Editor’s Page: All I Gotta Do Is Write It

I spent my college summers painting houses. I’d load up my teal-green Saturn with my meager belongings — including the strange lawn gnome my friend Rob gave me when I left for Penn State — and head back to the Philadelphia suburbs to lend Bill Dean Painting, Inc., a hand with the small exterior jobs he couldn’t do on his own.

Poor old Bill. If there ever was a man in need of a skilled total joints surgeon, it was one William Dean. Just thinking about that man’s painfully awkward gait makes me want to ice down my knees. (To any professional house painters who may be reading this: Spring for the knee pads. Trust me!)

I loved the painting part. Perched up at precarious angles on a rickety decades-old ladder, I passed many enjoyable days touching up shutters or windowpanes while personally curated mix CDs filled with the staples of 90s rock — Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and that one really cool song with the word “copacetic” in it — blasted from the speakers of my Sony boombox on the ground below.

Everything did feel “in excellent order” when I had a brush in my hand. Unfortunately, the actual painting involved in the job was fairly limited. As old bone-on-bone Billy pointed out to me on the first day of the job: “The painting’s the easy part — it’s the prep work that takes all the time.”

Writing reported features is similar in a lot of ways to painting houses — the bulk of the work takes place in the prep stage. Our little editorial team of myself, Adam, Danielle and Joe frequently use the following phrase to let the group know about our progress on assignments: It’s basically done. All I gotta do is write it.

To nonwriter/editors such a statement probably seems absurd, but our hive mind understands perfectly what All I gotta do is write it means.

Like the homes Bill Dean Painting, Inc. made sparkle with a fresh coat, so much prep goes into every story that’s published here. Every editor on the team goes all-in whenever they receive an assignment, and I’m fully aware of how rare it is to have such a talented, professional staff in place. But I want to focus on one particular member of the team for a second, Senior Editor Joe Paone. If you’ve had the pleasure of talking to Mr. Paone on the phone about anything remotely related to outpatient surgery, you know all about the passion and curiosity he brings to the table. Joe’s energy is contagious. On days that are dragging, the Paone positivity can hit like a Five-Hour ENERGY — on the heels of a double-espresso. Bonus: It’s way better for my heart.

This month Joe was tasked with writing a story on emerging urology procedures in the outpatient space. What readers see is a well-crafted story on an important industry trend. What you don’t see, however, is the hours of background research Joe put into finding the right sources to speak to, not to mention all the time it took to arrange interviews, talk at length on the phone and organize his copious notes into a format that’s fitting for a feature story. There’s also the writing, but if you were paying attention at all, you’d know the story is basically done by this point.

One last thing about Joe: The guy LOVES to write about as much as I loved to paint houses back in my early 20s. In fact, if you told him you needed around 500 words on, say, positioning, he wouldn’t hesitate to pump out 1,000, 1,500, even 2,000 words just to make sure every potential angle was safely covered. That’s like being hired to paint someone’s kitchen and painting the rest of the house simply because you were in the zone.

Paint on, Mr. Paone! OSM