“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Jessie.” Marian spoke in mock indignation. “The next thing we know you’ll sink to being a patron of the poor and go about enjoying yourself at making them self-conscious and envious.”
“They’re not at all sad down this way,” said Howard, “except in the usual inescapable human ways. When they’re not hit too hard, they bear up wonderfully. You see, living on the verge of ruin and tumbling over every few weeks get one used to it. It ceases to give the sensation of event.”
Their automobile had turned into Park Row and so reached the News-Record building in Printing House Square. Howard took the two women to the elevator and they shot upward in a car crowded with telegraph messengers, each carrying one or more envelopes, some of them bearing in bold black type the words: “News!—Rush!”
“I suppose that is the news for the paper?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked.
“A little of it. Our special cable and special news from towns to which we have no direct wire and also the Associated Press reports come this way. But we don’t use much Associated Press matter, as it is the same for all the papers.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Throw it away. A New York newspaper throws away every night enough to fill two papers and often enough to fill five or six.”
“Isn’t that very wasteful?”
“Yes, but it’s necessary. Every editor has his own idea of what to print and what not to print and how much space each news event calls for. It is there that editors show their judgment or lack of it. To print the things the people wish to read in the quantities the people like and in the form the most people can most easily understand—that is success as an editor.”
“No doubt,” said Marian, thinking of the low view all her friends took of Howard’s newspaper, “if you were making a newspaper to please yourself, you would make a very different one.”