Dateline or no dateline

No, if you were glad it made him happy, you'd understand why some newspapers do it the other way.

 

And sometimes there's the Max Power way.

 

You were taught half-right.

No dateline on Home Paper City.

Dateline if you actually went to the community to report from there and have a bylined story. Otherwise, no dateline.

You can dateline an unsigned staff report off a call-in.

I used to work for a paper whose design required a dateline on EVERYTHING -- including games in Home Paper City and events where all reporting was done by phone. So, we had a guy playing for the Buccaneers, and I did a phoner on him. Had to dateline it Tampa, and then explain to one or two journalism-savvy people that no, I actually didn't go to Tampa, but it was our paper's unusual style.

I didn't mind datelining Home Paper City, because Home Paper City is a super-parochial community that thinks the paper should be waving pom-poms for the local high school and cover them at the exclusion of the rest of the county, while we saw ourselves as a county paper that covered all of the schools in our coverage area equitably, so it subtly conveyed a message that they weren't any more special than the rest of the county.

 

A former sports editor of mine once told me this...."If your ass was at the game, then you put a dateline on it, enough said."
I think if you go, then you put a Dateline. If you take it over the phone, then you mention if it was in suburb or big city.
I know some places that put Datelines on everything, and to be honest I am OK with that if you are covering a larger area and you have a main town with lots of little communities around.
Still my fav Dateline......... Petticoat Junction S.C., and yes it is a real place......

 

Henry" This is not the first time this has happened.

There I am, reading the thread, writing my response in my head and -- bang -- there's your post summing up exactly what I was going to say.

 

Dateline for every story outside city limits of newspaper. Byline if you go to event. Staff report if done by phone.

Have a major problem with putting dateline and byline on story that took place that you didn't attend and did by phone.

 

The first newspaper I worked at used datelines for all out-of-town stories, whether we were there or call in.

That policy changed when one of our reporters did a story on a local guy playing football in Europe. Thus, the dateline was - ASCHAFFENBURG, Germany.

The policy quickly changed.

It's always been my belief that a dateline indicates the reporter was in said city.

 

Part of Rhody's question, I think, is just how long do you have to be at the game.

If you are a weekly guy and you go, take some pics and notes and then finish by phone, do you use a dateline.

 

Probably the worst dateline was when Altoona, Pa., changed its name to Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold for 60 days as part of a movie stunt and the AP put that as its dateline. I'm not sure I could write that when a city wasn't permanently changing its name and was just doing it for money anyway.

 

My paper used to put a dateline on everything we did -- in the area or not. I always thought it was dumb to have a dateline with stories written in our coverage area, but the editor at the time thought it was a great thing. That quickly changed when our current ME took over.