Editor's Journal: Making the Cut

by Brian K. Mahoney, March 26, 2008

One of the primary jobs of a magazine editor is to decide what material will comprise any given issue. This necessitates, of course, excluding other material. The opportunity cost of printing any particular story or photograph is not to run a different one in its place. Also, some writers—who shall remain nameless—have a tendency to write longer than expected, and need trimming to fit. While this is the function of the editor—to edit the universe of all possibilities down to (hopefully) the one that is best in its given context—it’s not the most joyous editorial task, as it usually necessitates leaving some good stuff on the cutting-room floor. What follows is a celebration of these necessary but unfortunate trimmings.

Sometimes, the jettisoned pieces are just factoid jetsam that you wish you had more room for. In my interview with Dan Leader (Local Luminary, p. 17), the founder and CEO of Bread Alone told me that the price of wheat has gone up 120 percent in the past year, due to a number of factors, but mainly because of increased trading (read: betting) on wheat futures due to stock market volatility and increased cultivation of corn for biofuels. This has caused prices at Bread Alone to rise, on average, 25 cents per baked item.

This rise in the cost of wheat is not just a local phenomenon. Food prices are spiking around the world. As I write in late March, CNN.com has just posted a report on the price of spaghetti doubling in Haiti, effectively putting it beyond the reach of many of that nation’s poorest citizens at 57 cents per bag. Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist with the UN, explained the effect of the rising prices this way: “Currently if you’re in Haiti,” Abbassian said, “unless the government is subsidizing consumers, consumers have no choice but to cut consumption.” (Read: starve.)

Another instance of an interesting tidbit that we had to trim away due to spatial constraints: In an interview with Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini about her crusading reportage against honor killings (“No Honor in Killing,” p. 26), Husseini told Senior Editor Lorna Tychostup that criticism of her stories as anti-Islam, anti-family, and anti-Jordan did not always come from expected sources. “One of the criticisms I received,” said Husseini, “was from an intellectual Jordanian woman who worked in a high position and had studied abroad. She called the newspaper and started screaming at my editor, saying that they should stop me from writing because I was tarnishing the image of Jordan.”

To accompany the Husseini interview, we were lucky enough to make contact with renowned Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj, who has illustrated many of the issues Husseini has written about for the Jordan Times. As we don’t normally run cartoons in our News and Politics section, we chose to feature Hajjaj’s chilling depiction of a father casually threatening his daughter’s life for wanting to play sports in the Table of Contents (p. 6).

Sometimes, what gets cut out is of a more lighthearted nature, but reveals the interiority of a situation not usually available to outsiders. When speaking to Paul Masiero, chef/owner of Baba Louie’s pizza restaurants in Hudson and Great Barrington (“Adventures in Pizza,” p. 64), he explained the bedrock importance of service and the stress he places on it with his wait staff, relaying wisdom he had been taught at the Culinary Institute of America. “People will always come back for great service, but they’ll never come back for great food and lousy service.”