Journalism and creative writing

It’s sometimes said that journalism is useful training for creative writing, because journalists have to use an economical but appealing style of English.
Economical in the sense that they are restricted to writing only a certain number of words for each story, or newspaper article, and appealing in the sense that the relatively few words which they are allowed to write have to appeal to their readers.
They are also highly-motivated - they are accustomed to meeting deadlines, and this self-discipline is useful in creative writing.
But is all this really true? After all, many - perhaps most - successful writers have had no training in journalism.
It is true, and this is because journalists have had time to develop an economical but appealing writing style. They have been trained in this skill for several years at a school of journalism and they have developed and refined it during their careers as journalists.
The same `veteran-argument’ applies to their sense of self-discipline. For several years, during their careers as journalists, they have had to produce stories - economical and appealing stories- to a deadline.
This doesn’t mean that no-one else can do all this, it just means that without this training and self-discipline it’s much harder to do it.
So how exactly do they write in an `economical and appealing’ writing style? The answer is, they edit as they are writing. More precisely, they `scan’  ahead. When they are typing the first part of a sentence they are simultaneously considering which noun, adjective or adverb to use in the next part of the sentence.
And while they are doing so - when they are concentrating like this, they are surrounded by the distractions of a busy newspaper news room. There are noisy conversations, phones’ ringing, including ‘phone calls to themselves. And when they answer the ‘phone, they will be simultaneously talking and thinking about their stories.*   
Is any of this information useful for creative writers? I think that some aspects of journalism can be adapted to creative writing, and in future posts I’ll explore this idea further, with some practical examples.
*I am a journalist\photojournalist and have worked in newspaper news rooms.