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Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Here's one from Mark Sandalow, the San Francisco Chronicle's Washington bureau chief. In a weblog called PoliticsBLOG on today's SFGate website, he had an item on U.S. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi's role in an internal leadership fight for the No. 2 spot in the House Democratic caucus.

Sandalow writes an "inside baseball" political column ... stuff that nobody but a political junkie would bother to read ... but he does a good job of it. (I can talk because I used to write a political gossip column myself, for a paper in a Midwestern state capital city which will go unnamed here.) It's even-handed, and it gives a sense of what it's like behind the scenes in a legislative caucus.

(Vocabulary time: A caucus is a private meeting of the legislators of one political party, like the House Democrats or the Senate Republicans. We have them in Springfield, too.)

Back to Sandalow's column. He uses a lot of anonymous sources here, but he has to. The caucus meeting was private, and he's writing for Pelosi's hometown paper. Anybody quoted in this story could get in hot water with Madame Speaker. OK, Mme. Speaker-elect, technically speaking.

Sandalow begins in the middle, with an off-the-record interview he conducted with one House Democrat while the others were speaking to the TV cameras. Notice how quickly he sets the scene and sums up his column at the beginning:

As members of Congress huddled around cameras and microphones to assure news reporters that Democrats would quickly move on from today's leadership fight, privately they raised questions about their speaker-to-be's judgment.

"I have no idea what she was thinking,'' one veteran member of Congress and strong Pelosi supporter said just out of earshot of the television cameras, which jammed the hallway outside the Cannon Caucus Room where Democrats had just overwhelmingly endorsed Steny Hoyer to be their new majority leader over Pelosi's objections.

"This was a lose-lose scenario for her,'' the lawmaker said.

Here's the background, which any political junkie reading Sandalow's blog would know. Rep. Hoyer, D-Md., had just won the No. 2 spot, called the majority leader, even though Pelosi had endorsed Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. The vote was 149-86, so Pelosi lost big.

Sandalow talked to half dozen members, all but one of whom went off the record. One of them suggested why he didn't want to be quoted by name. And all of them spoke more freely knowing their names wouldn't be used -- especially second-guessing their leader. That's just the way political reπorting is done. Sandalow says:

Loyalty to Murtha, a concern that Hoyer had not been loyal enough, and Pelosi's interest in promoting Murtha's get-out-of-Iraq ideas were the most charitible motives offered.

Insecurity,paranoia, and vindictiveness were among the negative ones.

"Everyone has their own leadership style. It's not how I would have handled it,'' said another long time member of Congress, who refused to be identified, particularly to a writer from Pelosi's home town newspaper.

Sandalow puts in in perspective, though, when he suggests "[n]o one suggested the Pelosi's reign as speaker was in danger or that she wasn't capable of fully recovering," and he adds, "Even some Pelosi critics shrugged their shoulders and suggested that having just won a Democatic majority, perhaps there was a method to her madness." He also adds some perspective when he suggests the national press, which has been playing up the leadership in-fighting in the Democratic caucus, is more than a little bit hyped:

Members differed in their analysis of how difficult it would be to patch up the scars from today's battle, but they agreed that the news media had far overstated its consequences.

"Pelosi Splits Democrats With Push For Murtha,'' blared the banner headline of this morning's Washington Post, with a subhead: Speaker-to-Be Accused of Strong Arm Tactics.''

The story went on to chronicle how Pelosi had talked to some members about committee assignments in the same conversation as the Murtha-Hoyer vote, which hardly seems a strong arm tactic in a town where two members of the current congress are in prison for accepting bribes, and another is explaining how $90,000 in bribe money ended up in his freezer.

"This was more a monster of the media than a reality within the caucus,'' said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, a close Pelosi ally who was perfectly willing to talk on the record.

So, in the end, Sandalow's column gives a sense of perspective on what is probably going to turn out to be a run-of-the-mill political story in spite of the headlines it got in this week's papers. And it does give a sense of what it's like to be in Washington these days, and what it's like to cover legislative politics. Not bad for a run-of-the-mill political gossip column item.