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HOW A NEWSPAPER IS MADE

Newspaper Production. To furnish for a cent or two a fairly complete record of important events that take place in any corner of the world, editorial comment, market quotations, reviews of new books, critiques of plays and concerts, fashion hints, cooking recipes, cartoons, and illustrations, as well as advertisements of all kinds, would seem a stupendous, not to say impossible, task if it were not an everyday phenomenon. A single copy of a daily newspaper in a large city contains, exclusive of advertising, from 60,000 to 80,000 words, or as many as does the average novel. These metropolitan papers print from 100,000 to 900,000 copies each day, numbers far in excess of the editions of most successful novels. While it takes the novelist months to produce his work, and his publishers months to print it, the newspaper is made and printed in from one to ten editions within twenty-four hours.

The successful achievement of such an undertaking, day by day, requires extensive equipment and effective organization. The rapid production of a large edition demands many expensive machines to transform written matter quickly into type, and huge presses to print the papers at the highest speed. Furthermore, it makes necessary a large staff to gather and prepare news and other reading matter, a large force to put this material into type, to print it, and to distribute the papers, besides managers and clerks to carry on the many business transactions involved in so big an enterprise.

Newspaper Organization. Although in its main divisions the organization of newspaper publishing is essentially the same, the size of a paper determines to a considerable extent the number of employees and the degree of division of labor among them, as well as the character and the extent of the equipment. On large papers where many men are employed and many editions are printed daily, there needs must be considerable specialization in editing and reporting; while on small papers the size of the staff requires that each man perform a variety of tasks. Sometimes conditions of ownership or control, and on older papers office traditions, modify the usual duties and authority of different members of the staff.

No one form of organization that can be described in detail, therefore, will apply to all newspaper offices even when they are of the same relative size, but a composite type of organization for large newspapers may be explained to show the division of work.

Newspaper publishing consists of three distinct parts with three entirely different classes of workers: (1) the business management, (2) the mechanical force, (3) the editorial staff.

The Business Management. The business organization, as its name implies, has charge of the commercial side of newspaper publishing. From the financial point of view the purpose of the newspaper is to make enough money to maintain the paper and to pay dividends to the stockholders. The object of the business department is to sell as much advertising space and as many copies of each issue as it possibly can; and, on the other hand, to pay out for wages and expenses only so much as is necessary to keep the paper up to a standard that will insure a good circulation and enough advertising. In short, a newspaper company, regarded purely in the light of a business enterprise, is not essentially different from any manufacturing company that produces and sells a commodity.

The business department is organized with a business manager at its head, who has complete control of the finances of the paper, subject, of course, to the owner or board of directors of the company. Under him are: (1) the circulation manager, (2) the advertising manager, (3) the cashier. The circulation manager directs the work of subscription canvassers, the drivers and the assistants on the paper’s distributing wagons, the mailing clerks and helpers, and a force of office clerks and bookkeepers. In the advertising department are the advertising solicitors and the office clerks and bookkeepers. The cashier has assistants and a bookkeeper to aid him. The business office of the newspaper is frequently referred to as the “counting room.”

The Mechanical Force. The mechanical side of newspaper making is divided into three relatively distinct departments: (1) the composing room, where, under the direction of a foreman and a copy-cutter, the type is set up by compositors or is cast in linotype or monotype machines by operators, and where the type is arranged by make-up men in pages as it is to appear in print; (2) the stereotyping room, where these pages of type are used to make molds into which lead plates are cast by stereotypers under the direction of the foreman of the room; (3) the press-room, where the papers are printed, in charge of a superintendent with pressmen and machinists as his assistants. Attached to the composing room is the proof-reading department with a head proof-reader, several assistant readers, and as many copy-holders who read aloud the copy for the proof which is to be corrected.

The Editorial Staff. The writing and editing of a newspaper, with which this book is particularly concerned, is divided into two distinct parts: (1) the gathering, the writing, and the editing of the news; and (2) the interpreting of the news. The two branches are different in the kind of work involved, and are relatively independent in the organization of the office. To present clear, concise, accurate, timely, and interesting reports, or “stories” as they are called, of everything that is going on in the world of sufficient importance to be of interest to any considerable number of readers, is the aim of the news department. The more quickly, the more attractively, the more completely the news can be presented, the greater is considered the success of the newspaper from the point of view of the news staff. The editorials of a newspaper attempt to interpret and to explain the news, or to make the news the basis of argument upon issues growing out of questions of the day. The attitude taken by a newspaper on the questions at issue is determined by what is known as its “editorial policy.”

The editor-in-chief, under whom are one or more editorial writers, has charge of the editorial columns and determines the editorial policy, subject to whatever control of this policy the owner or directors desire to exercise. The editorial writers and the editor-in-chief confer daily to consider the attitude that the paper shall take in its editorials and to divide the work of writing them. Some of the editorials are written by men in other professions who are not on the regular staff, and often by such members of the news staff as the financial editor or the dramatic critic. Most of the editorials, however, are the work of the editorial writers.

The news staff is in charge of the managing editor, who is usually responsible directly to the owner or the directors. As aids the managing editor has the assistant managing editor, and the news editor, or the night editor, to take charge of “making up” the newspaper The gathering and writing of local news is in charge of the city editor and the night city editor, with an assistant city editor. The news of the state, the nation, and the world, as it comes by mail, telegraph, and telephone, is under the control of the telegraph editor. The city editor directs the reporters; the telegraph editor the correspondents. Particular kinds of news are collected and edited by persons in especially designated positions, such as the sporting editor, the society editor, the financial and market editor, the dramatic and musical editor, the real estate editor, the railroad editor, the marine editor, the labor editor, all of whom usually work under the direction of the managing editor. The special magazine sections of the Saturday or the Sunday issues are in charge of the magazine, or Sunday, editor. An exchange editor goes over all the newspapers received in exchange to clip and edit material worth reprinting. Cartoonists, artists, and photographers supply the materials for newspaper illustrations, or “cuts,” as they are called. A librarian has charge of the reference books and newspaper files, as well as of the collection of biographical sketches and portraits of prominent people known as the “morgue.”

All of the manuscript, or “copy,” is edited and is supplied with headlines at the copy desk in charge of a head copy-reader with a number of copy-readers as assistants. “Rewrite men” are often employed to take the facts of a story from another newspaper and rewrite them, or to receive material over the telephone from reporters and correspondents and write it up for publication. Unsatisfactory work of a reporter may be turned over to a rewrite man to be put in the desired form, for rewrite men must be able to take the raw material of the news furnished by others and turn it into a well-written news story.

Getting News into Print. The relation of all these departments to one another is best shown by following through the process by which a piece of news gets into print. The telegraph editor on a newspaper in the capital city of the state, for example, gets from an office telegraph operator, a typewritten dispatch signed by the paper’s correspondent in a city of a neighboring state to the effect that the attorney-general has dropped dead in the lobby of a hotel. The telegraph editor at once notifies the city editor so that he may assign reporters to get the local phases of the piece of news, or “to cover the local end of the story,” as the newspaper workers say. One reporter is sent to interview the members of the late attorney-general’s family; another is dispatched to the governor’s office for an interview with the governor on the deceased official; a third is asked to look up the statute concerning such an unexpected vacancy in the office; a fourth is assigned to find out the probable successor to the position.

After informing the city editor and the managing editor, the telegraph editor at once turns over the dispatch to the head copy-reader to have it edited and to have a headline written. Meanwhile one of the rewrite men is delegated to get a biographical sketch of the attorney-general from the office “morgue” and to write an obituary. The artist looks up the half-tone engraving, or “cut,” of the official in the “morgue” and selects an appropriate border or “frame” in which to put it. The editor-in-chief is informed of the attorney-general’s death so that he may make appropriate editorial comment. Meanwhile the telegraph editor has sent a telegram to the correspondent who furnished the first news of the event instructing him to “wire” five hundred words more giving all the particulars.

When the dispatch has been edited and a headline written by one of the copy-readers, the latter returns it to the head copy-reader, who glances over it and sends it in a pneumatic tube to the composing room. The tube delivers it at the copy-cutter’s desk. The copy-cutter glances at the sheet with the headline for the story, and then at the two pages of copy. The headline he sends by the copy distributor to the headline machine to be set up. The two pages of copy he cuts into three pieces or “takes” so that the story may be set up on three different linotype machines. If the copy of the whole story were given to one machine operator, it would take three times as long to get it into type.

Meanwhile some of the reporters have returned from their assignments. Each one reports what he has found to the city editor, and is told how long a story to write, and possibly what to emphasize in the beginning, or “lead.” As each story is finished it is turned over to the city editor, who glances over it and passes it on to the head copy-reader. Thence it goes through the same course as the first dispatch.

After the copy of the dispatch has been set up in type, it is taken to a small hand press, and several impressions called “galley proofs,” or “proofs,” are printed, or “pulled,” from the type. One of the proofs, with the original copy, goes to the proof-room to be compared with the copy and carefully corrected by the proof-readers. Another proof-sheet is sent to the managing editor, who is responsible for everything that goes into the paper; a third proof is delivered to the news editor who arranges, or “makes up,” the news stories on each page of the paper before it is printed. After the proof-readers have corrected the proof, and the editors have made any necessary changes in it, the proof-sheets are returned to the operators so that they may make the necessary alterations by resetting whatever is changed. From the type thus corrected a second set of proofs, called the “revise,” is printed and these are distributed to the editors as the first were. The type is then ready to be used in the process of printing the paper.

Half an hour or more before an edition is to be printed, the news editor gathers the proofs of the news stories that are to be put into that edition, and goes to the composing room to arrange this news on the several pages. The importance of the news of the attorney-general’s death would warrant its being given a prominent place on the first page. The most prominent position is the right-hand outside column. If there is no news of greater importance, the news editor directs the “make-up” men in the composing room to put the type of this story in the outside column of the first page “form.” The “form” consists of a “chase,” or steel frame, somewhat larger in inside dimensions than the page as it appears when printed. Into this “chase,” which rests upon a smooth iron-top table, the type is arranged between the brass or lead column rules which make the lines between the columns of type. The advertisements are placed in the forms under the direction of the advertising department just as the news matter is put in under the direction of the news editor, the page and position on the page usually having been stipulated by the advertiser in making a contract for a certain “position” for his “ad.” When each page is filled with type, the whole page is “locked” in the “form” by a series of screws or wedges (called “quoins”), so that the form may be handled without letting the type drop out. If the type falls out and gets mixed up, it is said to be “pied,” and the mixture is called “pi.”

The forms, after being locked, are taken to the stereotyping room where a paper mold, or matrix, commonly called a “mat,” is made of each page. These matrices, bent in semicircular form, are placed in a casting box into which molten lead is poured to make the semicircular lead plates to be used in printing. In large offices the casting of these plates is done by placing the matrix in an automatic stereotyping machine, known as the autoplate, which turns out completed plates in less than a minute. After the plates have been trimmed and planed on the back to make them exactly the right thickness, they are ready to be put on the press.

These semicircular lead plates, which are thus cast in exact reproduction of the page forms of type, are fastened on the cylinders of the press. As the cylinders revolve, ink rollers touch the surface of the plates and ink the projecting letters. The paper from a large roll, as it passes between the cylinders and the blanket rolls which press the paper against the inked plates on the cylinders, takes up the ink and thus has printed on it the impression of the page of type. Besides printing the pages, the press cuts, folds, and counts the papers so that the complete newspaper comes from the press ready for sale or delivery.

As soon as the newspapers are printed, they are turned over to the circulation department for distribution. Some copies go to the mailing room to be labeled with little orange-colored address slips and to be put into the mail sacks, in which they are taken to the post office or mail trains. Other copies are sold to waiting newsboys, and still others are taken in the company’s wagon to news stands and carriers all over the city.

Despite the number and variety of these details in the process of newspaper making, the news of the death of the attorney-general would reach the readers in a comparatively short time after the event occurred. In half an hour from the time the last piece of copy is written, a complete newspaper containing it is printed and ready for distribution.

Speed of Production. The invention and the perfection of various mechanical devices used in newspaper making have made possible this great speed. In the front rank of ingenious pieces of machinery that have added greatly to rapidity in newspaper publishing stands the linotype. This machine, which casts solid lines of type, or “slugs” as they are called, has increased four-fold the speed of production and has made possible much larger editions. The monotype, which casts each type separately, has also proved a valuable addition to the means of turning “copy” into type quickly. For the casting of semicircular stereotype plates the autoplate machine is an important time-saving device. The time required for “running off” an edition is now reduced from two- to five-fold by making duplicate sets of these stereotype plates and by putting them on from two to five large presses so that these presses print the same edition simultaneously.

Improvements in newspaper-printing machinery have resulted in huge presses that take paper from large rolls and turn out completed newspapers printed in one or two colors, cut, folded, and counted, ready for distribution. They can be adjusted to print papers from four to forty-eight pages in size, and can produce twelve-page papers at the rate of 144,000 copies an hour. Magazine sections and “comics” are printed in four colors, usually yellow, red, blue, and black, on large presses under conditions practically the same as those just described.

In order to insert the latest news without taking the time necessary to make up new forms, prepare new matrices, and cast new stereotype plates, a device called the “fudge” is employed. After the first page form of a late edition has been used to make a matrix, about six inches of type is taken out from two columns in the lower left hand corner or the upper right hand corner of the page, and a new matrix and a stereotype plate are made in which this corner is a blank. This new plate with the blank space is then put on the press in place of the regular first page plate. As fast as late news is received, it is set up on linotype lines, or “slugs,” and these lines are clamped on a small cylinder in the press. When the paper runs through the press, these linotype lines on the cylinder are printed, often in red ink, in the space on the front page left unprinted by the blank in the plate. To save more time with this device, a telegraph wire is run to the press room and a linotype machine is installed beside it, so that the latest news can be cast on linotype “slugs” and put on the “fudge” cylinder as fast as the reports are received by telegraph. Results of baseball games, races, and other sporting events can be printed to advantage by means of the “fudge.”

Recently a mailing machine has been introduced that folds, wraps, and addresses each copy separately as fast as papers are fed into it.

In no other process of manufacture that is as complicated as newspaper making, it is safe to say, has equal speed of production been attained.

Handling a Big Story. The scene in a metropolitan newspaper office following the receipt of the first news of the “Titanic” disaster, as graphically portrayed by an editor of a New York morning paper, illustrates the conditions under which important news, received late, is hurried into print.[1] The account in part is as follows:

At 1:20 a.m. Monday, April 15, [1912], the cable editor opened an envelope of the Associated Press that had stamped on its face “Bulletin.” This is what he read:

Cape Race, N. F., Sunday night, April 14.—At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship “Titanic” called “C. Q. D.” to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.

The cable editor looked at his watch. It was 1:20 and lacked just five minutes of the hour when the mail edition goes to press.

“Boy!” he called sharply.

An office boy was at his side in a moment.

“Send this upstairs; tell them the head is to come; double column, and tell the night editor to rip open two columns on the first page for a one-stick dispatch of the ‘Titanic’ striking an iceberg and sinking.”

Every one in the office was astir in a moment and came over to see the cable editor write on a sheet of copy paper the following head [which he indicated was to be set up in this form]:

TITANIC SINKING

IN MID-OCEAN; HIT

GREAT ICEBERG

“Boy!” he called again; but it was not necessary—a boy in a newspaper office knows news the first time he sees it.

“Tell them that’s the head for the ‘Titanic.’”

Then he wrote briefly this telegraphic dispatch, and as he did so he said to another office boy at his side: “Tell the operator to[Pg 13] shut off that story he is taking and get me a clear wire to Montreal.”

This is what he wrote to the Montreal correspondent, probably at work at his desk in a Montreal newspaper office at that hour:

Cape Race says White Star Liner “Titanic” struck iceberg, is sinking and wants immediate assistance. Rush every line you can get. We will hold open for you until 3:30.

“Give that to the operator and find out if we caught the mail on that ‘Titanic’ dispatch,” he said quickly to the boy.

In a moment the boy returned.

“O.K. on both,” he said.

The city editor, who had just put on his coat previous to going away for the night, took it off. The night city editor, at the head of the copy-desk, where all the local copy (as a reporter’s story is called) is read, and the telegraph editor stood together, joined later by the night editor, for the mail edition had left the composing room for the stereotypers and then to the pressroom and from thence to be scattered wherever on the globe newspapers find readers.

The “Titanic” staff was immediately organized, for at that hour most of the staff were still at work. The city editor took the helm.

“Get the papers for April 11—all of them,” he said to the head office boy, “and then send word to the art department to quit everything to make three cuts, which I shall send right down.”

Then to the night city editor: “Get up a story of the vessel itself; some of the stuff they sent us the other day that we did not use, and I ordered it put in the envelope. Play up the mishap at the start. Get up a passenger list story and an obituary of Smith, her commander.”

There was no mention of Smith in the dispatch, but city editors retain such things in their heads for immediate use, and this probably explains in a measure why they hold down their job; also having, it might be added, executive judgment, which is sometimes right.

“Assign somebody to the White Star Line and see what they’ve got.”

The night city editor went back to the circular table where the seven or eight men who read reporters’ copy were gathered.

“Get up as much as you can of the passenger list of the ‘Titanic.’ She is sinking off Newfoundland,” he said briefly to one.

And to another: “Write me a story of the ‘Titanic,’ the new White Star liner, on her maiden trip, telling of her mishap with the ‘New York’ at the start.”

And to another: “Write me a story of Captain E. J. Smith.”

[Pg 14]

Then to a reporter sitting idly about: “Get your hat and coat quick; go down to the White Star Line office and telephone all you can about the ‘Titanic’ sinking off Newfoundland.”

Then to another reporter: “Get the White Star Line on the phone and find out what they’ve got of the sinking of the ‘Titanic.’ Find out who is the executive head in New York; his address and telephone number.”

And in another part of the room the city editor was saying to the office boy: “Get me all the ‘Titanic’ pictures you have and a photo or cut of Captain E. J. Smith.”

Two boys instantly went to work, for the photos of men are kept separate from the photographs of inanimate things. The city editor selected three:

“Tell the art department to make a three-column cut of the ‘Titanic,’ a two-column of the interior, and a two-column of Smith.”

In the mean time the Associated Press bulletins came in briefly.

Paragraph by paragraph the cable editor was sending the story to the composing room. What was going on upstairs every one knew. They were sidetracking everything else, and the copy-cutter in the composing room was sending out the story in “takes,” as they are called, of a single paragraph to each compositor. His blue pencil marked each individual piece of copy with a letter and number, so that when the dozen or so men setting up the story had their work finished, the story might be put together consecutively.

“Tell the operator,” said the cable editor again to the office boy, “to duplicate that dispatch I gave him to our Halifax man. Get his name out of the correspondents’ book.”

“Who wrote that story of the ‘“Carmania” in the Icefield’?” said the night city editor to the copy-reader who “handled” the homecoming of the “Carmania,” which arrived Sunday night and the story of which was already in the mail edition of the paper before him. The copy-reader told him. He called the reporter to his desk.

“Take that story,” said the night city editor, “and give us a column on it. Don’t rewrite the story; add paragraphs here and there to show the vast extent of the icefield. Make it straight copy, so that nothing in that story will have to be reset. You have just thirty minutes to catch the edition. Write it in twenty.”

“Get the passenger lists of the ‘Olympic’ and the ‘Baltic,’” was the assignment given to another reporter, all alert waiting for their names to be called, every man awake at the switch.

In the mean time, the story from the Montreal man was being ticked off; on another wire Halifax was coming to life.

“Men,” said the city editor, “we have just five minutes left to make the city [edition]. Jam it down tight.”

Already the three cuts had been made, the telegraph editor was handling the Montreal story, his assistant the Halifax end, and[Pg 15] the cable editor was still editing the Associated Press bulletins and writing a new head to tell the rest of the story that the additional details brought. The White Star Line man had a list of names of passengers of the “Titanic” and found that they numbered 1300, and that she carried a crew of 860.

In the mean time proofs of all the “Titanic” matter that had been set were coming to the desk of the managing editor, in charge over all, but giving special attention to the editorial matter. All his suggestions went through the city editor, and on down the line, but he himself went from desk to desk overlooking the work.

“Time’s up,” said the city editor; but before he finished, the cable editor cried to the boy: “Let the two-column head stand and tell them to add this head:”

At 12:27 this Morning Blurred Signals by Wireless Told of Women Being Put off in Lifeboats—Three Lines Rushing to Aid of 1300 Imperiled Passengers and Crew of 860 Men.

“Did we catch it?” asked the cable editor of the boy standing at the composing-room tube.

“We did,” he said triumphantly.

“One big pull for the last [edition], men,” said the city editor. “We are going in at 3:20. Let’s beat the town with a complete paper.”

The enthusiasm was catching fire. Throughout the office it was a bedlam of noise—clicking typewriters, clicking telegraph instruments, and telephone bells ringing added to the whistle of the tubes that lead from the city room to the composing room, the pressroom, the stereotype room and the business office, the latter, happily, not in use, but throughout the office men worked; nobody shouted, no one lost his head; men were flushed, but the cool, calm, deliberate way in which the managing editor smoked his cigar helped much to relieve the tension.

“Three-fifteen, men,” said the city editor, admonishingly; “every line must be up by 3:20. Five minutes more.”

The city editor walked rapidly from desk to desk.

“All up,” said the night city editor, “and three minutes to the good.”

At the big table stood the city editor, cable editor, night city editor, and managing editor. They were looking over the completed headline that should tell the story to the world.

“That will hold ’em, I guess,” said the city editor, and the head went upstairs.

The men waited about and talked and smoked. Bulletins came in, but with no important details. Going to press at 3:20 meant a wide circulation. At 4:30 the Associated Press sent “Good-night,” but at that hour the presses had been running uninterruptedly for almost an hour.

SUGGESTIONS

1 Find out all that you can about the organization of the paper on which you are employed.

2 Know the names, at least, of the heads of all the departments.

3 Learn as much as possible about advertising and subscription rates and methods.

4 Familiarize yourself with the details of all the mechanical processes connected with newspaper making.

5 Interest yourself in the welfare of the paper as if it were your own property.