Steering the Bum Steers
Senior editor Anne Dingus, who along with Paul Burka, organizes and supervises the annual Bum Steer Awards, gives insight on the history of the long-standing tradition.
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AD: Again, the headline-writing is another massive, staff-wide exercise. We get tons of suggestions, from our editorial interns, most of whom are college students, to our editor himself. The trick to writing Bum Steers is to put the funniest part of the incident at the very end, and the trick to writing a headline is to make the punning or the attitude in the head play off that last line. Writing heads is by far the most fun of compiling Bum Steers. We'll have sessions with half a dozen staffers and compare notes, and just howl at our own wit (some of it unprintable, but we have to get it out of our system). Sometimes a head will crack me up, and leave Paul totally unmoved. But by and large they all work. Every year, after the issue is sent to press, I pick up the newly printed magazine a couple of weeks later and re-read the Bum Steers. And sometimes I laugh out loud at a head I've read a dozen times. Or even a head I wrote!
texasmonthly.com: What's one you wish never made it to print?
AD: I can't think of one Bum Steer in particular, but I can think of a type of Bum Steer that is bound to cause trouble, and that is when we skewer a small town or its city council or one of its municipal officials for doing something silly—say, proposing an ordinance that declares a sunflower a weed, or discussing a donation of more than $2 million to help build a set of giant longhorns that would span the interstate. Both of these events really happened in small towns in Texas, and we Bum Steered both events. But, because both the ordinance and the longhorns donation subsequently fell through, these two small towns were greatly offended by their Bum Steer awards, as if—because the ideas were eventually dropped or overruled—the events never happened at all. Well, I agree that it would be nice, in retrospect, to edit behavior. I'm willing to bet that we've all made some bloopers in our lives we'd just as soon erase—my ex-husband springs to mind. But you can't make something un-happen. Every year some indignant town or one of its boosters writes in and protests a Bum Steer, saying, in essence, "But later we changed our mind!" Yes, we acknowledge that, but the events did happen, nonetheless. And I'd like to add that we verify all our Bum Steers carefully. We have a fact-checking staff of three that pores over every word of every item and double-checks the accuracy of everything. If something isn't true, it doesn't appear in the Bum Steer Awards.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think Texas and Texans in general make better fodder for Bum Steers than does the rest of the nation?
AD: No, I'm sure you can find great Bum Steers all over the nation. Sometimes I'll be idly listening to the radio while driving and suddenly I snap to attention, because the deejay is relating a silly event that sounds like perfect Bum Steer fodder. For example, I was tickled to hear that the Hooters restaurant chain was being sued by a former waitress, because she won a drawing for what she thought was a Toyota—but it turned out to be a Toy Yoda. Oh, what a lovely Bum Steer that would have been! But it happened in Florida, alas. What Texas does have on the rest of the nation is size and population. A state this big, with this many people, is bound to produce hundreds of Bum Steers.
texasmonthly.com: Is going through them initially usually a monumental task? What process do you use?
AD: Oh, going through all those clippings for the first time is definitely a pain. It takes days. Since most items are from the newspaper or are printed off of a Web site, there's a lot of reading involved. First off, I make three big piles, marked Yes, No, and Maybe. Then I re-read all the Yeses and Maybes, and start trying to get the big picture—how many political items there are, how many school items. Sometimes you realize that two Bum Steers can be paired together—the content of one will inspire the headline of another—so you have to go back and dig out the first one and match them up. I usually end up sitting on the floor , making piles labeled "Crooks," "Celebs," "Enron," "Dubya," and such. The really hard part is writing the Bum Steers. Each item has to be as short as possible, yet clearly and accurately convey the information in, say thirty or forty words, and each must end with the funniest part of the incident or event.
texasmonthly.com: What direction do you see Bum Steers going in for the future?
AD: We have a great new redesign this year for Bum Steers—regular readers will notice how different it looks. Our art director, Scott Dadich, will probably custom-design the feature from now on, depending on who the Bum Steer of the Year is. Since this year it's Anna Nicole Smith, we used a lot of shades of pink in the design.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think Bum Steers has become a defining feature of Texas Monthly?
AD: Yes, Bum Steers is probably our single, best-known, most-looked-forward-to article of the year. It's always the feature touted on the cover, so we rack up nice newsstand sales the month it's out. The only runner-up would be our Ten Best and Ten Worst Legislators article, which appears every other year after the Legislature ends its session.
texasmonthly.com: What celebrity is poised to take over Anna Nicole's spot in terms of the sheer amount of Bum Steers?
AD: I can't imagine who might eclipse Anna Nicole. We may have to retire her after this year, because she is, shall we say, overexposed. Maybe she'll become the first-ever member of the Bum Steer of the Year Hall of Fame. This year, from the day the first episode of her series aired, she was way out in front.
texasmonthly.com: Finally, if you could sum up Bum Steers, what would you say?
AD: Every single year, it is the funniest single article written in Texas. That's because it's the product of twelve months of goofs and gaffes involving hundreds of people, the combined cleverness—some might say twistedness—of several dozen Texas Monthly staffers, and innumerable readers who pitch in to make sure we know about potential Bum Steers in their towns. It's impossible to read Bum Steers and not laugh out loud at least once. If you can read it and stay straight-faced—well, you deserve a Bum Steer.
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