This past May, the New York Times had a very nice profile piece on me in the Arts and Leisure section, written by Bob Baker. I liked it. Many people called to say they’d seen it. And that was that.
It was only as I was sifting through the referrer logs on Friday that I noticed Bob Baker has his own website, and that he’d written a detailed explanation of all the editing that went into that story, complete with three different versions of the article. It’s sort of like a DVD extra, print-style.
My undergraduate degree was in journalism, so I’m used to stories being heavily rewritten. But as the subject of the article, it’s weird to see a lot of the quotes that got dropped. I remember saying them, but since they didn’t show up in the “official” article, they don’t feel quite real. They never made it to ink.
You can see all the versions of the article here.