Roadkill journalism resurrected

Vancouver Sun, July 2004

Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print
by David Wallis (ed)
Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books
430 pages
ISBN 1560255811
Price: $23.95

If writers are from Mars, editors are from Venus. While most freelance scribes love what they do for a living, many will add darkly "except for this one editor," before regaling you with a rather-too-detailed account of how a beloved article was ruined at the hands of a nutbar senior staffer. Writers and editors, forced into a marriage of convenience in order to give birth to a great story, don't always see eye-to-eye. These relationships sometimes falter, occasionally leaving the completed article without a page to call its own. Until now.

But although Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, edited by US writer David Wallis, offers a home to 24 orphaned feature stories commissioned and then aborted by the likes of GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Saturday Night and The New Yorker, the writers involved often hint at forces other than editors behind the demise of their articles.

In short, sometimes furious introductions to their own stories, freelance writers -- including heavyweights like Robert Fisk, P.J. O'Rourke and Terry Southern -- outline their experiences of the Machiavellian manoeuvrings that shape what appears on the page at most publications. We hear of tobacco companies threatening to pull their advertising if stories they don't like are run; left-leaning publishers squashing articles that don't fit their ideologies; and, most damning of all, the dumbing down of content, with even the most venerable publications reluctant to stray far from the altar of celebrity obsession.

There's plenty of grist for the conspiracy theory mill here. Writer Mark Schone tells us how Rolling Stone inexplicably nixed his feature on the questionable suicide of the author of an unfavourable George W. Bush biography, while Jan Pottker reports how a former CIA chief orchestrated a dirty tricks campaign against her on behalf of a company whose questionable business practices she exposed.

But aside from these disquieting subtexts, Killed can simply be enjoyed as a celebration of journalistic excellence, containing many superb, page-turning feature stories produced by writers at the top of their game.

Among the best is a detailed expose by Jon Entine of the alleged less-than-green credentials of the Body Shop and its founder Anita Roddick, commissioned and killed by Vanity Fair in 1994 at a time when the company was at the height of its global expansion. Interviewing employees, Third World workers, disgruntled franchisees and former managers, the story is a textbook example of great investigative journalism.

Another feature, destined for Saturday Night but nixed after a new editor came to power, is by Canadian National Magazine Award winner Gerald Hannon. His frank, eye-opening account of his alternative career as a sex worker is the kind of bold, risqué story that any magazine worth its salt would publish.

Not all the stories are from recent years, though. The anthology includes a book review by George Orwell in which he criticizes the overly-lavish lifestyle of British expat businessmen. Regarded as unpatriotic by the London Observer, the story was killed in 1942, a scenario which one of the 20th century's finest essayist was more than familiar with. In an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, we hear of Orwell's "almost continual struggles for the right to be published... he didn't make anything like a steady income until he was almost on his deathbed."

Rejection, however, can sometimes breed even greater success. An outstanding feature by Betty Friedan, included here and smothered by McCall's in 1958, led to a book that helped spark the 1960s feminist movement. The essay, which radically encouraged women to treat college seriously rather than as a hiccup before marriage, was transformed into the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. It's still in print today.

Killed is packed with the kind of long-form feature stories that appeal to hungry news hounds and greedy magazine junkies. And while the lack of comment from publications on why they turned down these articles is an obvious weakness -- we hear only from chagrined writers and never from the editors who rejected them -- most of these stories clearly deserve the vindication of publication.

Wallis, who says most of his budget was spent on fact-checking some of the potentially libellous articles, should be commended for ensuring that these stories are finally seeing the light of day. We should encourage him to turn this into an annual endeavour where great features from around the world -- which are commissioned and then pulled by publications all the time -- receive safe passage to their waiting readers.

John Lee (www3.telus.net/johnlee) is a Vancouver freelance feature writer whose work has appeared in more than 70 print publications around the world.