This article describes changes in the frequency and use of sentence-initial connectives in news stories over the course of the twentieth century, from their relative absence to a semi-conventionalized frequency of use to meet profession-specific communicative functions that override other prescriptive considerations. These functions are mostly pragmatic, rather than semantic,including both interactional goals (managing the interlocutorial distance between reporter and reader, by invoking spoken discourse norms) and structural goals (delimiting text categories or genres of journalism, and creating coherence in news narratives).