NEW YORK -- Shortly after Hurricane Sandy pummeled the East Coast on Oct. 29, 2012, New York Times reporters began filing stories -- from emergency shelters on the fringes of storm-battered neighborhoods, from cold houses in newly isolated suburbs and from the perceptibly swaying Times tower in midtown Manhattan. They wrote about the death toll, hospitals losing electricity, subway tunnels flooding and cars floating down Wall Street. They worked upwards of 15 hours straight, eating in the Times cafeteria and resting at a nearby hotel.
More recently, a Staten Island grand jury cleared officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Eric Garner in a deadly chokehold, and Pantaleo remained a free man. Reporters collected quotes and scribbled observations, then scurried back to their midtown office to churn out fast copy.
But that raw copy is not what Times readers see. Readers approach the paper from beyond a buffer zone, a complex procedural fortress of polishing and standardization. Editing is not a glorifying gig, and unlike reporting, it doesn't come with bylines. But for Little Rock native Eric Dyer, the masthead is byline enough. And The New York Times is a weighty masthead.
As head of the Times' Metro Section copy desk since 2010, Dyer, 41, is the last person to see most metro stories before they are posted online or published. Stories come to him after they go through a reporter's immediate editor and at least one of the 18 copy editors and web producers he oversees. If a spelling, grammar or style error lingers, Dyer must catch it. He must change "pro-choice" to "for abortion rights" and "cop" to "police officer," to keep all stories consistent with the Times "house style." He must pursue missing information and flag colloquialisms, fishy "facts" and instances of subjectivity. If there's an anonymous source, he must decide whether the contribution is worth the resulting reader suspicion. In short, he must ensure that "all the news that's fit to print," is fit to print.
"I was a reporter for nine years, and I valued having someone carefully look at my work. I might have misremembered a fact or written something that I expected to be understood because I knew it, but the reader may not know," Dyer says. "At its core, our role is to make sure that what's published is the kind of thing someone would expect to read in The New York Times."
For the most part, people don't speak the way the Times reads, and Dyer can't help but notice.
"When you spend your entire day correcting other people's mistakes, you'll see bad grammar all the time. You'll see it on menus. You'll see it on signs. I just have to let it go."
He has surprisingly few pet peeves. The big ones are misused possessives (Dyers' versus Dyer's) and misuse of who and whom. And he and his husband, Michael Tino, have an ongoing debate about the serial comma. Tino, a Unitarian minister, is pro; Dyer is against. But in family scrapbooks, Dyer lets Tino sprinkle superfluous commas, "as long as we're consistent."
That's because Dyer is an earnest man.
In Dyer's profession, earnestness is valuable. "You know you're working at an important news organization that has a tremendous amount of influence, and you want to do your part to make sure it lives up to that reputation," he says.
But humor is equally valuable. One of a copy editor's most important duties is generating (often, in the case of a desk chief, revising) catchy headlines. Or, as Dyer puts it: "You want to draw people in and not be coy. And you want it to be truthful."
When combined, some of his best headlines read like post-modern poetry:
A Cube with a Twist
At 40, it Puzzles Anew
Luxury Living
in Old Temple
Of 5 and Dime
With Brothel Plans Delayed
A Madam Does Laundry
They reference: tracking the comeback of the Rubik's cube; a look at the transformation of Manhattan's iconoclast Woolworth building into condos; and a prospective brothel owner in Nevada, overseeing coin-laundry while awaiting licensing -- from late 2007, his early days at the Times, copy editing for the national desk.
DYER'S PARENTS
David Dyer, an architect, and Lenora Dyer, a home economics teacher, still live in the house that Dyer moved into at 3 days old. Because of Little Rock's desegregation policies, Dyer changed schools every few years. By graduation (Hall High School, Class of '91) he had attended six schools, spread throughout downtown, midtown and southeast Little Rock.
"I have no complaints. I got to experience more than I would have, just staying in my neighborhood," Dyer says.
He was a shy kid, but by high school he found his rhythm, joining the debate team and performing with the choir and in school plays.
When Danielle Ellesio moved to Little Rock in 1989, Dyer was her first friend. "It's hard as a junior in high school to move anywhere. He was just super welcoming," she says.
After school they did homework at Ellesio's or drove around, blasting the radio and shouting along. They had a handful of close friends, a group who went to school dances together and spent weekends watching movies and playing Trivial Pursuit.
"Eric's memory is like a steel trap. He's amazing with dates and geography. He can tell you what highway you need to get to anywhere in the United States," Ellesio says.
As a teenager, she suspected that Dyer would end up with a husband rather than a wife, but she didn't mind. "We never really talked about it. I never cared. He didn't seem to care. But it was sort of obvious that he wasn't dating anybody," she says.
His freshman year at Hendrix College, Dyer told his family that he was gay. Then he called Ellesio.
"Yeah, duh ... we love you. It's fine," she said.
SHOE-LEATHER REPORTING
Dyer majored in history, but his passion was Hendrix's weekly newspaper, The Profile. He began reporting his freshman year and by his junior year, he was editor. His put the paper online -- a rare thing in 1994 -- and the next year, the Arkansas College Media Association awarded The Profile first place in general excellence.
"There were a few members of the staff that felt that he was a little high-handed. He wanted everything to be just perfect, and if he didn't get what he wanted, he would do it himself," says Nell Doyle, former Profile adviser.
Dyer admits his penchant for micro-managing: "They called me The Usurper, because I liked to usurp other people's jobs."
In 1996, he moved to Evanston, Ill., to attend the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. While still a student, he worked as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune and spent a summer in Washington interning as a government correspondent for The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C.
After a two-year internship at a bureau of The Philadelphia Inquirer, he moved to the Tar Heel State for his first permanent position, with the Greensboro News & Record. He covered Gerald Hege, the sheriff of Davidson County, who wore paramilitary gear, called daily news conferences and kept TV lights in the executive office. Hege's patrol car had a Corvette engine and a black spider across the hood. He reinstated the chain gang, had insides of jail cells painted pink, and ultimately hosted a show on Court TV. He even had a line of merchandise.
"Any story you had to write about him was fascinating," Dyer says.
Later, Dyer was assigned to state government. He tracked Elizabeth Dole's 2002 Senate run and John Edwards' 2004 presidential campaign, following Edwards to key states. Unlike reporters from national papers, Dyer operated on a shoestring, calling ahead for discount motels and eating fast food.
"I wrote recaps and roundups and scene pieces and color pieces," he says. "We were telling the readers of the News & Record, your senior senator is spending all his time running for president, here's what he's doing."
Dyer filed a story a day, which was tough since he had to lug his clunky laptop, with its removable Internet card, to the universities and community centers along the trail. He'd find campaign organizers and say, "Hi, do you have a phone jack? It won't cost you anything. I have an 800-number to dial into."
FOLLOWING LOVE
In 1999 Dyer met Tino, 42, via Yahoo Personals and then, a few weeks later, face to face, in a coffee shop in Chapel Hill, N.C. They gabbed for hours about a shared passion for maps and how, as kids, they'd both decided to visit all 50 states. (At the time, Dyer had clocked 30; Tino, 25.) Around midnight, the barista finally asked them to leave. The new couple hadn't even noticed it was past closing time.
Tino liked that Dyer "was really present to what's going on in our world and very informed ... and there were basic values that we shared about life, family, justice and fairness."
Tino was a cell-biology doctoral candidate at Duke University, but he already knew he would never work in a lab. He wanted to become a minister, and planned to attend seminary as soon as he finished his dissertation. And seven months in, he also knew that he wanted to spend his life with Dyer.
In 2007 Tino moved to Peekskill, N.Y., an hour from Manhattan by commuter-rail, to lead a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Dyer went with him.
INSTITUTIONS AND LEGACIES
The 15th floor of the Times building, a glass skyscraper near Times Square, has an employee lounge, a portraits hall honoring its Pulitzer Prize winners and several conference rooms. Uniformed food staff, photographers and reporters stream in and out of one of them.
Dyer says sometimes he can't believe he works there. "When I come in the door, every so often, I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm doing this.'"
In the sunny lounge, he perches on a low, angular green couch -- a nod to Danish modern -- and talks about Nora.
Nora Dyer-Tino is a few months shy of 2. Tino and Dyer adopted her as a newborn, and Tino was even at the hospital for her birth.
"If you're comfortable with your life, having something change in it is a little unnerving," Dyer says.
Tino wanted children and Dyer didn't not want children, so he agreed, although he admits that when they were notified of an available baby three months into a stranger's pregnancy, the situation struck him as "abstract."
"I didn't know who my kid was. The child wasn't growing inside me, we weren't dealing with someone who was pregnant at the house," he says.
But the first time he held her "I was blown away."
Dyer and Tino checked off Hawaii, the last of their states, in 2007. Now, instead of traveling or taking in dinner and a play, they brunch at their favorite family friendly restaurant.
Dyer handles the morning routine, dropping Nora at daycare before heading to work. Tino picks her up and tackles evening activities. Because they live in a progressive area, Dyer isn't concerned about Nora being bullied for having two dads, but he does worry about eventually having the "adoption" conversation with her.
"I just want her to be healthy and to teach her good values and help her develop her talents," he says.
He looks forward to raising his daughter near the city. "There will be museums, we'll probably go to the Rockefeller Christmas tree next year, things like that."
The man from Little Rock, who was 23 when he first saw Manhattan skyscrapers, seems impressed that his daughter will grow up with New York as her prototype for "city." Sometimes he seems impressed that he even has a daughter. And he is definitely impressed that he daily witnesses America's biggest city from such an extraordinary, encompassing perch as the Times metro desk.
"When things come along, I'm willing to take calculated risks," he says, "but there is a bit of serendipity about it."
High Profile on 03/01/2015