When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

“A more confident editor would probably have been elated at the news. I am not made of such vibrant stuff. My foremost worry was one that I’d had the whole time we were working on the article: that we had somehow gotten it wrong. The fact of the matter was, we weren’t 100 percent sure we had the right man. A mistake of such magnitude becomes the stuff of legend and winds up in the first paragraph of your obituary.”

Graydon Carter employs a self-deprecating, humble tone when describing his work on the Deep Throat story. He isn’t claiming ultimate authority over the story, and is rather acknowledging his lack of “confidence” and “vibrancy.” By including these vulnerable aspects of his character at the forefront of the memoir, Carter is establishing trust with his reader. This passage also conveys the complexity, responsibility, and strain of editorial work like Carter’s.

“In those days, you didn’t announce news with a tweet. You released it in successive waves to selected press outlets. Or you released it all at once and wide to the wire services, newspapers, and television news divisions. Which is what we did with our Deep Throat story.”

Carter’s remarks on his editorial work at the time of the Deep Throat Story introduce his explorations of The Evolution of Print Journalism in the Digital Era. Although Carter has been an editor for decades, in the earlier stages of his career he was working in a more analogue world. He uses the second person point of view in this passage to affect a pedagogical tone—he is informing his reader about the journalism world in the era he was working. A passage like this one offers historical and cultural background for the events Carter is recounting.