Toronto Star public editor Sharon Burnside talks about the paper's time-honoured full-court press strategy on the big story of the day.

An excerpt:

"Get the news first; sew it up so the opposition cannot get it; leave not a crumb or a morsel or a tidbit uncollected; play it big."

More than 100 years ago this newspaper's spiritual founder wrote the rules for Toronto Star news coverage.

Joseph Atkinson was hired to resuscitate a paper failing in a market dominated by six other daily newspapers. He succeeded by breaking the rules.

"Its most interesting practice was that of turning the entire staff of reporters loose on a big story," Ross Harkness wrote in J.E. Atkinson of The Star.

Reporters were pulled off other assignments in the belief that if 10 people worked the story, someone would get a scoop. The "big" story would dominate the paper, pushing secondary news out or to the back pages.

Critics accused the paper of being sensationalist and unbalanced but, as Harkness points out, "the formula was remarkably successful in building circulation."

Newspapers are businesses with aspirations for public service that transcend the bottom line. But you can't pay for great journalism unless the business thrives. Employing reporters and photographers with the talent and resources to cover any story, anywhere, any time, costs millions. Investigative journalism is expensive. Foreign bureaus can be beyond expensive.

The Star still plays it big.

The challenge and the risk is in deciding what stories get that treatment.

Burnside goes on to talk about how much some big stories drove single-copy sales.

The Pope's death and replacement selection, along with a three-part Karla Homolka series, were big draws.

But they were topped by Belinda Stronach's defection from the Tories and the near-defeat of the Liberal minority government in Ottawa. But otherwise, politics didn't drive sales.

Wacko Jacko only sold a few hundred extra papers, while the famous Britney Spears cover actually cost thousands of sales.

But the best seller of all was the one with the annual golf magazine insert.