Lovelady

Steve Lovelady, a legendary newspaper and magazine editor, died last Friday at age 66.

I never had a chance to meet the man, but a few years ago I was at a conference in Fort Lauderdale and another editor — he was from the Detroit News, if I remember correctly — handed out copies of an internal memo Lovelady had written for reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The title was something along the lines of "How to Get Your Story on Page One."

It was a brilliant guide to what makes a great story — advising the reporter, for example, to zoom in as tightly as possible on the story's single most fascinating aspect — and I've used it as a guide to my work ever since.

Sadly, I misplaced it somewhere a…