Rewriting The Newspaper

Between the 1970s and the 1990s American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism and a new culture of news, propelled by the storytelling movement. Thomas Schmidt analyzes the expansion of narrative journalism and the corresponding institutional changes in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, he offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism’s evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of primary sources, industry publications, and oral history interviews, this study traces how narrative techniques developed and spread through newsrooms, advanced by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Challenging the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tome Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing, Schmidt shows that the evolution of narrative in late twentieth century American Journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.

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Rewriting Homeless Identity: Writing as Coping in an Urban Homeless Community focuses on the identities of homeless writers, with initially limited or no specialized training in writing, at a homeless community church. Through an ethnographic, two-year study, author Jeremy Godfrey hosted and participated in weekly writing workshops. He also participated in the founding of a street newspaper within that community. This book shows Godfrey’s experiences in leading writing workshops and how they promoted self-exploration within this community. Students of the workshop negotiated their unique, individual writing personas during the study. Those personas were often coping with their experiences on the streets. More importantly, the writers viewed those experiences as central to their writing processes. Much like the setting of the workshop at an urban, non-denominational, community church, the writers honed their coping tactics through conversational and performance-driven writings. Rewriting Homeless Identity highlights those writing samples and the conversations with homeless authors of the samples in relation to identity and a sense of growth.

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Essential reading for anyone with ambitions to break into one of the most competitive sectors in today's job market. Written by a working journalist with long experience in the national press, the book provides all the industry knowledge and expert advice and would-be journalists will need to enter the field. Reinforced by exercises to enable readers to test their skills and writing ability against the expert, the coverage includes everything from news reporting and writing general and specialist features, to leaders, personal columns and even photojournalism. With valuable tips throughout, sound advice on structuring a story and taking the right angle-plus a look at the overall market for newspapers and available training-this is the book of first resort for students or journalism, media studies and related courses, as well as their career advisors and tutors.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Writing of News" (A Handbook with Chapters on Newspaper Correspondence and Copy Reading) by Charles G. Ross. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Much has happened in the newspaper profession and in the schools of journalism since this book was first published ten years ago. The newspapers have covered a World War and war periods have always brought the greatest changes in American newspapers have wrestled with doubled costs of production, reduced staffs, much merging, curtailed income, and are now deep in the perplexities of reconstruction. Meanwhile schools and courses in journalism have greatly increased in number, enrolment, and branches of instruction. When the book was presented in 1915, it was the first textbook entirely devoted to the problems and technique of newspaper desk work. It has, therefore, been widely used in classes in copyreading, headline writing, and make-up, as well as in newspaper offices. Its contents have been put to a severe test, and some have been found wanting. The author himself, in using it year after year in class, filled many page margins with suggestions for improvement. Hence, in preparation for its tenth anniversary, it is well that the book should receive a thorough overhauling to bring it up to date, to put in some things omitted before, to make it more usable and teachable. Its general structure has not been changed. Most of the alterations are in the chapters on copyreading, headline writing, make-up, and type, but many additions have been made in other chapters. Class exercises have now been added to each chapter to present in brief much of the technique of teaching, as it has developed in the larger schools. They are intended to be suggestive, not only to the teacher, but to independent students and young newspaper workers. A bibliography has been added to suggest further reading. In the schools of journalism, the methods of teaching copyreading have developed during the period since first publication probably more than any other branch and have been somewhat standardized.

Excerpt from The Writing of News: A Handbook With Chapters on Newspaper Correspondence and Copy Reading In preparing this volume the author has had in mind the needs not only of students in schools of journalism, but of others who may desire a concise statement of the principles that govern the art of news writing as practiced by the American newspaper. It is hoped the book will prove helpful either as a laboratory guide in the school room or as a text book for home use. As the title indicates, the book deals with one phase of journalism, the presentation of the news story, more especially with the writing of the story - the reporter's part in the day's work. No attempt has been made to go into other aspects of journalism - the writing of editorials, the administrative features of the work, the delicate adjustment that every newspaper must make between its business and news departments except in so far as they bear directly upon the subject in hand. The term journalism is broadly used here to mean all branches of newspaper endeavor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.