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 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