Editing Column inch (section)

==Use and number of words==
Column inches are also used as an [[ad hoc]] estimate of the importance of a news story and are also used to tell how much copy a reporter should write or has written, and how much should be cut from a story to fit the available space. This harks back to the days of the late 19th century [[linotype machine]] and its relatively uniform newspaper column-widths, echoed in the [[phototypesetting]] and [[paste up]] days of the late 20th Century, when typeset newspaper stories were still printed on long strips of paper one-column wide, then pasted into page layouts. Even when pages were designed using various wider column widths, story lengths were still estimated "as if" set in the standard narrower columns. Correspondents, for example, might be paid "by the inch" for their stories, and some organizations explained their nickname [[Stringer (journalism)]]  as originating when regular-width columns of set type were measured with lengths of string.

The software used in most present-day newsrooms still measures column inches to give reporters and editors an estimate on how much space a story will take up on a page. Reporters usually refer to story lengths in inches, which actually refers to how many column inches a story takes up. Although it varies, it is generally agreed upon that there are 25-35 words in a column inch.

Newsroom staffers also measure items such as [[photograph]]s and [[infographic]]s using column inches.