The Press: The Journal's Daily Dividend

By traditional definition, a "leader" is an editorial, and in Britain that is still what it means. For the past 25 years, Wall Street Journal readers have become accustomed to a different meaning. A leader is the name put by Journal staffers to the long, well-researched general news stories that heighten and enliven the paper's regular diet of business news.

Last week Journal leaders reported that Mormon Apostle Ezra Taft Benson has been trying to push his church into an ultraconservative political stance; that the Federal Government has be come disenchanted with de facto segregated neighborhood schools, is now subtly pushing such ideas as "education plazas" that would serve the school needs of an entire community; and that a growing number of juvenile courts are using teen-age "juries" to recommend sentences for young errants.

Spotting Trends. Although such stories are seemingly unrelated to business, the Journal argues that just about any U.S. event affects business and business men. "Anything is fair game," says Managing Editor Ed Cony. In recent months leaders have widened the lens to look at how the "black power" dream has boomeranged on national civil rights groups, then narrowed it down to see how summer resorts subtly rebuff Negro vacationers and how newly integrated Negro schoolchildren in Alabama have met an "invisible wall" of social and economic barriers.

The stories aim to pinpoint trends not yet widely reported, and often turn out to be a scoop when printed. Last month a leader broke the news that a 71-lb. television camera developed by Westinghouse is scheduled to go along on the first U.S. mission to the moon and telecast the trip live. Three times in the past five years enterprising leader writers have won Pulitzer Prizes for such stories as the expose of the commodity market's 1964 salad-oil scandal.

The Journal runs three leaders a day on Page One and occasionally carries a fourth on the back page. Most of the ideas come from the Journal's 200 reporters in the field, and competition to get one in the paper is intense. Weeks or even months may go into a leader, or 20 reporters may spend as little as a day on a national roundup.

Broadening Minds. After a reporter has written his story, Chief Page One Editor Sterling Soderlind turns loose his home office team of five young editors. Their work, says Editor Cony, results in "perhaps the most edited newspaper copy in the country"; the byline goes to the reporter who wrote the original version. Some leaders involve a week or more of rewriting, checking and additional reporting. Special emphasis is placed on honing the lead paragraphs, which British Critic Henry Fairlie recently called the best in the business.