An even greater effort to get “to-day” rather than “yesterday” into news stories is made by the evening paper, because its special field is the news of the day on which it is published. Yesterday is dead; its news has passed into history. Taking up the chronicle where the morning paper has dropped it, the evening paper, in successive editions, records the events of the day. First-page stories in early editions may be ruthlessly cut down or thrown out as more important news develops. It is not enough to tell what has happened already; the newspaper must tell what is happening and what is going to happen. News that appears stale is not wanted. There are so many things of vital interest happening all the time that the newspaper is not concerned with dead events, except as they may have a bearing on the present.
The second-day story, then, if it is worth publishing at all, must have some new feature to bring it up to date. At least it must have the appearance of newness. It is in giving a story this gloss that the tricks of the news writer’s trade are called into play. Nowhere does experience count for more than in writing of a day-old event in a manner to convey the impression that the news is being told for the first time. The novice may write vividly of something he has just seen, but the trained news writer excels in the artifice of what the newspaper man calls rewriting.
On some evening newspapers a squad of men begin work soon after the city editions of the morning papers are off the press. Before dawn these men are on duty, busily preparing copy for the first edition of the paper, which goes to press before news begins to pour in through the regular channels. This work is in charge of an assistant city editor, who paves the way for the city editor. Copies of the morning papers and a pair of shears are his equipment. Stories that promise further development during the day he lays aside for the consideration of the city editor; others that may safely be rewritten and made to appear as new he deals out to the squad of writers; still others, those that are dead after one telling, he throws away. Stories that hold the possibility of a libel suit--or, as the newspaper man says, contain dynamite--are mentally labeled dangerous and held for investigation--or the wastebasket.