I once became an editor by mistake. It taught me to value the people behind the scenes | Hadley Freeman

Actors and pop stars can be hit-and-miss as interviewees, whereas directors and music producers rarely disappoint. The same is true of writers versus editors

I am going to assume you are a Guardian reader, given that you are at this moment reading the Guardian. Whenever I meet Guardian readers, they invariably ask me about my fellow Guardian writers: what's Tim Dowling like? (Extremely scary.) Have I ever met Polly Toynbee? (No, because she lives in a castle guarded by dragons.) Do I eat lunch with Marina Hyde? (She doesn't eat lunch: she's a vampire.) But I am never asked about my editors.

One of the many cultural differences between British and American journalism is that in the US, even among non-journalists, there is a genuine reverence for editors: Ben Bradlee, who edited the Washington Post during Watergate; former New Yorker editor William Shawn; Robert Silvers, the late founding editor of the New York Review of Books.