What did I learn from the world’s best editor?
It is an open question who is or was the best editor in the world. For me, Juliusz Rawicz, Julek (pronounced: Yulek, it is Polish) to his friends, was the best newspaper editor I ever knew. His coworkers at Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish newspaper, called him the world’s best editor. My first journalistic experiences are half a century old. I studied electronics at that time. To vent my interest in politics, I started writing for the Polish students’ nationwide biweekly. A few months later, they offered me a monthlong internship at the best Polish political periodical. Editors there extended it to the whole 10 weeks of my vacations and kept me around until a year later, when the apparatchiks had enough and fired them all. In the process, my journey into journalism became a serious matter.At that time, Poland was a socialistic country. There was no freedom of the press. It affected writers in three ways. First, editors were asked to publish a rosy picture of the socialistic reality and avoid news and opinions suggesting otherwise. If they did not, they were fired.
Second, on top of that often vague political pressure, the censors’ office read carefully every publication before printing. Censors had very detailed directives of what could or could not be published. Certain names, facts or phrases could not even be mentioned. Some events could be reported in the middle of the paper in fine print, but not on the front page. Editors knew most of the censors’ directives and tried to be proactive; too many censors’ interventions were a way to lose a job. Lastly, authors aware of that system self-censored their writings. In Polish, being politically correct is often expressed as sticking to a vertical line of a doctrine. We joked that it was an art to keep writing (politically) plumb while maintaining the level (of writing quality).
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