Effective editing: Trust and Ted Lasso-style cheerleading

EDITOR’S NOTE: For other posts in the occasional series about effective editing, read our interviews with Mike Wilson of The New York Times, Scott Stossel of The Atlantic and Lynda Robinson of The Washington Post. This interview, with Alexandra Zayas of ProPublica, is followed by the annotation of a project Zayas edited.

Alexandra Zayas was exposed to the power of local news at a young age. She grew up in Miami and spent much of her adult life in South Florida. “Miami is just a wild news town,” said Zayas, who is now 41 and lives in New Jersey. “I recall just constantly being surrounded by historic events,” she said, from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to the Elian Gonzalez crisis around the turn of the century.

Following the powerful reporting of The Miami Herald back then gave Zayas a sense that journalists had an exciting front-row seat to history. While studying at the University of Miami, Zayas’ professor — an editor at The Herald — helped her find freelancing opportunities at the paper. She covered a neighborhood beat as a college student before pursuing an internship with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2005.

Zayas then found her way to The Tampa Bay Times, where she grounded and elevated her journalistic skills — first as an intern, then as a reporter across a wide suite of roles that spanned breaking news reporting, enterprise reporting and investigative reporting, and ultimately as an enterprise editor. In 2017, she joined ProPublica as a senior editor.

At ProPublica, Zayas has risen into the ranks of the leadership team to become deputy managing editor. She coaches reporters and editors within ProPublica and in the newsrooms it partners with on projects. She helped lead ProPublica’s second-annual investigative editor training, a boot camp where newsroom staff trains up to 10 editors from around the country.

Storyboard connected with Zayas to discuss how editors can demonstrate their impact on a story, her comprehensive pre-writing process and why trust is the bedrock of reporter-editor partnerships. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted or spurred that shift from enterprise/investigative reporting into enterprise editing? And what seemed appealing about editing after being a reporter for so long?
I had a life-changing experience with an editor as a reporter when I worked with Chris Davis, who is now an editor with The New York Times’ Local Reporting Project. I had never done an investigative project in my life — I fancied myself an enterprise reporter and was very drawn to narratives. I ended up working on an investigation called “In God’s Name” in 2012, about how a religious exemption created by the Florida legislature in the 1980s allowed religious group homes for kids that were almost like religious boarding schools. They were places you would send a ‘bad kid’ to be reformed with no government oversight, essentially putting oversight into the hands of preachers policing themselves.

I was paired with this investigative editor who really evangelized me and showed me that not only could I do investigative journalism, but also that investigative journalism was capable of making a change in the world. The idea that your work was not just to inform, but could change lives, was something he opened my eyes to. I had other editors who thought I was a good writer and put my stories on the front page. But Chris was never satisfied. He was constantly wanting to know if I had better examples or if I had gotten better access. He was interrogating my understanding of everything and forced me to set a far higher bar for myself than I thought I was capable of. That generosity — his patience and his dedication, the spirit of partnership and teamwork I felt from him — not only evangelized me to fall in love with investigative reporting, but also showed me how much impact you could have as an editor.

I didn’t immediately become an editor, in part because I wanted to keep learning from Chris, so I joined the investigations team and worked under him. I fell in love with that sense of team spirit — the idea that you’re in it with somebody, you’re talking every day about what you’ve got, you’re really stressed out sometimes and you’re really victorious sometimes. I ended up liking the relationship part of my job more than the ‘going and finding out stuff’ part. I realized the relationship part of the job is a huge part of being an editor. So little by little, I started thinking I wanted to be an editor.

Can you share more about what skills are required to be a good editor? What parts of your brain do you have to tap?
When I became a senior editor at ProPublica, it became clear that editing is not just looking at a piece of writing and figuring out how it can be better, or how it can be structured better, or written in a prettier way. It’s really about pretending the page is blank and trying to conjure out of the universe the best possible version of this story — then working with the reporter to figure out how to get that. It involves asking: ‘Do we even have all of the best possible material? The writing is really pretty, but is it actually true? Is it the most logical argument we can make? What are the fatal flaws buried under this pretty writing?’ It’s like an X-ray reading, seeing beyond what’s on the page to what the possibilities are.

How did you develop those skills?
My mantra was ‘I made a mistake a day.’ As an enterprise editor at The Tampa Bay Times, I was editing my friends, essentially, but that really only lasted for six to eight months because I took a job with ProPublica soon after. When I was an investigative editor, I was remembering all of the stuff Chris taught me about how to put together a bulletproof investigation. But it was really a lot of not asking reporters all of the questions I needed to ask and then being blindsided in the end with something that I should have asked at the beginning. With stuff like that, you just honestly have to make those mistakes.

So you’d been an editor for less than a year before the ProPublica job. How did sell your abilities for that job? And what made it appealing to you?
ProPublica had offered me a job four years earlier, after ‘In God’s Name.’ I turned it down because I didn’t feel like I was fully done being an investigative reporter under Chris. But I stayed in close touch with the managing editor there, Robin Fields, and we were constantly talking about different opportunities. This was right after Donald Trump got elected and there was a real hunger to put resources into investigative reporting. The New York Times and ProPublica offered me jobs the same week.

Both of those offers were for editing jobs. I think people liked my investigative experience and the fact that I had edited narrative. To be able to do both of those things is an increasingly desired skill set. I shared before-and-after drafts of some stories I had edited. One I was very proud of was by Kat (Kathleen) McCrory on a victim of the Pulse nightclub shooting. It involved going way beyond what was on the page to what was possible. I think all of those things made them comfortable that I was a conceivable possibility for that job. Even so, I still had a lot to learn once I got to ProPublica.

Reporters obviously have their own clips to show, though a lot of people have touched that copy before it sees the light of day. I imagine an editing portfolio is different because you take rough copy and shape it into something else. Is showing before-and-after drafts typically what you were asked to do? How common is that, and how do you show where you took a story from conception to actualization?
Now I’m part of hiring committees at ProPublica, and a big part of what we do is really try to figure this out. We want a memo to get a sense of how they someone as an editor. We also will give them early drafts of stories that need work and say, ‘What would you do with this?’ We ask folks to not look at the published version and also tell them that there are many ways to edit a story, so the published way may not be the only way. We’re looking for people to essentially go beyond the line edit and look for those very big picture issues — things that might need more reporting, things that might indicate a flaw in the logic. Those tests are very important in hiring editors. Then we try to talk to way more people than the references they offer up — former editors, former reporters they’ve worked with — to get a really good sense of what their skills are and where they need to grow.

When it comes to editing narrative, how would you describe the essential ingredients for strong chemistry between a writer and an editor?
It’s the exact same when editing narrative as it is for editing traditional investigative reporting: two people who trust each other. Trust is the bedrock of the relationship between a reporter and an editor. I need to trust that the stuff that you’re telling me is true. I need to trust that you are telling me when you don’t have something and why you don’t have something. You need to trust that I care about you, the story and your growth, and that we’re on the same team. You need to trust that I’m letting you know when I’m not 100% sure of something.

How do you build that trust?
It’s really important for people to see me as myself and for them to feel comfortable. I admit my own vulnerabilities. I’m very much myself. I don’t have highbrow tastes. I am kind of a dork. On a story ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser, I told her for one story she was doing, I made her watch “The Matrix.” When reporters were working on an asbestos story, I made watch “Jurassic Park” because their story reminded me so much of it. I will seriously say the first thing that pops into my head.

I want them to feel as free as I feel when I’m talking out loud about a story. I’m asking them stupid questions that come into my head and making them explain simple concepts that I don’t understand. I want them to feel comfortable arguing with me if they think I’m wrong, because sometimes I am. I want them to know that if I’m arguing with them, it’s not just because I’m the boss — it’s because I think I’m right.

If I want reporters to do some needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing to find something, they’ll do it because they’ll trust that it’s for them, it’s for the story and I want them to succeed. Even reporters like Lizzie, who are way better writers than me, the trust we have in each other is so strong that sometimes she would get me a draft and I had an idea for maybe a lede, or a section hed, or something I wanted her to try out. I would write a fake version of it. I wasn’t writing over her; it was essentially me writing to give her an idea. The process is very iterative. It’s very egoless. This is not a situation where we’re fighting over word choice and commas. We start very big, very conceptual, very structural. I tell them, ‘Don’t even worry about the words at this point.’ The structure has to be right, the pacing has to be right, your voice is going to be in it — but right now, let’s work together on the very best possible framework for this thing.

On structure and pacing, how do you practice fine-tuning that sensibility and honing those instincts?
Exposure to really good storytelling. I see stories everywhere and I pay attention to how they’re told. Not just the great journalistic pieces that we see in writing, but movies; and not just the highbrow movies, but popcorn movies. A well-told Taylor Swift song. You can learn about storytelling from the stories that are all around us. I absorb and really pay attention to what works about them.

For instance, I was just watching “Karate Kid” with my girls and that final fight scene serves as a great example of pacing. It takes about four minutes from the moment the fight starts to the moment Daniel delivers that iconic, one-legged kick. And that kick lands with so much more resonance because of the way those four minutes are drawn out. There are beats that establish Daniel’s growth as a fighter, those that show how much is stacked against him, those that step up the suffering he has to overcome.

If you watch that scene knowing there’s a final blow coming, you understand why it doesn’t come earlier in those four minutes. You don’t want it to come before you’ve given enough oxygen to each of those important dimensions, but you also don’t want to belabor any one of them. By the time Daniel sets up for that final kick with that wild look in his eyes, that catharsis is earned.

You mentioned that your process starts fairly high-level. If you were going from the starting point to the end of your process — when you’re conceptualizing the story to when you’re getting the draft to applying polish at the end — what do you do first?
Story choice is essential. The writer and I will weigh the benefit of doing a story. For investigative journalism, they need to have an angle that reflects accountability for somebody or something, and there has to be a problem that can be impacted by the story. The big questions are: Who’s being harmed? How bad is that harm? What does that harm look like? What’s the scope of the problem?

The vast majority of investigative stories should not be narratives. Narratives should be reserved only for the stories that would be best served by that medium. I think too many people see narrative as better than a traditional investigative report. I don’t think one is any better than the other; I think you allow the investigative findings to dictate how you’re going to tell the story. Some stories are clearly better served by narratives than traditional investigative reports: ones in which you have deep access to people, or enough reconstructive material from documents or interviews that you can vividly reconstruct it. It has to be a tale that can carry a reader throughout its multiple chapters, where every chapter not only advances the plot, but also advances the points and serves the findings. This is a really high bar for even choosing to do an investigative narrative. It has to meet all those marks. Feasibility is also a big thing. Are we going to get that access? How are we going to do it?

I am very much a partner in the reporter’s reporting process. I’m encouraging them through all possible barriers. I help them think through public records requests or how to handle a first approach for a source — all different kinds of reporting strategies. We’re regularly checking in about progress. As a reporter, they are in the weeds. My job is to maintain a high-altitude perspective so that I can be asking all those big picture questions: Do we have enough of what we need? How does this next reporting task serve us in a bigger way? Sometimes, a reporter might get discouraged after striking out with something or learn about a caveat and think there’s no story. Having the editor as that independent brain is essential, because it’s like, ‘Actually, in the big picture, the problem still remains, right?’ I remind them of how outraged they were about this problem at the very beginning and about the things that excited them when a few months down the road, they’ve sort of become accustomed and desensitized to it.

At the ProPublica editor boot camp, I hand out a multi-page list of logical fallacies. I ask all the editors and reporters to circle all the ones they’ve seen or been guilty of — and it’s all of them, right? A big part of being an editor is psychology and spotting those behaviors, like putting too much emphasis on something because it’s the most recent thing they got or was harder to get. I’m a stand-in for the reader. I let them know when something excites me and encourage them to lean into that. I also egg them on when something’s hard.

When I was working on ‘In God’s Name,’ I had to do stuff that made me really anxious, like trying to get into abusive homes. Being able to have a pregame discussion with Chris Davis, then call him afterwards and tell him what I did, was a huge motivator for me. Being that coach and motivator for my reporters — caring as much about it as they do — is the job. And then we get ready to write. But we don’t wait until the first draft to start writing.

What do you mean by that?
There might be some memos along the way that we write about what the story is, what we’ve got so far, what we think we could get if we report a little bit more. That’s a very low stakes, low pressure way for writers to start digesting their reporting and put in some of the best bits that they’ve got without worrying about the writing part of it. It’s about digesting and thinking on the page. I have them write character thumbnails to flesh out who the different people are that they’ve talked to. I have them write chronologies and findings. Even for somebody writing a narrative investigation, I still have them write bullet points that are never going find their way into print. But we need to know the sharpest version of what our investigation found so that we can convey those findings in the clearest and most authoritative way. All of those writing exercises happen well before the first draft.

I would imagine that at a place like ProPublica, where projects span many months, this kind of digestion and metabolizing as you go is important. In my own experience as a reporter, the fresher and the closer you are to the material, the better — but these projects take a long time, by definition.
Even if you’re working on something quick, jotting down your findings and putting together an outline before you start drafting is essential. It saves you time on the back end. The saying goes, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ With the outline, I want the writer to share the material they’ve got — not just one sentence for each chapter. I want to know what material is going to go in the chapter so I can become as familiar as possible with it. Maybe the chapter should be ordered in a different way, but I wouldn’t know that unless I knew what the material was.

Then comes the draft. First, I look at the draft for content. What more reporting do we need that would make it stronger? Are we making the points we think we’re making? Are we making them as clearly as we want to make them? Big picture, what is the structure that could best serve this story? Then, even when we get down to the writing part, I don’t worry about the specific words until later. I really care about pacing. Then we zero in and zero in and zero in.

What qualities do you think help someone shine in an editing role?
You have to have emotional intelligence. You have to be able to not only worry about the story at hand, but also the person you’re working with and get a good read on them — how they work, what they need. Every individual writer needs something different from an editor and you have to be flexible enough and intuitive enough to give somebody specifically what they need.

There are different kinds of editors that I’ve seen be successful. I’m more of an optimistic Ted Lasso style, cheering people on. I’ve seen really prosecutorial, pessimistic editors who are fantastic. There’s so many different kinds of personalities and also different personalities of reporters. Each editor has to be flexible enough to find — within their own style — what works for a reporter.

We start from zoomed out to way zoomed in on detail.

Also, the editor needs to be somebody who cares about the story and is enthusiastic about it. Somebody who isn’t just optimistic, but is comfortable enough to speak their mind when a story isn’t working. As optimistic and gung-ho as I am, my reporters always know exactly when I don’t get something, I don’t like something, something is not working out for me or I’m not as excited about something as they are. It’s really important to be forthcoming, honest and not shy about expressing that, because then your reporter is not going to feel comfortable expressing how they feel.

You mentioned that ProPublica has an editing bootcamp. What are some other roles or resources you’d recommend to reporters who want to edit?
I am leading an online group seminar through Poynter on investigative narrative in September, which is open for enrollment. We’ll talk a lot about the fundamentals of investigative journalism and reporting, but there’s part of it about storytelling that I think could be really useful to people looking to get into editing. And things like this conversation. I read Nieman Storyboard all the time — those story annotations are helpful in understanding how things come together. Or going to something like the IRE conference. At least from my perspective, when it comes to investigative editing, it helps to have a facility with reporting to understand how you can get the best material is as important as understanding how to craft a good story.

There was a recent interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, with legendary magazine editor Adam Moss, that was one of the best discussions I’ve ever heard about the editing craft. After hearing it, we bought Moss’ new book, ‘The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing’ for all of our editor training participants.

It can be hard to build the experience or reputation you’re talking about if you are a freelancer. What are some ways to strengthen skills in terms of questions like, ‘Should this be a story? What meets the bar of what we should be assigning? How should we think about how this idea relates to the broader picture in the news?’
I think freelancers actually develop the skill a lot more quickly because they have to have a well-honed pitch and frame it well in order for it to get assigned. They learn through the cold, hard feedback of acceptance or rejection and learn to get really good at pitching if they are to survive as freelancers. I have found that the people I’ve worked with — like Lizzie Presser, for example — who came up as freelancers really had to, by necessity, develop that skill of proving out the premise of a story when pitching it. Trying to get feedback for why stories are accepted or rejected is helpful.

What has surprised you most the most about this path and what it entails?
It surprised me at first how hard it was. The tough thing — especially as a reporter who was used to going out and getting the exact answer to the exact question I had — is that someone else is out there in the world processing information and bringing it back to you. You’re one step removed. Your idea of a story as it is coming together might be different from what the reporter sees when they’re out in the field. Being able to interpret the world from one step removed is an adjustment. In some cases, this is why editors exist; you need that independent perspective. It’s an adjustment to rely on the reporter’s interpretation, though it’s something I’ve grown to really love.

You’ve risen up the ranks at ProPublica. How have your responsibilities as an editor changed as you’ve shifted from senior editor to assistant managing editor, and now to deputy managing editor? In particular, how has your relationship to the stories themselves changed as you’ve been promoted?
Senior editors only work with reporters. I had between five and seven I worked with directly. Each of them had a body of work for the year and we went through that entire process for all of our stories. Then as an assistant managing editor, I kept my reporter load but I was also asked to think more systemically about how things were done at ProPublica, like making sure that the most important projects had the resources they needed.

As deputy managing editor, I led a restructure of our visuals department and hired our first ever senior editor for visual storytelling. He is responsible for all of the photography, illustrations, graphics, design and film. Part of my portfolio now is managing those folks. I also have a couple of senior editors under me and talk to them about their stories. I dip in enough and am familiar enough with the material so that if I have a reporting or storytelling idea, I can suggest it as early as possible.

With every step, unfortunately, I have lost direct work with reporters, but I’m clinging for dear life to the last two who I edit. I love reporters more than anything else. I honestly cannot picture a day where I’m not editing reporters.

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Carly Stern is an award-winning enterprise journalist based in San Francisco who covers health, housing and economic security.