The Writing of News A Handbook with Chapters on Newspaper Correspondence and Copy Reading

The test of the news value of an event is its element of novelty. Whether news shall be the record of things admirable or things disgraceful practically depends on the community...

Newspaper English is the standard. There may be critics, who belong to a past generation and who have learned by rule, but for flexible, expressive use of the language the newsp...

There are numbers of people whose ideal paper is one in which the editorials shall be written by an Addison, a Lamb, or a Swift; the art criticism by a Ruskin; while the financi...

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 an...

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 ra...

The newspaper man is compelled, as the price of success in his calling, and often through severe experience, to learn that only that which is true is “news.” There is a popular...

They (teaching and accompanying reading) can suggest the proper relation between subject and style--the man whose style is too big or too small for his subject is the born prey...

“Some foolish people have said that daily journalism is killing literature in its highest forms. I say, to the contrary, that the daily paper provides a sort of first course in...

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 affectati...

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 l...

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 BRI...

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 sa...

The surest guarantee for right-doing in journalism is contained in the teaching that right is always right and that it must be done for its own sake. This is the great basic tru...

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....

This is the age of the reporter--the age of news, not views. We are influencing our public through the presentation of facts; and the gathering, the assembling and the presentat...