rewriteman

English

Alternative forms

• rewrite man

Etymology

From rewrite +‎ -man.

Noun

rewriteman (plural rewritemen)

1. (journalism) A newspaper reporter who crafts stories from information reported by others, such as legmen.
   • 1913, Irvin S[hrewsbury] Cobb, The Saturday Evening Post, volume 185, Philadelphia, Pa., London: Curtis Publishing Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 23; republished in “The Third Stick”, in Stickfuls: (Myself—To Date) (The Works of Irvin S. Cobb), New York, N.Y.: The Review of Reviews Corporation publishers; published by arrangement with George H[enry] Doran Company, 1923, →OCLC, part 1 (Getting Set in New York: In Three Takes), page 136:

     This was my abrupt introduction to the system by which most of the live news is handled for the New York evening newspapers [...] Its continued use has bred up two distinct and separate types of news-specialists—the leg man, who gets the story, but rarely writes it; and the rewrite man, who writes the story but rarely gets it.

   • 1954, Edmond D[avid] Coblentz, “Introduction: The Drift toward Specialization”, in Edmond D. Coblentz, editor, Newsmen Speak: Journalists on Their Craft, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Calif., London: University of California Press, →OCLC, page 125:

     Many of the changes which have taken place in the newspaper field within the last fifty years have been in the direction of specialization. At the turn of the century, for example, a reporter got his stories, wrote them, and sometimes even made up his own headlines. Legmen and rewrite men were practically unknown.

   • 1973, “Newspaper and Wire Service Operations”, in Journalist 3 & 2: Naval Training Command Rate Training Manual (NAVTRA 10294-C), Washington, D.C.: Published by Naval Training Command; United States Government Printing Office, →OCLC, page 153, column 2:

     LEG MEN cover local events and phone the information to a rewrite man.

   • 2007 September 22, Robert D. Mcfadden, “James F. Clarity dies at 75; reported on crime, politics and war”, in The New York Times‎, New York, N.Y.:

     After working as a copy boy and then a reporter at The New York Journal-American, he joined The New York Herald Tribune as a night rewriteman.

   • 2009, James T. Fisher, “Epilogue: Souls of the (Port) Apostolate”, in On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-century America), Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 299:

     [Allen] Raymond was the son of a Methodist lay preacher who traded his Ivy League, New England pedigree for a hardboiled journalistic persona cultivated over decades as a "legman," rewrite man, copyeditor, and reporter for a dozen urban newspapers, mostly in metropolitan New York.

Further reading

• Rewrite man on Wikipedia.Wikipedia