In journalism, bylines are always a little bit misleading. Even my quickest blog posts don’t make it to you without the help of a copy editor. And on a project like the one we’ve been publishing this week, even the additional bylines on the stories don’t capture the magnitude of the work. It’s true that a lot of the world on “Dragnets, Dirty Harrys and Dying Hard: 100 years of the police in pop culture” involved me watching movies and television and reading books, taking obsessive notes, organizing those notes into spreadsheets, talking to sources, and ultimately pulling all that material together into everything you’ve read this week. But if I had worked on it alone, this series would be much messier — the original drafts of the first five pieces ran to almost 30,000 words — and it would look very different. In addition to me, 21 people, 19 of them Washington Post staffers and two of them freelancers, worked on various aspects of this project: recording and shooting interviews with my sources; editing and fact-checking the five main stories and the special features we published with them; illustrating the series, doing photo research and designing the layouts and promotional material; and working on getting the stories to readers. That’s an astonishing effort, possible only at an institution like The Post. And it would be a mistake to think that a significantly stripped-down operation could have produced a project of this complexity. I may have written it, but I didn’t build it. In the lead-up to this series, many readers were generous enough to tell me that they’d subscribed to The Post in order to read it. Now that the series has been published — the last piece, a look at the stories pop culture tells about police officers who are women, people of color, or are gay, lesbian or bisexual, arrived this morning — I hope some of you might consider subscribing as well. |
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