Newspaper writing and editing ( 1913 ) by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

Excerpt:

This book is adapted both for use in college classes in journalism and for study by persons interested in journalism who are not attending college. The needs of these two groups are not essentially different. Both desire to know the basic principles of newspaper writing and editing and to get the necessary training in the application of these fundamental principles to their own work.

 In each chapter, accordingly, explanation and exemplification are supplemented by material for practice work. To formulate a large number of rules for the writing of news stories, the editing of copy, the writing of headlines, and other kinds of newspaper work, is plainly impossible, even if it were desirable. Methods of news- paper making during the last fifty years have undergone so constant and rapid a readjustment to new conditions in the transmission of news, in mechanical production, and in the sources of income, that only a few traditions have remained unchanged. The tireless effort to secure novelty and variety in present-day journalism prevents the news story or the headline from becoming absolutely fixed in form or style. 

Instead of attempting to formulate dogmatic rules and directions, the author has undertaken to analyze current methods of newspaper work with the purpose of showing the reasons for them and the causes which have produced them. 

The examples selected to illustrate these methods have been taken from newspapers in all parts of the country and are in- tended to represent the general practices now prevail- ing. For obvious reasons, names and addresses in most of these stories have been changed. To retain the newspaper form as far as possible, the examples have been printed between rules in the column width.