A.J. Korn, 17, is a senior at Edison High School in Huntington Beach who has been accepted into the Air Force Academy. He visited the OCBJ recently for a class project. Not only was his resulting paper graded an “A,” we thought it was good enough to earn A.J. a bylined article.
As I entered the Orange County Business Journal office and sat down to talk with the editor, Rick Reiff, I was a bit nervous. When I called to see if I could come in and observe him for a while he was more than happy to accept; he said that it was perfect timing because they were on deadline and there would be a lot of action. The one catch was that Mr. Reiff was going to be busy, which meant I couldn’t ask him too many questions, I would just have to observe. I could understand that request, but luckily through the course of the afternoon I was able to get in a few questions.
Mr. Reiff is the editor of the Orange County Business Journal, a weekly newspaper that caters to the business owner and the people who produce goods and services. They have a circulation of about 23,000. They get the bulk of their profit through the advertisements they sell. The paper may be small, but it ships to some of the most influential people in Orange County, and everyone who knows anything about business knows they can find the top business stories in the Journal. Mr. Reiff told me that his job was to “scoop the dailies.”
Being an editor, he has to put all his concentration into reading articles getting ready to go to print. He does more than just look for typos, he actually reads for content and then talks with the writer about how to make the story better. Sometimes he even makes up the headlines and leads, the first sentence designed to catch the reader’s attention and make him read the whole article. This wouldn’t be too hard, except that he must do this for around 60 articles, all in the span of about one or two days.
Luckily he has help doing this, in the form of a managing editor. The managing editor is just like the editor except without the nice office, or at least that is the way it seemed to me.
Besides editing, Mr. Reiff also acts a manager to the 12 reporters working under him, talks to sources to confirm stories, as well as doing a two-to-three minute spot on television every week. Before coming to the Journal, Mr. Reiff was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who worked on the 1986 Goodyear takeover story.
While I was in Mr. Reiff’s office observing him, there was never a dull moment. Whether it was editing an article, checking his e-mail messages, talking to a reporter or ordering around his team, the place was always busy.
In his office is a white board sectioned off into squares, with each section representing a page in the paper, and in each square is an article planned to go in that page.
There are also back-up articles which are referred to as “being in the bullpen.” Mr. Reiff said that they never finish all the stories they have each week so the way they keep their paper full is to have a surplus of articles. A secondary benefit of doing it this way is that the editor can pick and choose which articles he wants in the paper. Sometimes a story isn’t to his liking and he can fill its spot with a more valuable one.
This is an awesome job for anyone who loves writing and bossing other people around. There’s never a dull moment and you’re always doing something new and current. Working on a newspaper means knowing the news before everyone else and generally knowing everything about current events.
It’s an exciting and fun job, but there are some downsides. There is quite a bit of liability, because if something goes wrong it means it was your fault. Of course there are great rewards, as well, because when things go well it is also your fault.
An editor can make or break a paper. I was very pleased to get to watch Mr. Reiff in action and also a little in awe, and I think there’s a good chance that I could be meeting with him again very soon.
