Can't anyone around here edit?

True, much of the language of editing is borrowed from medicine. A bad story needs CPR, triage, is going into the ICU. With fellow Outside alum Laura Hohnhold she started the Editors' Room, which now features a floating staff of six editors and is taking on more work than it can handle. Early clients have included Offspring, Wired, Us Weekly and Men's Journal -- and the offers keep on coming.

Which is not necessarily to imply that the magazines engaging the ER's services don't have capable editors on hand. In many cases they just don't have enough.

"Ideally you've got all those skills and then some on your own magazine staff," says Men's Journal editor Mark Bryant, who worked with Chase before at Outside. "You've got a lot of people who can edit at that level. And they all have time to do that. But it's very labor-intensive and it's far from a perfect world and I do find there are times that a piece needs an enormous amount of attention that you know will be worth the effort. But it's attention that no one on the staff has time for."

Complicated stories are not the mitier of most magazines, obviously, and the skills required for dealing with them are not in as much demand as they may once have been. "Let's face it," says Bryant, "there are not very many magazines, and not very many magazine editors, who still care about storytelling. The emphasis at most magazines is not on great reporting and writing."

Indeed, says Chase, many editors -- and writers -- are frightened by the very prospect of reporting. "I can't tell you how many editors entice writers by saying, 'You won't have to do any reporting.' I thought reporting was the building block of journalism."

Clearly she hasn't been looking at the lean, mean, thinner-thighs versions of magazines out there now. Condi Nast's Lucky has all but done away with meddlesome stories by making a magazine all about shopping (it's the shoes, stupid), while a new magazine called List will feature nothing but, well, lists. Try editing your way out of that.

Chase is quick to point out that there are a number of great line editors still out there doing the thankless task of editing difficult stories, line by line. She mentions Pat Towers at Elle, Susan Morrison at the New Yorker and Ilena Silverman at the New York Times Magazine.

Silverman, who recently arrived at the Times after years of working for Art Cooper at GQ, says she is no triage artist: She can't make a sick story dance. "My skill is not taking a piece by a so-so writer and making it great," she says. "What I can do is try to help a writer who is really good, and push them and push them."

And how do you push a writer without making him angry? (There's a joke there involving drink but we'll let it go.) Often, according to Silverman, it's just a matter of talk. "Sometimes writers have a more interesting story in them than what they sent in. A lot of it is talking. I do a fair amount of talking to people before they start writing."

And when the piece is closing and she is still fussing and finessing the last little word choice, she often finds her writers gratified by the attention. "They can't believe someone cares as much as they do."

For Chase, a lot of what she sees missing is that sense of care -- care for the writers and care for the business. "We have a real love of writers," she says of her nascent shop. "It sounds like a corny thing to say but it really is what we're about, that relationship, that editor-writer relationship. I think it's been lost in a lot of the business in the last 10 to 20 years."

She credits much of her love of stories and writers to mentors like Bryant and former Outside and Men's Journal editor John Rasmus. (The idea of a mentor seems itself passi, she says, and impossible to find when you leave your job every nine months.) They gave her stories by Gay Talese and Hunter Thompson, long pieces that broke the mold and redefined the magazine feature, stories that grabbed the reader by the collar or took him by the hand, saying, Get a load of this. Not much need for those at a magazine like List.

"I think the emphasis has moved to pop, heat, buzz," she says, invoking the modern magazine equivalent of snap, crackle and pop. "The problem with all three of those is that they are all fleeting; by definition they're not going to last long. Something can be hot but eventually it's going to become cold."

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