Mba Operations Research

ORGANIZATION OF COPY READERS 

The number of copy readers depends, of course, upon the size of the newspaper. Small-city papers may have no men employed solely for this work. On the larger papers the staff of copy readers aver-ages perhaps six or seven, while some offices use as many as a dozen or more. These men are said to comprise the " copy desk," and all news copy, in theory at least, passes through their hands. On some papers the staff is divided, part reading telegraph copy under the telegraph editor and part working in the local room under the city editor. Other offices have adopted the newer plan of the combined desk, where both telegraph and local copy is read. This desk is in charge of a head copy reader, who apportions the copy among the readers, passes on their work after it is finished, and in general keeps things moving. The head copy reader is in effect a news editor or an assistant news editor. It is his duty to see that neither the local nor the telegraph department plays up " its stories unduly, but that each story, whatever its source, is rated at its true value in relation to the other news of the day. 

EDITING THE STORY 

The work of the copy reader is twofold : (1) to edit the copy and (2) to write the head. 

In brief, the copy reader should hew and polish the story to exactly the form in which it should appear in print. He is a skilled workman, employed to trim away the rough edges. By this it is not meant that the copy reader is expected to give the story the grace and elegance of literature. He should give it, if it has not already, grammatical exactness, freedom from ambiguity, and the force that goes with direct, simple statement of fact. This is the groundwork of the copy reader's task — to make the story correct in form as in fact. 

Less obviously, he must make the story conform to style— not only to the general laws of news writing, but to the special, arbitrary style of the newspaper for which it is written. Every good newspaper...