Instant Karma

I told you that the whole "information silo" thing about Substack was overblown.

Oceanside, CA. March 2025. Jim Trageser is the other guy.

Note to readers. It was a toss-up whether or not to push this piece out as a note or a column. I chose to publish it as a column because of the length. It’s a worthy followup to yesterday’s column from a great source. Thanks for your indulgence.

Yesterday’s column, “What I’ve learned from four years on Substack,” elicited an interesting response from a colleague that nicely made the case for one of the column’s central tenets: that the “information silo” effect, a terminal illness allegedly suffered by writers leaving legacy media to strike out on their own, is vastly overblown.

From yesterday’s column:

One of the funnier shots I took after leaving legacy media was that my work would suffer without an editor. If anything, unhelpful and biased editing designed to alter my opinion was one of the constant, grating irritations that drove me to step away from legacy media. Bear in mind that I was an op-ed writer and essayist (and very occasionally a feature writer). All of that generally comes with varying but significant degrees of carte blanche…

Copy editors have been the bane of my writing existence. For those of you who may not know, copy editors are responsible for what is commonly thought of as proofreading, i.e., correcting spelling, punctuation, etc. In many publications, copy editors are also responsible for headlines and pull quotes as well. Good copy editors are worth their weight in gold. The problem is that almost none exist anymore…

During the George Floyd protests in 2020, I wrote an article that was, presciently as it turns out, highly critical of Black Lives Matter. I thought then that BLM was an opportunistic scam, and I think that opinion has been well-acquitted in the fullness of time. But this column was withheld from publication by the copy desk pending some suggested edits that would have muted the most serious criticisms of financial impropriety. When I refused, the 20-something very liberal copy editor justified rejecting the column because “Now is not the time for this. I’m doing you a favor.”

When I composed this, I thought that I might actually be one of the few page one columnists in America to have this problem. I was reasonably sure that this was a Pocatello, Idaho, podunk backwater and land of the not-ready-for-primetime-players newsroom issue. “Surely,” I assumed, “big city columnists don’t have to endure anything like this.”

Well, not so fast. This comment on the column came from my buddy Jim Trageser, a well-known and respected San Diego area columnist and feature writer of many decades who now writes Lost in Cyberspace.

I had one copy editor at my last daily paper - a self-confessed Marxist who once snuck in after the ME had gone home and swapped in the column the ME had earlier rejected, and then had production re-run the plate. He only got suspended for a week, I think. Should have been fired.

But as a self-deluded little man, he would regularly try to rewrite my lead Sunday opinion column. Every damn week.

By that time, I had a quarter-century in the business, and won Best Opinion Column nearly every year in the local journalism awards contests.

So I’d earned the right to veer a bit from the AP Style Guide, and even Strunk & White, in my opinion columns.

I tend to be very conscious of rhythm and meter in my opinion writing, and often resort to a series of short sentence fragments separated by periods to make a point.

He would laboriously re-write each into a full, grammatically correct sentence.

And in the process, utterly kill any flow the column had before.

I had the great benefit of being the Opinion Pages Editor at the time - my own section editor! - reporting only to the managing editor and editor in chief (and publisher, of course).

After this angry copy editor would mangle my column, I’d go back into the system, and restore the original. He’d then go running to the editor in chief or managing editor and say I had no right to overrule the copy desk.

Instant freaking karma! Two guys, 800 physical miles and a media landscape galaxy apart, same problem.

I try to keep columns under 2000 words. It’s a self-discipline thing. It’s easier on the reader and keeps the gratuitous prose and unnecessary exposition to a minimum. But I could have bolted every single word that Jim wrote in his comment onto my column, changed a few names and places, and what he said would have been almost exactly my own experience in more detail.

And not just the parts of his response about mucking with themes and ideas. The part about destroying the beat and meter of a column with an elán-altering dose of AP correct style almost caused me to have a sympathetic stroke. Any writer worth their salt develops a style that readers come to recognize and use as a cipher. It’s part of any decent writer’s bag of tricks (it’s also part of what distinguishes us from AI). Don’t like my em dashes? Perch on it, gumby.

Copy editing motherfu#%er$ with woke agendas and an AP style fetish. Who knew? I certainly didn’t, until I met Jim on Substack.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.