This year marks the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's shooting at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln's assassination also arguably marks another anniversary: the advent of the modern news story.The details of the initial assassination of an American president are actually well-known. John Wilkes Booth shot the president in the rear of the top; Lincoln succumbed the next morning. Plans to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward were unsuccessful, though Seward was badly injured. ( Simplyhindu on Johnson never occurred.) But reports at that time were significantly less clear. In hindsight, we are able to easily start to see the change between your terse and generally accurate reporting that has been done in the modern fashion and the muddier remnants of a mature style.THE BRAND NEW York Times' coverage of Lincoln's death is an example of journalistic principles familiar to anyone who learned them in recent years. It follows inverted pyramid structure, and restricts itself to the facts. The opening (or lede) comprises hard news only: The president has been shot. The New York Herald hit the streets of the city by 2 a.m. on April 15th, and published six more editions on the following 18 hours, an unprecedented journalistic feat at that time. The Herald's coverage similarly stuck to the facts and led with the most important information.Contrast these with the Times' account of the Battle of Gettysburg. The article reads more like a forerunner of a live-blog or perhaps a Storify collection, comprising a pure chronology of observations and reactions. The only parsing of news at all can be found in the news. Otherwise, the reader is left to untangle the many accounts without help. Who won the battle? How? At what cost? The information is there, but it is definately not accessible.Contrast these Lincoln coverage, too, with the report of Lincoln's assassination that ran in the Alabama's Demopolis Herald. That account was cobbled together mainly from third- or fourth-hand information and imagination. Seward is reported dead, not wounded; in addition, an incident created out of whole cloth has Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston defeating the Union's commander, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. While it surely encouraged Alabama readers who were in denial about the South's just-concluded surrender, the report can hardly be considered journalism as we know it. It is more comparable to Karl Rove's famous last stand against their own network when Fox News reported that Mitt Romney had lost his presidential race.Several factors combined to improve just how news was reported between the start of the Civil War and its conclusion. Telegraphy began in the early 19th century, and gained a commercial foothold in the U.S. in the decades prior to the war. The rise of the electric telegraph freed communication from reliance on hand-delivered documents. Information could possibly be carried long distances easily, though data could only be entered as fast as one operator could click out the dots and dashes of Morse code and another operator could transcribe them into text. This meant you could send a brief burst of text very quickly, but long and ponderous articles were time-consuming to transmit. You wanted to tell the highlights of the story for the reason that first, short burst, which had become known as a bulletin.Another trigger for journalism's evolution was the war's staggering personal cost. The loss of 2.5 percent of the country's population through the conflict meant that hardly any American family remained untouched. This public craved news of the war and wished to get it immediately.Therefore the way news stories are written was transformed, and the transformation itself gave rise from what has been, at the very least until very recently, the ideal of modern journalism. Its principles will be the ones I was taught in the years soon after Watergate: Stick to the facts. Be economical with your words. Give the reader the main news first. Leave editorializing to the editorial page.Journalism since it was practiced for some of the 20th century relied on reporters in the field who, with the telephone replacing the telegraph, would call their newsrooms and get a rewrite man at risk. The reporter would dictate the reality; the rewrite guy (it was nearly always a guy in those days) would bang out the copy and hand it off to the editors.I practiced a version of this when I was in my own 20s, covering breaking news for The Associated Press. I would find a pay phone, so when I had someone on the line, I'd dictate a lede - no more than a sentence or two, rather than more than 40 words. I'd pause as the editor transcribed it and wear it the wire as a bulletin. That done, I would dictate another paragraph or two, and pause again while this is sent being an urgent "first add." A second add, or update, and maybe a third.The result wasn't great literature, nonetheless it got the job done. It worked in a global where some newspaper somewhere was always directly on deadline. check here might use any the main sequence, from the initial bulletin through the final add. Once I was done with the final installment of the original story, I could go back to the field and gather more details for a follow-up called a "writethru," which would combine, expand and generally improve that first report. If other reporters were involved, editors would combine our contributions in the writethrus.These days, the reporter in the field could be anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter or YouTube account. That first bulletin can come from anywhere. To a qualification, the craft of journalism has had a step backward due to this fact. The reader or viewer is again categorised as upon to distill the important gist of a story from the encompassing information, and perhaps, to sort out fact from opinion or to recognize when context is missing. But the basic principles of journalism can still serve us when we insist they be followed. We still have a right to expect credible news outlets to filter the noise and present us facts which are presented in the fairest context possible. While journalism is changing once again, not precisely what was elegant and trustworthy previously has to be sacrificed.A president died in the early morning from then on tragic night at Ford's Theatre. But in many ways, that is the morning modern journalism was born.For more articles, please visit the Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC newsletter or sign up to the blog.