Challenge:Russell Baker describes his love for newspaper writing. He was both a reporter and a columnist. What is the difference? What information does a news reporter include in a story? What information is not appropriate in a reporter's news story? What do newspaper columnists write about? In what ways does a columnist have more freedom to include both fact and opinion?
Outcome: Check out your local newspapers. Identify news stories written by reporters and columns written by columnists. Make a list of the different types of news stories. Make a comparative list of the different columns or opinion pieces included in the paper. Write your own short news story about something happening in your area. Take the same topic and write a column or article about it. Include information and your own comments and opinions.
I am a newspaper man. I began as a police reporter in 1947, and went on and did all the things that you did in those days when you learned the business by doing it from the ground up, covering affairs like this, covering speeches on the rubber chicken circuit, doing rewrite. I was made London correspondent of the Baltimore Sun, the paper I then worked for. I came back to Washington and I was White House Correspondent. I went from the Baltimore Sun to the New York Times. Most of my writing in that time was of a journalistic nature, it was reporting which I loved and still do. After a while on the Times, I was offered a newspaper column. There was no conception by anybody on the Times on what such a column would be, so I made it up.
