The editor comes in just to polish things up. It is simply too late to deal with the important questions where the reporter might have liked to have had someone to work with. The stuff that most editors spend most of their time on in most newsrooms is the last step in the process. Writing is a process, Hart said, and drafting is one of the last stages and one of the few stages at which editors and reporters generally get together in most newsrooms. It is perhaps the least consequential stage in the process, insofar as it exercises any large impact on a piece of writing.
Editors feel very powerful because they get to take the story and do anything they want.
Those feelings aren't very good, because they lead to a lot of animosity. When he works with newspaper staffs, Hart asks writers and editors how they spend their time, and he asks them what the problems are. He says he finds that 95 percent of editors' time is not spent on the parts of the process where problems arise. Stories with structural flaws, the lack of a nut graph or buried leads or that miss the point go off the tracks long before editors get involved. When they do get involved, there is precious little they can do.