Column Inches and Editorial Content
Column inches are also used as an ad-hoc estimate of the importance of a news story and are also used to tell how much copy a reporter should write. This harks back to the paste up days, when in fact newspaper stories used to be printed on long strips of paper that were 1 column wide. The length would vary based on how long the story was.
The software used in most present-day newsrooms still measures column inches to give reporters and editors an estimate on how much space a story will take up on a page. Reporters usually refer to story lengths in inches, which actually refers to how many column inches a story takes up. Although it varies, it is generally agreed upon that there are 25-35 words in a column inch.
Newsroom staffers also measure items such as photographs and infographics using column inches.
Read more about this topic: Column Inch
Famous quotes containing the words column, inches, editorial and/or content:
“Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.”
—Henry Timrod (1828–1867)
“No imperfection in budded mountain,
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
green atoms shimmer in grassy mandalas,
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)