: How to format news, poems, text messages, and other kinds of written text? I always find myself wondering how to format written text: news (on TV and newspapers), text messages (from a cellphone),

This is an interesting topic. I'm not seeing any set conventions for this either, but with the advent of e-books, the formatting vagaries bring up new issues. Because the book will be read on a variety of e-readers, and users can vary the reading experience, you can't depend on block text or different fonts to render properly in all situations. So, if you're editing for an e-book, perhaps begin the text in a new paragraph and introduce with an em dash or hyphen? Or use italics, unless you're using italics for so many other situations that you might be confusing the reader.

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I have not really come across any conventional way of formatting these things. Much of the (rest of my answer) is based on my readings and a few other sources (which I will be citing).

The short answer first: yes, use block quotes. Solves most of the problems. Keep the following in mind for blockquotes:

Indent the content (usually 1 inche)
Doublespace
Do not include quotation marks

The MLA Guideline for using block quotes can be found here: writingcommons.org/format/mla/621-follow-mla-guidelines-for-block-quotations
The long answer:

For text messages, use any of the following strategies:

Italicize the text message
Underline the text message (a little more distracting than italics)
Use a different font than the main text (for example, use Courier instead of regular serifs)

In either case, you would have to do the following too: (essentially making it a block quote)

Make sure the content is in a new paragraph
Make sure the content is indented (usually 1 inch)

For poems and lyrics, use the following:

The following is based on a book The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone which includes poems in the middle of the text (was reading the book, so have used it as a reference).

Indent the poem 1 inch from the main text (so if you have a margin of 1 inch, the total indentation for the poem becomes 1+1 inches)
Use the same line spacing as the main text
Use the same font as the main text
Include an extra space before and after the poem. For example, it is a usual practice not to include double Enter between paragraphs. However, in this case, include a double paragraph (both before and after).

For newspaper: (have not found any authoritative source for this)

If it is just the headline(s) that you are quoting, you can simply italicize them in the main body
If you need to include a newspaper clipping, use block quotes

A few other points:

The decision to use a different font is generally by the publisher. You can insist that they use a different font for a particular type of content (for example, Instant Messages or text messages)
In certain books, the content is center aligned, so I believe it is something that has got more to do with the publishing house than a convention (for example, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon)

Hope these help!

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