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Pulitzer Prize winner Gartner shares writing tips, names favorite writers while promoting new book

By Daniel C. Hartman
Greenlee Web Team

By Karla Martinez, Greenlee Web Team Journalist Michael Gartner lectures at the Memorial Union on Jan. 24.

Who would a man that won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing list as his favorite editorial writers of all time?

And what bit of advice was told to him by one of those favorite writers that he still lives by today?

Those questions were answered Jan. 24 as Michael Gartner shared selections from his new book, “Outrage, Passion and Uncommon Sense: How Editorial Writers Have Taken On and Helped Shape the Great American Issues of the Past 150 Years.”

Speaking to a crowd of about 200 in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union, Gartner, whose resume includes serving as Page One editor of the Wall Street Journal and president of NBC News, said he had four favorite writers and explained how he came to pick them.

“I chose four people from four different generations,” Gartner said. “First is Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. He invented the editorial page. You know somebody had to. He separated the editorial content from news content and put it on a separate page, and he did it in the 1850s.”

The reason Greeley was first, Gartner said, was because of an 1862 editorial he wrote.

That editorial was probably indirectly responsible for President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The next two writers Gartner listed were Henry Watterson, a journalist who founded the Louisville Courier-Journal and William Allen White, owner and editor of the Emporia (Kan.) Gazette. The final writer was the unusually named Vermont Connecticut Royster, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Gartner, who used to co-own The Tribune in Ames and served in various positions at the Des Moines Register including editor, said that the four men all shared important traits that made them exceptional editorial writers.

“The quality that brought them together is that they were first off great reporters,” he said. “They wrote with elegance and they were eloquent and they were very persuasive.”

It was from Royster that Gartner said he learned about what goes into an editorial, just before he came back to Iowa from working at the Wall Street Journal.

“He said to me, ‘you ever written an editorial?’ and I said, ‘no sir, I haven’t.’ He said ‘do you know how to write an editorial?’ I said, ‘no, but I expect you’re about to tell me.’ He said, ‘yes, it’s simple; give the other side the space and give your side the thought.’ “

Gartner said that is advice he still lives by today.

“I always thought that was a spectacular rule,” Gartner said. “In other words be fair, but be persuasive. Use the facts the best way you know how like a lawyer does in a brief. It was just wonderful, wonderful advice.”

 

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