Category: Writing for Newspapers

On some evening newspapers a squad of men begin work soon after the city editions of the morning papers are off the press. Before dawn these men are on duty, busily preparing copy for the first edition of the paper, which goes to press before news begins to pour in through the regular channels. This […]

Too often the complaint against the newspaper is that it is sensation-seeking and has a predilection for scandal and unsavory gossip. Men and women, including some of eminent rank in their own professions, although having only a slight knowledge of the making of a newspaper, have a habit of saying in their ignorance that newspapers […]

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 […]

The art of arts, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity — nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness.— WALT WHITMAN. Newspapers in Greeley’s day were judged by their editorials; today they are judged in large measure by […]

A vast deal of the slipshod and prolix stuff which we are compelled to read or to listen to is, of course, born of idleness. When, as so often happens, a man takes an hour to say what might have been as well or better said in twenty minutes, or spreads over twenty pages what […]

Contrary to the opinions of many, the newspaper has saved its readers from that modern perversion of our already forcible English, slang. It has pruned its language of affectation, fine writing and indiscriminate and excessive use of adjectives.— From an address by the REV. WILLIAM B. NORTON, of Evanston, Ill., as reported by the Chicago […]

Of the three generally recognized qualities of good style — clarity, force and grace—it is the last and the last alone in which critics of newspaper English find their material. It would be ludicrously superfluous to illustrate here the prevailing clearness of what one reads in the daily press. To it everything else is sacrificed. […]

Newspaper work is an exacting profession, because things a journalist has done do not count. Like a hen he must lay an entirely new egg every day.— From an address by ARTHUR BRISBANE at Columbia University, New York. As many changes have come in recent years in country journalism as in any other line of […]