The Last Rewrite Man
We were once a rewrite man at the Sun-Times. We can describe the breed with confidence. A rewrite man might be thought of as a literate reporter, a master of such advanced techniques as spelling and writing in complete sentences. Add to his virtues the stoicism it takes to sit at a keyboard, vised in lacerating ear phones, cajoling a bumbling correspondent in the field who can barely read his own notes, let alone make a coherent narrative of them. And when catastrophe breaks far from home, a great rewrite man’s genius emerges in full force. “Working the phones,” he will have questioned eyewitnesses, survivors, and all the proper authorities, and spun out his riveting tale hours before the braying lug under whose byline the tale will run careers into town in a rental car in pathetic search of someone to tell him what happened.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I don’t know when rewrite men were created–it would be an interesting thing to find out,” said Crimmins. “Probably somewhere in the early part of this century, when newspapers started to have multiple editions and stories would develop, expand, change, contradict themselves in every edition until the editions ran out. Somebody had to keep rewriting them for every edition.”
“I do a story from scratch if there’s nobody around, or if they decide I’m the guy they want to do this. I do it all by phone. And several times a week they send somebody to the scene of some spot news event that is too close to deadline for them to come back and write a story. So that person, or those people if there’s more than one, will be told to call me and I will take down what they say, quiz them a little bit, and write a story.”
Crimmins did his best to ignore his boss. “But even then, I didn’t always write my own stories. The Hanrahan trial–maybe you remember Hanrahan [the state’s attorney] went on trial the latter half of ’72, along with the police officers who were in on the [1969] Black Panther raid and a couple of assistant state’s attorneys, a deputy superintendent of police, a whole bunch of guys. I rarely wrote that story, the reason being you had to turn it in during a break in testimony and race back to the courtroom trying not to miss anything.
What does a magazine owe an advertiser who’s certain not to like an upcoming article? Advance notice, says Commonwealth Edison.
“Our policy,” says Fandell, “is not to advise people about what the content of the magazine is. I’ve been in this business 30 years and I’ve never heard of a self-respecting publication that did that. . . . I think it’s ethically improper for a publication to do that.”
