PAYMENT
The correspondent is paid on the basis of matter used. Rates vary, but the average is $5 a column, usually estimated at 1,500 words. Extra payment is allowed for exclusive news. A few newspapers require correspondents to send in at the end of each month a “string” of their published stories, but the majority keep an account with each correspondent by means of credit tabs showing the date of each story, the name of the sender and the number of words.
CHAPTER XII
COPY READING
If that change occurs (a return to smaller newspapers) there will be an increased demand for the services of the man who possesses not the common ability to make a story long and diffuse, but the rare talent of making it short, vivid and complete. There is hardly a newspaper office in the country in which the difficult and admirable art of compression has not been to a greater or less extent neglected in recent years.—From a lecture by Hart Lyman, editor of the New York Tribune.
The copy readers on a metropolitan newspaper do the work that is commonly associated with the word editor: they “blue-pencil,” or edit, the news copy. Tradition has equipped the editor with a blue pencil and has made it a symbol of editorial callousness. In reality, the copy reader is much more likely to use a soft black pencil with which a word may be cut out at a single stroke or an illuminating word inserted in broad, unmistakable characters. The copy reader takes the story as it comes from the reporter and puts it through a refining process. His work is critical rather than creative. It is destructive so far as errors of grammar, violations of news style and libel are concerned. But if his sense of news is keen, as that of every copy reader should be, he will find abundant opportunity for something more than mechanical deletion and interlineation. He may insert a terse bit of explanation to clear away obscurity or may add a piquant touch that will redeem a story from dullness. To the degree that he edits news with sympathy and understanding, with a clear perception of news values, his work may be regarded as creative. If, on the other hand, he conceives it his duty to reduce all writing to a dead level of mediocrity, if his ideal of editing is merely to wage war on the split infinitive and substitute “obtain” for “secure,” no matter what the sense, he richly deserves the epithet that is certain to be hurled at the copy reader by the reporter whose fine phrases have been cut out—he is in truth a “butcher” of copy.