receive material over the telephone from reporters and correspondents and write it up for publication. Unsatisfactory work of a reporter may be turned over to a rewrite man to be put in the desired form, for rewrite men must be able to take the raw material of the news furnished by others and turn it into a well-written news story.
Getting News into Print. The relation of all these departments to one another is best shown by following through the process by which a piece of news gets into print. The telegraph editor on a newspaper in the capital city of the state, for example, gets from an office telegraph operator, a typewritten dispatch signed by the paper's correspondent in a city of a neighboring state to the effect that the attorney-general has dropped dead in the lobby of a hotel. The telegraph editor at once notifies the city editor so that he may assign reporters to get the local phases of the piece of news, or "to cover the local end of the story," as the newspaper workers say. One reporter is sent to interview the members of the late attorney-general's family; another is dispatched to the governor's office for an interview with the governor on the deceased official; a third is asked to look up the statute concerning such an unexpected vacancy in the office; a fourth is assigned to find out the probable successor to the position.
After informing the city editor and the managing editor, the telegraph editor at once turns over the dispatch to the head copy-reader to have it edited and to have a headline written. Meanwhile one of the rewrite men is delegated to get a biographical sketch of the attorney-general from the office "morgue" and to write an obituary. The artist looks up the half-tone engraving, or "cut," of the official in the "morgue" and selects an appropriate border or "frame" in which to
