Editing v. truncating
I read an AP story on a battle in Baqouba, Iraq, in the print edition of the Lowell Sun this morning and was startled by how slanted it seemed against the U.S. troops. However, the full AP article, written by Lauren Frayer, is much better, and well worth a read. I don’t think for a moment the Sun sliced the wire copy to make the American soldiers look bad, I think the editor simply used as much copy as he need to fill the white space on the page. An editor at The Boston Herald, on the other hand, did a good job of actually editing the story by moving paragraphs around while dropping some to save space. One minor detailed the editing left out is that Baqouba is a town in the Diyala province.
