Cutting 600 Words to 250 Without Losing the Story
It is 9 p.m. at a Bengali daily in Kolkata. The district page closes at 10:30. A reporter in Kharagpur files 600 words on a municipality notice to 12 shops built on 0.8 acre of cremation-ground land; 40 families use the ground; no rehabilitation plan is mentioned. The copy says two of the shops are owned by the brother of the local councillor, but the reporter's only source is a shopkeeper who will not be named. The municipality's disaster management officer has not commented. The reporter's phone is switched off. In the previous edition, the paper misspelled the surname of a dead man in a separate obituary as 'Bose' instead of 'Basu'; the family has complained. You have 250 words of space, a six-column headline and a three-line correction box.
1. Make a cut plan: what stays, what goes, and why. Include how you treat the councillor claim.
Read the worked answer
Keep: the notice, 0.8 acre, 12 shops, 40 families, the absence of a rehabilitation plan, and the municipality's non-response. These are the public-interest core. Keep one short shopkeeper quote and one family quote; attribute both.
Cut: the history of the ground, repeated descriptions of the shops, two long quotes reduced to one, adjectives such as 'massive' and 'illegal empire', and background already published.
Councillor claim: hold it unless the reporter has a document - shop licence, assessment register, municipal record - or an on-record source. An unnamed shopkeeper is not enough to print 'councillor's brother owns two shops'. It is a serious imputation, the councillor has had no chance to reply, and the reporter is unreachable, so the claim cannot be verified before deadline. The land story stands without it. If it is verified later, include the councillor's response and say what the records show; do not imply guilt by family relationship.
2. Write a headline of no more than eight words and a three-line correction note.
Read the worked answer
Headline: Notice to 12 shops on cremation ground
Seven words. It is supported by the copy: the notice, the number and the location. It does not say the shops are illegal, because the notice may be appealable, and it does not drag in the councillor claim.
Correction note: 'In Tuesday's edition, the surname of the late [name] was printed as Bose instead of Basu. The error is regretted.'
Place it in the fixed correction box on the district page, not at the foot of an inside page. If the obituary is online, correct the text and add a dated note at the end. A correction should be prompt, specific and as prominent as the error; a three-line box is enough, but it must not be buried.
3. The reporter is unreachable. Do you hold the councillor claim or run it attributed to an unnamed shopkeeper? Explain the legal and editorial reasoning.
Read the worked answer
Hold it. The claim is defamatory. Truth is a defence in Indian defamation law, but the paper must be able to prove it; an unnamed shopkeeper whom the reporter cannot produce is a weak defence. The councillor has a right to reply, and no reply has been sought. The reporter is unreachable, so no document can be checked before the page closes.
Editorially, the link is not essential to the public-interest story about the cremation ground and the notice. Running it on a single anonymous source would expose the paper to a legal notice and would weaken the verified part of the story. If the link matters, hold the whole story for a day, get the municipal record, and seek the councillor's response. A second-day follow-up with documents is stronger than a first-day insinuation.