Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Dealing with celebrities
Lessons from my story

Most of the time, famous people were trouble.

Politicians would promise pieces and then never file, giving no explanation. Celebrities resisted efforts to make their writing more concrete and specific.

You’d think, with all the money they spend on public relations experts, that their pieces would arrive in perfect condition. But that was rarely the case. They had the same problems making successful arguments that everyone has. The difference? They could go straight to the top. Their submissions never languished in a slush pile.

Famous people often started with my boss, Andy Rosenthal, or the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger. Andy and Arthur nearly always said the decision was mine, but I knew they would have to take responsibility for whatever I did. They never forced me to run anything I didn’t want to run.

I remember one submission from a famous person that elicited the typical reaction from one of my editors: “This seems painfully obvious. But do we want it? For their names?” If you write something painfully obvious and you’re not famous, your work will never make it out of the pile of unsolicited manuscripts.

When we decided against the piece, Andy said, “I’ll just take the heat when it goes into the Post or the Journal.” The next week, another famous man, another obvious piece. When I said no, which meant Andy would have to justify my actions, I experienced anew what a great boss he was. He never made me feel I had to take substandard pieces. He would turn it into a joke—in that case, emailing me back, “Heavy sigh. Why can’t we be fabulously wealthy instead of having to deal with this?”

Some celebrities rejected us after we attempted to edit their work. They preferred to publish someplace that didn’t demand so much of them or violate what they considered their essence. Famous people have no interest in getting a note back that says, “We would like to run this, but we need a rewrite; our questions are below.” That just doesn’t happen. They would rather take it somewhere else than go through that, and I don’t blame them. They didn’t have to publish in the Times. Whatever they had to say would end up in front of people through social media. We needed them more than they needed us.

When I speak to students, professors, and others interested in opinion writing, they always want to know about the celebrities I have worked with. Yet that was my least favorite part of the job. We often had to reject their work, and that felt weird. I always had to tell myself that I was thinking of the reader. If I started running articles solely because of who the authors were, I would be lowering standards, and that would hurt the Times. I didn’t want to disappoint readers with anything that seemed shallow or pandering. Although they don’t usually drop their subscriptions because of just one article, subscribers eventually will walk if quality declines.

Celebrities often fell into the trap of believing that they could say anything and it would be published. Maybe their handlers told them their names were enough to sell it, but that wasn’t true. There has to be a point, and it has to be a surprising one, no matter your name or pedigree.

I remember having to reject a piece from Bono, the lead singer for U2, who had previously done a series of well-received columns as a contributing opinion writer. One September day, his public relations person emailed my boss saying that she wanted to chat. And yes, they always want to chat. Andy sent her to me, and as usual I too avoided the phone, asking her to just send the piece so I could share it with my editors. People think that personal contact will help; but many editors resist it because those calls take time and, in the end, are not why things get accepted or rejected. I found it useful to get to know writers only when they were regulars, and our coffee meetings were devoted to thinking of ideas for great pieces. It’s your writing, not your contacts, that will make you successful.

When Bono’s piece arrived, I sent it around without saying what I thought. One of the longtime editors, always civilized and succinct, had a reaction that summed up the problems quite well: “It feels too much like a guided tour of African despair—not surprising at 1,600 words. Maybe with a little more focus, much shorter?”

Others pointed out that Bono had violated a cardinal rule of writing an op-ed: Don’t call for something that will never happen, like spending trillions on Africa. It’s meaningless. Another editor thought the piece would grate on our readers, and he quoted a line from a 2005 Times Op-Ed piece: “There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.”

So, rejected it was.

A week later, a different public relations person got in touch with a draft of an op-ed, now from Bono and Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. Were we ready to reject that duo? Just a week later? Again, the editors didn’t like it. They criticized the piece as being “obvious,” “painful,” “self-serving.” But they acknowledged the power of big names and the audience interest in them.

I decided to try. The article was tied to a speech that Zuckerberg was scheduled to give at the United Nations, which made it newsy. Maybe it could be saved. Or maybe I was just being a wimp, and too human? Had I used up all my willpower on the first submission? I wrote back to the public relations person saying that I needed a rewrite, and I gave him some suggestions on how to be more specific in a way that I thought would interest readers. He needed to think about what news they could create because, given the authors, the piece would be picked up by other news outlets. (You don’t have to be famous to write an article that makes news. When Greg Smith quit his job at Goldman Sachs on the Op-Ed page with a critique of the firm’s culture, the reaction was huge.)

In our editing, we asked Bono and Zuckerberg to say more than just that people needed digital access. How, we asked, do you manage that when hundreds of millions of people don’t even have electricity? Shockingly, a short time later, they delivered a new, much better piece. It was more to the point and had specific answers to the questions we had posed. It was pruned of irritatingly vague suggestions, and we were happy to publish it. Despite being famous, these celebrities too had to meet the demands we made of all pieces: that they be surprising, concrete, and persuasive.

Particularly difficult were the pieces from accomplished writers and novelists. There was no question they could write, better than any of us could. But doing a bestselling nonfiction book or an award-winning novel is no guarantee of a successful op-ed. They are totally different forms.

I remember a piece from a famous novelist. It seemed, with some edits, like something we could publish. We made suggestions, and she sent back a revise through her representative. That version was better, but it still had some parts we didn’t like because they were too promotional and sounded like an infomercial. It also took too long to get to the point. But as one editor said, “If she’ll let us cut it right down, I vote yes.”

We struggled to meet our standards and to make her happy. We knew we had to tread carefully, because we did want to publish her. I told her representative that we would edit her revised article and trim it to the length that suited our space. I didn’t think we had anything drastic, so I was surprised and disappointed to hear a few days later that they were ditching us.

Politicians could be difficult, too. They would promise pieces and then fail to deliver. One time, the communications staff for Hillary Clinton offered something that they promised would be both long and important for our Sunday section, which meant holding open space that would be hard to fill if she failed to come through. Clinton’s people were coy and wouldn’t tell us what she was going to say, but we were game. Send it, we said, we’re waiting.

And wait we did.

We waited. We emailed. They said it was coming. Then they said they needed a little more time. This was not our first experience with her communications staff. As the editor who was handling it wrote at the very beginning, “Let’s just try to make sure they’ll send it by 3 but don’t send it until 6 and then pull it at 7:45 . . . just kidding.”

Well, it happened again. Silence. Crickets. Nothing ever came, not even an explanation of why it wasn’t coming.

Why? Because those things are group efforts, even though they appear under the name of one person. More people, more problems. The editor who had been burned was still willing to work with Clinton’s people. He wrote, “I expect we’ll get something sans apology around 8, and they’ll be apoplectic when I tell them it’s too late. Still, we should hold out for possibly running this hypothetical piece on Tuesday, assuming it exists and we like it.”

Often people with power or fame just wouldn’t respond to emails. They knew we needed them more than we needed us. Then they would say they wanted to move their piece to a different date, so we would go through the agony of waiting all over again. Or we would just never hear back, and see their piece with no edits in another publication, making the lesson clear: if you dare to ask questions or require edits, we will just go somewhere else, without even telling you.

While we were discouraged by how difficult it could be to edit people who were annoyed with our questions, we at least had one another. I remember the time a well-known academic was so obnoxious to an editor in a phone call that we all stood and cheered when she finally hung up. Don’t be abusive; screaming never makes an editor want to bend to your will.

Of course we weren’t mistreated by all celebrities. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, wrote a series of articles about women in the workplace with Adam Grant, the Penn professor who was one of our regular contributors. Adam was always a pleasure to work with—smart ideas, fast delivery—and his friend Sheryl was similar.

Occasionally, I was utterly wrong about people. In the spring of 2011, I headed toward my daughter’s graduation from Kenyon College with hostile feelings about the graduation speaker. We would be hearing from Jonathan Franzen, whose novels I had deliberately never read. I had decided that life was too short to spend my time reading someone I believed to be a misogynist. In a well-publicized dustup, he had declined to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show, implying that he didn’t care about her all-female audience. I figured there were tons of novels I wanted to read, so why give my time and money to someone with disdain for people like me?

Like everyone, I can be stupid and bullheaded. I was wrong about him. His speech about technology and nature was so inspiring I shifted from being an enemy to a starstruck fan. When I got back to New York, I found Franzen’s email in our system. After telling him how much I had liked his speech, I asked whether we could run it in Op-Ed. We didn’t usually run speeches as essays, but I found his talk so remarkable I figured it was worth breaking the rule. He was lovely to deal with and easy to edit, not in the least condescending. I was, of course, humbled. I wondered how many other people in my life I had been wrong about.