The other day somebody commented on something I had written “in my column.”
There was only one problem. I hadn’t written anything about that topic in the column which came out that day.
I even went to the back files to see if I had written about that topic recently. I hadn’t.
Then someone produced a Reporter and showed me the piece that had drawn the comment. Yes I had, indeed, written it.
But it wasn’t a column. It was an editorial. Is there a difference? You bet there is.
People who are “in the biz” are so used to the very real delineations between columns, editorials and stories that we forget just how many people use those words interchangeably.
And that’s not their fault. We don’t spend a lot of time explaining the difference because it’s ingrained in our DNA. So I guess we don’t need to be surprised when we get such comments.
So here goes:
• Column—A personal expression by one writer. It may or may not be the opinion of the publication itself. It’s also a place to be humorous, whimsical or just downright silly, if that’s your personality. Confession: It is.
• Editorial—The expression—“position,” if you will, although I don’t particularly care for that word—of the newspaper itself. This is where the publication gives its opinion, with all the weight—if any—that carries. When people tell you “the newspaper said” this is the only one of the three forms we are discussing in which that comment is accurate.
• Story—Virtually everything else. It’s news. It is, or ought to be, just the facts with enough background exposition to make them understandable.
(There’s a whole lot more in that “ought to be,” but we will leave that alone for now).
I don’t do dogma well, but I tend to be pretty dogmatic about not editorializing—or worse, columnizing—in a news story.
It’s my contention that news ought to be reported like the great Vin Scully broadcast baseball games, right down the middle. Vin may have gotten paid by the Dodgers but he saw his job to report, not to root.
Sometimes people will also say “I want to put an ad in the paper,” when they mean a story. If you think the distinctions between stories, editorials and columns are important, the one between all of those and ads is even more so.
Ads are what we get paid for. All a newspaper has to sell is space. No ads, no newspaper. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Occasionally there will be a humorous dimension to the misunderstanding.
A somewhat prolific letter writer once submitted yet another badly-in-need-of-editing missive that included the sentence “as I said in my last editorial....”
Uh, no.
Looking back on my “definitions” above, I think I have short-changed the column a bit.
Columns are the most personal communication we do and I don’t want anyone to get the idea they are always frivolous or light.
Columns are also the place we sometimes bare little bits of our soul, such as how we feel when we’ve lost someone about whom we cared.
We’ve all done those.
The bottom line. Whatever you want to call what we write, we are so very glad you are reading it.
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