The Why, Who and How of the Editorial Page.

by Kenneth Rystrom Paperback, 376 pages 3rd edition (1999) Strata Publishing Company ISBN: 1891136011 price $33.75

New edition of text reflects changes

When the battle's over, our critics say, we leave the ivory tower and come down to do our job: killing the wounded. But what happens when the wounded rear up and offer us a fight? At that point, we should drop the cudgels and pick up a copy of Kenneth Rystrom's The Why, Who and How of the Editorial Page.

We're at a point in our profession when our existence is being increasingly questioned. Publishers want to cut back editorial pages, or at least have more control over what we do. Some editorialists, such as Ronald Clark of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, have responded to critics by occasionally eliminating the traditional editorial brace. And we all face daily struggles to make our pages more open to readers while preserving what integrity is still possessed by the scrap of newsprint we call our own.

At such a fork in the road, there's no better guide for finding our way than understanding how we got here in the first place. Rystrom, a retired Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University professor, is a former editorial page writer and editor, as well as former president of NCEW. In the third edition of his fine guide to doing our jobs, Rystrom shows us how we arrived at the modern editorial page. From Peter Zenger and his Philadelphia lawyer to Horace Greeley and the thunderers of 19th-century editorial writing, Rystrom traces a history of opinion-writing.

Rystrom offers us a wide scope of opinion-writing lore, and he doesn't fall into the trap of limiting his history to a single group. He acknowledges John Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish, the founders of the first black newspaper (although he places Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the wrong time period) and he notes the work of Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin in promoting women's issues when such concerns were unpopular.

By the time Rystrom competes his historical tour, it's hard not to feel a little pride in doing something so many others have done so well.

If that's not enough balm for the ego, Rystrom discusses what sort of folks become editorial writers. Many of us in this profession love to read and think reflectively. We learn to write with authority and clarity, wearing our hearts and minds on our sleeves with a grace and dignity that comes of a commitment to our profession (or at least we should!).

Rystrom honors those qualities and, by discussing them with such an evident pride in our profession, revivifies us. Again, it's a good book to have around when the going gets tough.

And it only gets better. In the second section lies the meat of the book, and there Rystrom gets down to business. He slices up editorials to show us how to put one together. Even the most jaded editorial writer can learn something here. At one point, he even offers a formula for successful editorial writing that could save the day during one of those 5:45 deadline emergencies. Rystrom offers examples of poor editorials, mercifully sparing us from shame by using journalism students' work as fodder. Then he shows us some of the best editorial writing, annotating both sets of examples to provide even more instruction. Setting moods, determining audiences, carefully delineating just the right word - all are covered in this section.

Rystrom also offers a fine array of resources, and he shows his flexibility by including new Web sites along with standbys such as the Bible, Shakespeare, and Strunk and White's little book.

The final section examines what our pages look like, what they contain, and how different papers are coping with the mandate to find ways to bring more readers to our product. He illustrates this section with full pages from various newspapers, then describes the mechanics involved in selecting columnists and cartoonists and bringing readers into the pages. There's a wonderful sense of order, a feeling of a circle completed, in this section.

To understand that symmetry, go back to the first section, where Rystrom closes a chapter in his first section with a quote from James Parton, a 19th-century biographer of Horace Greeley: "The power and success of a newspaper depend wholly and absolutely upon its success in getting, and its skill in exhibiting, the news." Parton was describing the end of the age of individual journalism, when Greeley, James Cullen Bryant, James Gordon Bennett, and others attracted readers through the celebrity power of their names. But Parton could just as well have been describing today's market, where we compete against faster and faster modes of communication in our struggle to offer insight that matters - and is read.

A disturbing recurrent theme in Rystrom's book is the tardiness that opinion writers exhibit when it comes to trends that affect us. We're good at telling readers why they should care about events miles and even years away from the average home, but we fail when it comes to adjusting to changing times. Rystrom describes the first meeting of what would become the National Conference of Editorial Writers, held in 1947, and how one participant remarked that editorial writers were the last arm of journalism to form any sort of advocacy group. Later, Rystrom describes a 1986 survey that found that editorial pages remained the most unchanged sections of the newspapers over the last 40 years.

Although we've made efforts to change since that survey, we're still behind. Too often we'd rather seek refuge in the tower than do what Rystrom urges us to do - go to the agora, shop for ideas, then make our pages marketplaces of community thought.

That's a lot easier to say than it is to do. However, Kenneth Rystrom, with his invaluable book, can set us all on the right track toward achieving that goal.

NCEW member James M. Abraham is an editorial writer with the Tallahassee Democrat. His e-mail address is [e-mail]