The LEADER / EDITORIAL
The Editorial used to be written by the editor but now there is a team of leader writers whose voice tends to follow 'newspaper policy / the party line'. For instance, in The Sun, this will be flagged as "The Sun says" = the Editor's opinion.
Sometimes, the writer of a column is named. There may be several regular columnists, each with a distinct voice and particular interests.
Mary Kenny writes informatively in her advice on how to write a newspaper column.
She explains why columnists are valued by readers:
"Columnists have increased and proliferated, and today a newspaper like The Times will have three or four regular columnists each day. In one sense, the competition is much greater – the Internet and blogging have opened the floodgates of so much more writing, information and opinion-mongering – and yet, there are also many more opportunities because of all these outlets. I also believe that because there is so much data and information available to us all, there is a constant need for trustworthy analysis. This week, for example, I’d like to read a really well-informed column about what is exactly going on at Davos – not just describing it, but interpreting it intelligently for me, too, from someone who knows their stuff and can analyse the content."
The article contains gems such as this:
"Yeats’s advice to writers was that that they should learn to “put pictures in their prose”: and I would add to that, that it’s often engaging to tell a story when writing a column. Edward Lucas, who often writes about serious matters touching on Russia and Eastern Europe, was writing recently about the fact that a fifth of the British population is “often” or “always” lonely: he didn’t write a preachy column about this, but he told a poignant little story about an Estonian correspondent who used to write to him regularly. When the letters stopped coming, Lucas learned that his pen-pal had died, and that no one attended his cremation: how he regretted he hadn’t made more of an effort to befriend the older man, whose life had been intertwined with the bleak history of his country."
