ar and World War II, newswriting and reporting did an about face. During the Civil War, anonymous reporters wrote long, detailed narratives, pointing out details that gave the reader a sense an event in much the same way a novelist would describe a scene. Because of inventions like electric communications and the kerosene lamp, which afforded the poorer, less educated the illumination but not the vocabulary or the attention span to read sprawling accounts of events, newswriting became more focused on the communicating facts and less on entertaining the reader with artful renderings of the news. By World War II, news stories more closely resembled telegrams, written with the cost of each word in mind. While a Civil War reporter’s work might be compared to Ernest Hemingway’s account of a man catching a fish, a more recent reporter could be liken to Detective Joe Friday of Dragnet fame: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Efficient, not artful, writing became the standard....
