What this involved is turning an experience into a story, a story based on experience, but not the experience. An editor wants to cut away extraneous experience and get to the part of the experience that's the story. Matt may know that five paragraphs were the result of an excrutiatingly long day. He' s invested in those paragraphs. I'm not invested in them at all.
Reporters have to assign importance to all the details.
There were no newspapers, barely any TV, no telephones. I'd be the last person to find out if war had broken out in Kosovo. Editors have very little to offer in those conversations. The reporter in the field is his own assigning editor. But then she became convinced that, no, they should stay in the new Kosovo.