CONTENTS
| I. | How a Newspaper is made | [1] |
| II. | News and News Values | [17] |
| III. | Getting the News | [29] |
| IV. | Structure and Style in News Stories | [60] |
| V. | News Stories of Unexpected Occurrences | [101] |
| VI. | Speeches, Interviews, and Trials | [126] |
| VII. | Special Kinds of News | [161] |
| VIII. | Follow up and Rewrite Stories | [194] |
| IX. | Feature Stories | [211] |
| X. | Editing Copy | [255] |
| XI. | The Writing of Headlines | [271] |
| XII. | Proof-Reading | [315] |
| XIII. | Making up the Paper | [322] |
| XIV. | The Function of the Newspaper | [331] |
| Index | [361] |
NEWSPAPER WRITING
AND EDITING
CHAPTER I
HOW A NEWSPAPER IS MADE
Newspaper Production. To furnish for a cent or two a fairly complete record of important events that take place in any corner of the world, editorial comment, market quotations, reviews of new books, critiques of plays and concerts, fashion hints, cooking recipes, cartoons, and illustrations, as well as advertisements of all kinds, would seem a stupendous, not to say impossible, task if it were not an everyday phenomenon. A single copy of a daily newspaper in a large city contains, exclusive of advertising, from 60,000 to 80,000 words, or as many as does the average novel. These metropolitan papers print from 100,000 to 900,000 copies each day, numbers far in excess of the editions of most successful novels. While it takes the novelist months to produce his work, and his publishers months to print it, the newspaper is made and printed in from one to ten editions within twenty-four hours.
The successful achievement of such an undertaking, day by day, requires extensive equipment and effective organization. The rapid production of a large edition demands many expensive machines to transform written matter quickly into type, and huge presses to print the papers at the highest speed. Furthermore, it makes necessary a large staff to gather and prepare news and other reading matter, a large force to put this material into type, to print it, and to distribute the papers, besides managers and clerks to carry on the many business transactions involved in so big an enterprise.
Newspaper Organization. Although in its main divisions the organization of newspaper publishing is essentially the same, the size of a paper determines to a considerable extent the number of employees and the degree of division of labor among them, as well as the character and the extent of the equipment. On large papers where many men are employed and many editions are printed daily, there needs must be considerable specialization in editing and reporting; while on small papers the size of the staff requires that each man perform a variety of tasks. Sometimes conditions of ownership or control, and on older papers office traditions, modify the usual duties and authority of different members of the staff.
No one form of organization that can be described in detail, therefore, will apply to all newspaper offices even when they are of the same relative size, but a composite type of organization for large newspapers may be explained to show the division of work.