Rip-and-Read News

“Rip and read” is a slang phrase describing a radio station journalism practice that dates back to at least the 1940s. News agency stories, especially written for aural delivery over the air (most often those from Associated Press or United Press International), would arrive in the subscribing station's newsroom by means of a bulky teletype machine that printed the stories in purple type onto a continuing roll of light yellow paper. At many local stations, it was common practice to simply rip stories off the roll and read them over the air. (Radio network news personnel never did this—they or other staff wrote out news stories based on both news agency and reporter information.)

The news teletype operated 'round the clock (unless somebody accidentally turned it off), so updated rip-and-read newscasts could repeat the process based on later agency news feeds. But direct reading of wire copy was also one reason why newscasts on many stations often sounded much the same. As different stations were drawing their news “scripts” from the same news services (UPI, for example, focused heavily on serving its several thousand radio clients with a special service written for on-air usage), their newscasts often were largely the same. Rip and read was considered an acceptable practice given the lack of time overburdened on-air personnel could devote to occasional short newscasts on stations that emphasized music or other formats. Even then, however, it was expected that station employees would at least logically rearrange stories for the local market.

Better yet, station announcers (or news staff if they were present) could rewrite the news agency or “wire” copy if time was available. Well into the 1980s, however, this meant retyping the stories on a manual or electric typewriter, a more complex and time-consuming process than the ubiquitous computers of today. Still, rewriting had the benefit of usually improving the on-air product. Carefully done, rewriting could emphasize local angles of national or foreign stories that were more relevant and interesting to the station's listeners, perhaps a personal angle or some other connection to the region. Rewriting could also help stories flow seamlessly from one to the next, and when done [Page 1228]well and often, could avoid repetition of the same wording in subsequent newscasts.

But another important factor (and one often overlooked) was the need to correct occasional errors (factual or even style) in the wire copy itself. Nor was it unusual, given transmission problems or teletype machine malfunctions, for an occasional story line to be typed directly over the previous one—resulting in an unreadable solid block of purple color. Going directly on air without at least skimming the stories first was always dangerous, if only for that reason. Newscasts could also run the risk of a batch of ripped news stories (often fairly brief and thus small) falling out of order before use or even on the air.

The basic temptation to rip and read continues today in the hotly competitive world of radio where industry consolidation has reduced or even eliminated dedicated news personnel at many stations or clusters of stations. It is also harder to develop a local angle if the news is being transmitted from a distant location using voice tracking—another increasingly common practice.

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