job, in my view, is just making the very best day-to-day decisions on developments that you could never see coming.

We get all kinds of story tips. Often these leads are from people unhappy with somebody else for personal or business reasons. Generally speaking, jumping down that kind of rabbit hole ends up being a huge waste of our staff’s limited resources, so I use a great line I learned from my predecessor David Little: “Sounds like you need a lawyer, not a reporter.”

But sometimes, we get story leads that are too big to ignore. Sometimes those leads are going to take dozens, or hundreds, of hours to research. So we do our best to provide several local staff-written stories per day while also having a few longer-term projects in the hopper. It’s a tough, and always imperfect, balancing act.

More often than not, though, the “toughest decisions” are in day-to-day tasks.

To use a baseball analogy, there’s a lot of umpiring that goes into this. And lately, more than ever, the toughest part of that is making decisions on what should and shouldn’t be allowed in a letter to the editor.

We publish every letter we get as long as the writer follows a few simple rules. Among those are “no name-calling; keep it civil.” We also insist that letters be factual, while allowing some room for everyone’s personal “This is my interpretation of that fact, and that’s my opinion” views. That can be a tough grey area in terms of calling balls and strikes.

In election season, it only gets more complicated. Especially in the Donald Trump era.

I recently got a letter where a reader told the “Trump called white supremacists and Nazis ‘very fine people.’” When I told him his letter needed a bit more context, and that Trump also said exactly the opposite that day — “I’m not talking about the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists because they should be condemned totally” — he got mad. “I heard what he said. Print the letter as it is.”

That’s one of those tough ball-and-strike calls that are bound to displease regardless of which way they go. (In this case, the fact that even Snopes largely backs Trump’s version makes me tend to give his side the call on that particular corner.)

We’ve also gotten letters saying Joe Biden had promised to pick a Black woman as his vice-president, and that’s the only reason Kamala Harris got the job. Actually, Biden never said that. He said he’d pick a woman. Period. But, try telling that to someone who insists it’s true because they “saw it on the Internet somewhere.”

Inevitably, when letters like these are returned with a request for a rewrite, the initial response is, “You’re not printing it because you disagree with my opinion. Your bias is showing.”

That’s one comment that really does boil my blood.

How in the world could any one person agree with everything that’s printed on our Opinion page? We run an incredibly wide mix of opinion both in terms of columnists, cartoonists and letter-writers, and I’ve never once refused to print anything because I didn’t agree with an opinion. To name-drop a few of our more frequent letter writers over the years, how could I possibly agree with everything that both Mark Gailey and Nichole Nava say about politics? Or how could I agree with every single thing Rob Berry has said about homelessness while also agreeing with every single thing Angela McLaughlin has said about homelessness? Their views are often as opposite as it gets — but we print their letters.

(For the record — I don’t think any of these folks will mind me saying this — each has submitted letters that I had questions or concerns with at some point or another over the years, and each has been consistently fantastic in terms of cooperating and finding a satisfactory compromise.)

We also don’t allow personal insults. That, too, can be a tough ball-and-strike call. Example: If someone calls Trump or Harris a moron, we might reply by saying, “Don’t call them a name. Instead, tell us what they did that makes you think they’re a moron.” On the other hand, a few days ago, someone wrote that Trump had “a moronic smile.” Is that the same as calling him a moron? Would “stupid smile” be less offensive? And if I allow that, does that mean I’d also have to allow a letter from someone saying Harris has “a moronic laugh”?

Tough calls. Each guaranteed to convince people I’m tilting the strike zone in favor of the other team.

Readers notice. Once you stretch home plate from its normal 17 inches to make a slight exception, the next guy is going to want it too, and then another writer will take it a half-inch farther outside. And before you know it, to conjure up an infamous line from a letter from a few years back, we’ve got “Republicans are evil flying monkeys” all over again.