Sharp edits needed to make wire stories fit

On this last day of 2017, we dip into the mailbag to answer a question raised recently by several readers.

This inquiry sometimes comes when a reader compares a wire-service story printed in The Dispatch with the original version seen in another publication or online. The recent example was a behind-the-scenes look at President Trump’s first year in office, which was written by The New York Times and came to us at a length of more than 300 column inches, or about 9,000 words.

That is an incredibly long story by newspaper standards. The average daily story in The Dispatch is about 25 column inches, or about 700 words.

To give you some perspective on the amount of space that would be consumed by a 300-inch story, consider that each page of our paper can handle a little less than 70 column inches of text. That’s with no photos, graphics or advertisements — just text. And we rarely would consider subjecting you to a page so gray with type.

Do the math, and you’ll see that 300 inches would add up to more than four pages — nearly half of our entire A section on some days — for the text of one story. That would leave little room for any other news.

I’m confident that is not what most of you would want.

Often, when The New York Times, Washington Post or other wire service offers a story that long, it also will offer an abridged version, knowing that most U.S. papers do not have room for a 300-inch story. (We printed about 62 inches of the Trump story with three photos, all of which filled a page and a half.)

Even an “abridged” story from The Times can arrive at a longer length than we can handle, so an editor must

judiciously trim the story to fit the space available.

This is a time-consuming art. We take this very seriously and do our best to preserve the key points and supporting facts. Often, what doesn’t make the cut includes anecdotes, quotes and description that are interesting but not vital to the focus of the story.

We also combine wire stories at times, because on any given day, one service might have more or better sources on a topic than another. Or one might

be written better but lacks some information provided by another service. We seek to give you the best information offered by The Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Tribune and other services available to us.

“My goal when I choose a wire story for the A section is to try to get the best material in it that I can, given the space constraints I’m facing,” said News Editor Danny Goodwin, who does this work frequently.

“If a certain news service covers it quite well, without the need of information from other wire services,

I run that story,” Goodwin said. “If I have a version I like overall, but I see some information in another wire story that I think would benefit the reader, I try to work that in.”

If there is a conflict, we note that in the story with something like, “but The Washington Post reported something different,” and we say what that is.

“Basically, I am intent on doing the best I can to make sure every inch we devote to a topic has value to the reader,” Goodwin said. “With all that we have going on at night as we assemble the paper, I’m sure I fall short sometimes, but that’s my goal: Make

every inch count.”

When it comes to cutting stories, readers should know that newspapers have always trimmed stories — sometimes to fit available space; other times because the topic is less relevant to people in this market. Many news briefs start as fulllength stories in the city where the news happened. A bus crash that kills the driver and injures six schoolchildren in Eugene, Oregon, for example, is worth a full story in Eugene but likely will be a brief here — if it even makes it into The Dispatch amid all of the other stories competing for space.

Some stories are cut

to briefs by the wire services before they send them, and “some of them come to us as 15-inch stories that I boil down,” Goodwin said.

If we didn’t trim stories for space, we’d provide far fewer topics in the paper, because it would be consumed by a few long wire stories.

“We still run stories at length, because we believe such in-depth coverage is something we do best,” Goodwin said. “But the wire is full of stories that are just too long, considering all of the other stories we need to print, or because they simply won’t hold

the interest of most readers.”

We also edit wire stories to the same standards we apply to locally writtens stories — to root out material that we view as extraneous or unfair. That includes adjectival exuberance that serves no purpose in relaying the facts of the story.

We appreciate the opportunity to address your questions about how and why we do what we do to bring you the news. And we wish you all the best for 2018.