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Old 04-22-2014, 05:07 PM   #1
Hans Rancke-Madsen
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Default generic newspaper size

How many news articles (just news but including all the small 50-word filler stuff) would you say a generic big city newspaper of the pre-internet 20th Century would have? Just a ballpark figure. 100? 200? More? Less?

(I'm writing about a campaign newspaper and want to compare it to the real thing).


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Old 04-22-2014, 05:44 PM   #2
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Default Re: generic newspaper size

I suggest looking at real examples; http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser appears promising, though the NYT is probably above average even by big city standards.
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Old 04-22-2014, 05:59 PM   #3
Hans Rancke-Madsen
 
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Default Re: generic newspaper size

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
I suggest looking at real examples; http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser appears promising, though the NYT is probably above average even by big city standards.
That's an most interesting site. Thank you for the link. But I just need a rough ballpark figure for a single sentence; I do not want to sit down and spend hours counting news articles just for that.


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Old 04-22-2014, 06:19 PM   #4
Rocket Man
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Longmont, CO
Default Re: generic newspaper size

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen View Post
How many news articles (just news but including all the small 50-word filler stuff) would you say a generic big city newspaper of the pre-internet 20th Century would have? Just a ballpark figure. 100? 200? More? Less?

(I'm writing about a campaign newspaper and want to compare it to the real thing).


Hans
I know that today, the Denver Post has 40 to 50 items in the A section alone, if you count each brief as a separate item. The biggest difference pre-Internet is that your newspapers will have more sections and more pages per section because both advertising and circulation are much healthier. (Though even then, radio and television caused some erosion.)

I might still have some papers from the mid-1990s, I think, before the Web came into being and the Net really took off. I'll do some looking and get back to you. All of my 16 years in the business has been with smaller papers (22,000 circulation at largest), so the story counts I could give you for those wouldn't be terribly representative.

One other difference is that newspaper staffs are bigger pre-Internet than they are now, so more of that news will be local content, more of the "big stories" will be covered by the paper instead of automatically relying on the AP, and more of the local stories can be in-depth because staffs can afford to "carry" a reporter for a while until he gets a big piece complete.
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Old 04-23-2014, 04:42 PM   #5
malloyd
 
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Default Re: generic newspaper size

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen View Post
How many news articles (just news but including all the small 50-word filler stuff) would you say a generic big city newspaper of the pre-internet 20th Century would have? Just a ballpark figure. 100? 200? More? Less?
Does each obituary or entry in the arrest record count? That will inflate the total considerably.
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Old 04-23-2014, 05:11 PM   #6
Hans Rancke-Madsen
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Default Re: generic newspaper size

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Does each obituary or entry in the arrest record count? That will inflate the total considerably.
No, I don't think of that as actual news.


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Old 04-27-2014, 05:41 PM   #7
Rocket Man
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Default Re: generic newspaper size

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Does each obituary or entry in the arrest record count? That will inflate the total considerably.
These days, most obituaries are paid ads; I wasn't counting them in my estimate. (Older papers would often have treated them as news copy turned in from an outside source, which made the obits free to run but also meant editors could rewrite and shorten them however they wanted.) In terms of page planning, editors count the entire police blotter as one story, regardless of how many or few entries it has.
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