Death catches up with the editor | Columnists

Some mornings I wake up screaming.

Not literally, but I bet I have your attention. I'm an editor. That's my job. Still, I toss and turn at night worrying about the sins against grace and grammar that have slipped through my fingers, or the printed legacy I'm not leaving behind. You see, an editor should remain anonymous and let the author have the glory.

Oh, I was a writer. Sometimes I still am. Playing with words is fun and it's always exciting to see your name in print. But that kind of work rarely pays the bills.

That's why I became a magazine editor long ago. The job included a steady salary, a private office, and subsidized training that went beyond grammar and structure. I learned that editors don't just move words around on a page. They uphold standards of truth and clarity and make the page sing.

They also decide which world trends, events and issues get attention, so readers can make decisions and, occasionally, make history. I was happy to take that responsibility seriously. I was also happy with my expense report, which was designed to take important people to lunch.

Ah, lunch. The highlight of the day in the golden age of publishing, when editors recruited new writers, passed on knowledge to old ones, gathered information on the outside world, and combined business with pleasure.

Midway through my career, I saw The Song of Lunch, a 2010 BBC/Masterpiece drama (available on Prime Video) starring Alan Rickman as a stressed-out book editor who tries to win back an old flame over lunch at a London publishing house.

I thought the film was a documentary.

I was also surprised that so many important people like a free meal, especially when it's for themselves. So I talked to author James Baldwin about the literary scene in post-war Paris and to actress Liv Ullman about her volunteer work for UNICEF. I treated food journalist James Beard to his first McDonald's meal. He really enjoyed the fries.

Only the McDonald's outing ever made its way into the print edition. The publisher's luncheon eventually fell victim to cost-cutting and the work-from-home trend. I was asked to turn some of the magazine's more important stories into books — about the rise of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, or the Tiananmen uprising in China in 1989. They sold well.

In many ways, books are just long magazine articles – they all need a beginning, a middle and an end. Both formats need to convey information coherently and avoid repetition, ugliness, jargon and cliches. This is important work, but it is not brain surgery.

I gave up my penciling career years ago, although my wife, who was once an editor, and I still help friends with their articles and books. My older son became an editor at my old magazine before fleeing to the financial world. The younger son is a news editor at PBS. Maybe there's an editing gene. More likely, it's just a satisfying job to make things better.

The number of editors is declining, as is the number of people working in publishing. In the United States, about 120,000 people still have the word “editor” in their job title, but the Department of Commerce says that number is declining by nearly 500 each year, even as the overall workforce is growing. And those who remain “editors” are doing less and less actual editorial work.

Blame it on the decline of print media and the rise of social media, but also on click-hungry “news” websites and, of course, artificial intelligence. Less and less does anyone really have control over what you read – least of all the editors.

This is particularly worrying at the moment. Wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere. Climate change is killing us. Refugees are streaming into Europe and the US, where ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant forces are on the rise. In too many places, democracy is under attack.

We do not lack information about these problems. What we need are steady hands to bring order to this flow, make it understandable and show us what to do. Algorithms and AI are not up to the task – at least not yet.

The world needs editors more than ever, but I fear my calling is doomed to failure. Worse, I know that a world without its unsung comma-slingers would be both incomprehensible and profoundly terrifying. When that moment comes, we will all wake up screaming every day.