They are the people you want to have on your side in a game of Trivial Pursuit.
They know the names of all the countries in Africa and Eastern Europe.
They can explain the latest U.N. resolution and identify the hottest figures in country music and alternative rock.
I’ve always held wire editors in awe. Their jobs in the newspaper seem to carry so much power, such awesome responsibility, such profound influence.
They read (or at least scan) hundreds of dispatches every day from all over the world and then select a few dozen (sometimes fewer) that will actually appear in the newspaper the next day. They are the gatekeepers to the world.
They’re paid to know what they can about practically everything.
As a daily routine, it’s a lot less glamorous.
In fact, when the rest of the newsroom staff departs for lunch, to be invigorated by the open air, stimulated by vigorous conversation, sustained by a leisurely meal in the company of friends, colleagues and sources, Dan Kincaid, Tom Nichols, Bill Wickersham and Ray Archer either make quick trips to the eighth-floor cafeteria or pull out their brown bags at odd hours.
“The wires never stop,” Wickersham explained.
It is a lot to cover. You have stories from a half-dozen wire services and that’s just for news. Archer also follows the business wires, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, among others. Terry Beahm checks other syndicates for entertainment, lifestyle and health news for the Features Department.
They’re not reading all this stuff for their own enrichment. The wire desk is a process, one continuous flow, selecting, editing and moving stories and pictures into various departments; compiling and keeping track of news budgets, the basic organizing tool of the news day. Speed and organizational skills are crucial to the wire editor.
“Because of the limited space devoted to wire news, it is important that I have the ability to trim stories to their essence, sometimes turning long narratives into short news briefs,” Beahm said of his role in features, which applies virtually to all the wire editors.
The process reaches a critical point at the daily 4 p.m. news meeting, where top news editors begin the selection process for Page A1. Local editors pitch their reporters’ work while the wire editor, usually Kincaid for national and international news, offers his assessment of three or four leading candidates from national and world news.
“It’s an uneven playing field. Local trumps national,” Wickersham acknowledged ruefully. “That’s the way it is.”
Once the front page is set, Kincaid and Nichols will fill the inside pages of the first section with national and international news, again often in briefs trimmed from longer stories.
Editors have decided that the news franchise for The Arizona Republic is local. They believe most readers feel as Phoenix resident Geralyn Miller, who told me last week: “I can get national news elsewhere. I want more local news.”
But there is some give and take.
“A story usually sells itself,” Kincaid said. He’s not the pound-the-table type. A couple of weeks ago, the soft-spoken Kincaid was well-armed for the debate. The devastation Hurricane Mitch had left in Central America was being recognized. One particular AP story described the tragedy of a small Nicaraguan town. House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde had just sent President Clinton a letter with 81 specific questions relating to perjury, tampering and obstruction of justice.
This day, Kincaid offered another possibility. Scientists had successfully isolated from human embryos a primitive kind of cell that can grow into all kinds of human tissue.
“I don’t know if you can get three out there (on Page One),” News Editor Don Nicoson teased. But Kincaid explained this scientific breakthrough could ultimately lead to a supply of replacement tissue for people with various diseases.
It ran on the bottom of A1 the next day.
From Thursday to Sunday, with advertising-thick sections, we probably keep readers adequately informed on national and world affairs. That’s not true on Mondays and Tuesdays, when wire editors must squeeze the world’s events in not much more than one full page of space.
Our preference of local over world news does not go unnoticed or uncriticized either. Several members of the current class of foreign military officers attending the Naval Command College commented on it while on a recent visit to Arizona.
Cmdr. Gerry Christian of Australia observed that the United States’ foreign and domestic policy relies enormously on public opinion, a component of which, of course, is the information supplied by the news media.
“The insularity of the American public, and of the news media, has the potential to undermine your status in the world,” he warned.
“People have to understand the problems of the world as they will affect you,” added Capt. Alvaro Gaspar of Portugal.
They’re saying that national security and the fate of democracy hinge on an informed electorate, knowledgeable about world affairs.
With such pressures on them, no wonder the wire editors eat on the run.
