IN MEMORIAM Remembering an exacting soul at the ProJo BY BRIAN C. JONES

It may come as a surprise for some people that newspapers have souls, given the recent distress in the industry: reporters like Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley respectively making up stories at the New York Times and USA Today; circulation thieves, cheating advertisers by overstating the numbers at other papers; and corporate greedmeisters, cutting reporting staffs, producing more profits and less news.

But there is another aspect to journalism not often talked about until something tragic happens, such as the sudden death last week of Mimi Burkhardt. Even if you are a faithful reader of the Providence Journal, you probably never heard of Mimi, who was 52. She was a copy editor, part of an invisible army that battles to make newspapers honest, and not just at the Journal.

After other editors assign stories, and reporters write them, the drafts go to copy editors who root out unlawful grammar, chase down out misspellings, stupid punctuation, pompous wording, wrong names, and numbers that don’t add up. After they’ve cleaned up the mess, these editors write headlines, a difficult form of alchemy that when done by someone of Mimi’s skill, can make for something more memorable than the story itself.

Even among this group, Mimi was a standout. Your story was fortunate if Mimi was on the case, although your goose was cooked if you were the writer. Mimi would go through the story laboriously, paragraph by paragraph, line after line, word for word, ruining the evening’s plans for a late dinner, a little TV or a good book.

She already knew about the inconsistencies — the dates didn’t add up, how could Politician X be 62 if he graduated in 1952, and by the way, she had just run budget figures and they didn’t match up, either; and isn’t Swansea in Massachusetts, not Rhode Island, and wasn’t late governor inaugurated in EIGHTEEN hundred and something-something. She wouldn’t be rushed or intimidated by your sighs or even outright protests that this was taking too damn long. It wasn’t about you, or even how, under newspaper rules, she had the final word on what was published. It was only about the story. Mimi couldn’t abide the possibility that something wrong or illogical or unclear would appear in a newspaper, and that the next morning a reader would face the same idiocy she was confronting that night.

If you were working on a major story — a series that took months to report and weeks to write — Mimi’s oversight was even more astonishing. She had an enormous capacity for complex organization: maybe you should consider beginning the story this way, moving this entire section down to that part of the story, and you might want to consider re-reporting this other section.

She took these stories very much to heart. She literally dreamed about what she was editing, and would come to work the next day saying she’d woken in the middle of the night with just the right word to make a troublesome paragraph work, or the realization that a section of a story thrown out the previous day to save space was really critical and should be restored.

A few weeks ago, I ran into her by chance in downtown Providence, and she showed me a leather handbag that had needed repair. Wondering who could do the work, she recalled a series I had written for the ProJo in which one of the subjects was a shoe repairman. She introduced herself to the cobbler as the story’s editor. Wasn’t one of the issues that faced his family in that story whether, in a difficult economy, they could afford to have a second child? Yes, he said, they had gone ahead anyway. This series — which had profiled four other families as well — ran in 1992. Now, 12 years later, it was still very much alive and urgent in Mimi’s mind.

Newspaper stories were not just products to Mimi. They were about actual people and events. They mattered, not only to the people they were about, but to those who read them. Stories got into people’s heads, shaped their understanding of the world and their place in it. It was always about the story with Mimi, and the stories were always personal.

So in an age enraged and cynical about the newspapers and the media, it is important to note that newspapers do have souls. And that one of them was Mimi Burkhardt.