Rosser Newton

I have never held a newsroom job. My career started in corporate finance at Goldman Sachs in New York, where I worked as an analyst from 1987 to 1989, and I have spent the years since in energy investing. The writing came later and came out of research rather than a beat. My first real published work in that vein was Richard Coke: Texan, which followed years in the archives.

Yes, in school and early on in my first job. There is not much romance to it in practice, though it did teach you to think through a sentence before committing to it, since revision was expensive. These days I do appreciate typewritten documents from the other direction. A fair amount of twentieth century archival material comes to you as typescript with handwritten corrections in the margins, and those marks often tell you as much as the

The distribution changed faster than the verification did. Something can reach a very large audience before anyone has checked whether it is true, and corrections never travel as far as the original claim. The part I find more interesting is what it has done to history. Archives, libraries, and historical societies now put material directly in front of people who would never have made the trip to see it. That is a genuine gain. The tradeoff is that a confident, wrong summary of a nineteenth century figure can circulate for years while the primary record sits a click away and unread.