Three Questions with Slate editor Rebecca Onion
& also a historian, a writer, a culture editor, a podcast enthusiast, and more!
Thrilled about having the thoughtful, thorough, and endlessly curious Rebecca Onion on the Pine State three questions stack today. One of my scroll-zoning activities is moseying over to Rebecca’s website and reading what she’s been editing and writing lately. It was her work that single-handedly convinced me to subscribe to Slate.
When longform writing and journalism is at the stake, Rebecca’s work is unexpected, timely, and always features a part of a larger conversation that I hadn’t yet thought about. In other words, she’s an editor and writer who is full of surprises. Whenever I pitch her I often think of her in my head as an editorial version of the Oologies podcast, or an editorial Ms. Valerie Frizzle—fascinating history, fascinating science, fascinating culture, and truly fascinating, nook & cranny, personal histories. Prepare to be riveted!
I think of you as an editor with an eye toward history, but also making history accessible to a wide range of readers (or perhaps, less readers with backgrounds in academia) and I’d love to hear strategies of yours (both editorially and writerly) that you think could help writers imbue history into their work without it veering toward academic paper OR being a drop-in fact spree in a lyric essay? Craft strategy for history with personality, I’ll call it.
My thinking on this has evolved a lot over the years, as I’ve transitioned away from being a “history writer” and toward being a “culture and life editor with an abiding interest in history.” Along the same timeline, and perhaps not coincidentally, my perception is that people who read articles online have gone from seeing the term “history” in the framing of a piece as a plus, to seeing the word as signaling duty—”oh no, ‘history,’ I’ll have to eat my vegetables.” (We can see this phenomenon in play when we A/B test headlines ... and it’s sobering.)
I have all kinds of theories as to why this has occurred, and part of me suspects that this attitude may be the status quo, and the years between 2012 and 2021-ish, when readers were hungry for historical writing, were the aberration. But! It is what it is.
I absolutely love historical digressions in non-historical pieces where it’s very clear that the history needs to be there. It should not feel at all like the reader is going to be able to skim or skip this part and pick back up with the non-history stuff later. The connections should feel vital; the facts and situations described should be vivid. If it’s not that way, it’s not great to force it.
The same goes for pieces that are history-first, like the ones we run in our History rubric. A few history pieces I’ve edited in the past few years that were start-to-finish urgent-feeling to me were Max Felker-Kantor’s piece about DARE snitches, a two-word concept I had never heard of and immediately needed to know more about, and Flora Cassen’s piece about her family member who was a kapo during World War II, which was brave and personal and fascinating.
What I really admire about you as a journalist and editor is that you’re always transparent (from process to pay), and the media landscape has gotten a lot of flack for this recently–are there ways (boundaries?) you use to manage your workload as an editor, or things you wish writers understood about that workload and how the process works?
Between 2012 and now, I went from grad school, to being a freelancer, to being on staff as a writer, to being on staff as an editor. So I’ve seen this from a bunch of different angles. What I definitely didn’t realize as a freelancer, and mostly didn’t realize as a staff writer, is that editors have to become gatekeepers, out of self-protection. You can be a nice gatekeeper, but you still have to be selective from the start, or you will end up commissioning stories that don’t work, struggling through edits, then risking putting up something subpar, or else having to have the dreaded “We’re killing this” conversation. You only have to go through that process once or twice before you see that taking pieces that “kind of” work and giving them love until they do will absolutely drain you of bandwidth. If editors seem picky or unimaginative in relationship to freelancers’ pitches, this is why. (I am not telling any editor anything they don’t already know! But I didn’t think of it this way as a writer.)
I try to always write back to pitches when I’m passing, usually using a macro (a canned response)—unless the pitcher is someone I’ve worked with before, and then sometimes I’ll offer a line or two of more specific feedback explaining why we are passing on the concept. I wish writers knew that offering specific feedback on a pitch if it doesn’t work is not something we can usually do. I often get replies to canned passes asking for more specifics, and then I just….don’t write back. It’s kind of a big ask, and going into it with someone we don’t know also opens us up to a whole long email chain, a debate, a back-and-forth. We can’t really do that, unless there’s a pre-existing relationship we’re trying to maintain. I hate to say it, but it’s just the job!
I love the range of both the things you’ve written about previously to pieces you’ve edited, and I’m assuming that’s because “Life & Culture” is such a large funnel to work within, but when do you know a pitch or a piece is DOING what it should (that tingling feeling?) and if that is too hard to pin down (you just know), then what are some themes / historical references / identities or audiences you would love to see in your inbox at Slate?
It is so hard to pin down, but if a piece idea or a pitch will work, it has a few qualities.
First, the idea or the piece has to be written in a way that has me reading from beginning to end of the email or the draft. As a reader online, I have really started to notice in the past couple of years that most articles are easy to skip away from, but certain writers compel readership—and this ability has little to do with the topic. They are confident, never dutiful; they have sparkle. They show that they can self-edit a bit, and avoid cliché, and understand where things lag and where they move. This quality of brio is hard to quantify, and hard to teach! (I sometimes follow Substackers, find out they have it just by dint of keeping me reading, then commission them; this happened with Phil Christman, who I had write about Rod Dreher last year.)
Second, especially with my particular pitch inbox, where I’m often fielding ideas about pieces that respond to the news cycle or the zeitgeist, the pitch or piece needs to show that it understands what’s been said, and what’s left to say. This is harder than you might think, because the discourse moves faster than a herd of horses on the open plain. But when a pitch lands that is obviously going to add something to the conversation, we know it right away. (Examples from this year of editing are Aaron Bady’s critique of Dune: Part Two, which came from me seeing Aaron talk through the ideas on Twitter—I thought, “This hasn’t been done yet,” and reached out.)
Third, if it’s for a piece that requires reporting, the pitch needs to demonstrate that the writer has the correct scope of reporting in mind, and that they can execute on what they’re proposing. (A few years ago Adam Kotsko wrote about the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s antivax ideas for me, and that was a good example of this. He had worked with Agamben personally, had read all of his work, and was familiar with his recent turn before we started working on this piece together, all of which led me to believe he could bring this one home—which, he did.)
Fourth, there’s the matter of “buzz” or “juice” or however you want to say it. To use a competitor with a very finely honed sense of buzz as an example, look at everything The Cut publishes. The pieces (whether reported features or personal essays) have in common the fact that the writers are unafraid of embarrassing themselves, a little bit or a lot. They’re taking a risk, zeroing in on controversy, not writing things where people will nod along and say, “That’s nice.” Whether or not you agree that Kerry Howley should have gone after Andrew Huberman like that, I read every word of that piece. And whether or not you think the $50K-in-a-shoebox writer should have put her business out there, I bet you read the essay.
Not everything we publish has to have this “oh lord, here we go” quality—there’s plenty of room at Slate for explainers, for example, which don’t always read that way—but it definitely moves a pitch along if it does.
* Bonus question *
I know you love podcasts (see playlist here), so if you could recommend ONE podcast (or even podcast episode) for folks right now, what would you recommend?
Ooooooh I love this question. I have really been loving a few pods lately. (Keep in mind that I listen almost solely to chat podcasts, and so chemistry is the number one thing that matters to me…chemistry, before all!) A newish one I like is Mixed Signals, from Semafor—a media podcast with Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza. As hosts, they seem to have clicked right away. I learn a lot about the industry I’m in by listening, but it would probably be of interest to anyone curious about the money behind media. And I just started listening to Blank Check with Griffin & David, about movies; this year I started up a “movie every weekend” habit, and cinema podcasts became, correspondingly, much more important to my life. This pod is long-running, and the vibes are immaculate.
Rebecca Onion is a senior editor at Slate and the author of Innocent Experiments.
Awesome work!