s no later facts at his command, may seize
it as a new feature. Instead of beginning his story with the fact of the
fire, which is already known, he begins with the cause, which appears to
be later news. His lead may be as follows:

| Spontaneous combustion in the wheat |
|bins of the H. P. Jones Produce Company's|
|elevator, First and Water streets, |
|started the fire which destroyed the |
|entire structure with a loss of $150,000 |
|this morning. |

Or if the rewrite man is not so fortunate as to discover a new feature
as good as this, he may have to resort to beginning with a picture of
the present results of the fire--thus:

| Smouldering ruins and a tangled mass of|
|steel beams are all that remain of the H.|
|P. Jones Produce Company's $100,000 |
|grain elevator, First and Water streets, |
|which was destroyed by fire this morning.|

It will be noticed that, while these new rewrite leads begin with a new
feature, each new lead contains all the facts presented in the previous
lead and is told with an eye to the man who has not read the earlier
account. After the lead the rewrite man retells the whole story for the
benefit of readers who did not see the morning papers and rearranges the
facts so that they appear new to those who read the previous stories.
Facts which the other papers buried he unearths and displays; details
which appear to be later developments he crowds to the beginning. The
whole story is sorted and rewritten in a new order and with a new
emphasis. The result is a rewrite story which appears to be later,
although it contains no new facts at all. It is seldom, of course, that
such a rewrite story is used for local news, for very rarely is it
impossible for a later paper to discover new facts. But in the case of
news from the outside world, from other cities, the simple method of
rehashing old facts must often be resorted to. If the story is based
upon a single dispatch announcing an earthquake in Hawaii or a shipwreck
in mid-ocean, many rewrite stories must be printed on the same facts
before another message brings later news and additional details. An
example of this is the treatment of the first few stories of the wreck
of the White Star liner _Titanic_. The story was a big one, but the
first dispatches