Dateline or no dateline

You put a dateline on the girls' gamer, not the boys'. I'm with everyone who says datelines are for stories where the reporting, or at least the bulk of the reporting, was done on-site.

This standard is only true of bylined stories, to me. Nightly roundups can have datelines, because most papers don't put bylines on them.

Frankly, I'm not sure why you didn't just pick one and do the other entirely by the phone.

 

How apeman describes it is how I was also taught how to do it, albeit at a past shop. You always use a dateline, unless the story takes place in your home location. (i.e. If you run The Podunk Press, and the story takes place in Podunk, then no dateline.) However, I've never really put much thought into it.

 

The ones that make me homicidal are when the paper decrees every story have a dateline, even in an unincorporated area or in a roundup story that applies to the entire circulation area. Thus a former paper now has datelines like PODUNK COUNTY or GREATER PODUNKLAND.

 

This. And it shouldn't even be debatable. It really pisses me off when papers don't travel to a game and run a "staff report" that has a dateline. Either run the AP story or get rid of the dateline.

 

They no longer do this, so I feel OK in pointing this out, but when I worked in Danville, we put city and state on all datelines unless they stood alone by the AP Stylebook. Everyone does this. But everyone also has a local list of dateline locations that stand alone. We did not. So half the stories in the paper would read DANVILLE, Va. -- ipso locum golden skillet. They got away from that after I left, but I thought that was a rather amusing literalist interpretation of the rules.

 

If you're covering an event in person and in another town/city, byline and dateline.
If you get something over the phone, no dateline.

 

Moot point anyway because readers don't notice and few give a shit

 

I totally want to visit D'Crowflies.

At my last shop, we eventually had staffers writing gamers off the radio when we stopped paying to travel with some of the local college's teams. And we'd do roundups off of phoners, like everyone else. We had a modified dateline to indicate that we weren't there. Instead of:

BUMFUCK - Local school got trounced by better team...

it would be:

In Bumfuck, local school got trounced by better team...

I don't know if readers even knew what it meant, but it was what we did.

 

THIS. Of course, 21 is right. I throw up in my mouth a little bit when I read/hear another applied rational or concept.

 

Datelines originally existed for the telegraph service to determine how much to charge, say, for 400 words transmitted from New York to Washington.

21 is, to quote Red Smith, as right as two martinis at lunch. You have to been there and gathered the information to use a dateline. And please, only on stories out of your main circulation area.

Dateline trivia question: Does The New York Times still use a UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. dateline?

And memo to AP: On racing stories, it's SPEEDWAY, Ind., not INDIANAPOLIS.

 

No offense, but that's just painful to read. The readers don't notice or care about a lot of things, but we still have to get it right.

 

I have to take my own art and running file photos durin playoffs when you can get the art is lazy.