Reporters never will have enough time to work on all the story ideas or turn in absolutely perfectly polished prose on deadline. They might as well acknowledge that fact and pay more attention to the other factors in their work they can control.

Reporters and editors everywhere battle and complain over length of stories. Good reporters always gather more interesting and important information than they can use in their stories. Good editors always have more good stories, photographs and graphics than they have space. With space at a premium in news today, you need to make every word count in your stories. However long your editors let you write, you need to hone your ability to organize information and write tight stories that make every word count.

The One-Minute (OK, Maybe 5-Minute) Editor: Working effectively with reporters when you don't have time to brainstorm.

A complex story should not be challenging to the reader, however challenging it is for the writer. Careful work in organization of your reporting and writing will help readers make sense of stories that deal with cumbersome economic or technical issues, or with soap-opera tales that present multiple characters and confusing turns. These techniques will help keep the complex story clear.

If there is one thing many newspapers around the world seem to have in common, it is the rigid adherence to the Inverted Pyramid as a style of news presentation. Editors justify the Inverted Pyramid as an effective way of informing readers very quicky about what happened, when, where, why, to whom it happened and how, without losing their interest and attention. Though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, it has created the impression that all the news has to be reported in the first paragraph, hence the use of summary leads.