Let us take, arbitrarily, one day twenty-five years ago—February 1, 1893—and see what some of the Sun reporters did:
| Jefferson Market Court | S. H. Adams |
| Essex Market Court and Meeting of Irish Federalists | Rudolph E. Block |
| With R. Croker at Lakewood | George B. Mallon |
| Custom-House News | E. G. Riggs |
| City Hall News | W. H. Olmsted |
| Police Headquarters | Robert S. Yard |
| Ship News | S. A. Wood |
| Coroners and Post-Office | W. A. Willis |
| Subway Project and Murder at East Eighty-Eighth Street | W. J. Chamberlin |
| Magic Shell Swindle | E. W. Townsend |
| Condition of Police Lodging-Houses | D. G. Phillips |
| Carlyle Harris Case | F. F. Coleman |
| Fire at Koster & Bial’s | John Kenny |
| Bishop McDonnell’s Trip to Rome | Evans |
To gain an impression of the variety of work which comes to a Sun reporter, take the assignments given to David Graham Phillips in the last days of his service with the Sun in 1893:
| March | 1—Joseph Jefferson’s Lecture on the Drama |
| ” | 2—Bear Hunt at Glen Cove |
| ” | 3—Special Stories for the Sunday Sun |
| ” | 6—Obituary of W. P. Demarest |
| ” | 7—Meeting of Russian-Americans |
| ” | 8—Mystery at New Brunswick, New Jersey |
| ” | 9—Special Stories for Sunday |
| ” | 10—Accident in Seventy-First St. Tunnel |
| ” | 11—More Triplets in Cold Spring |
| ” | 12—Services in Old Scotch Church |
| ” | 13—Furniture Sale |
| ” | 14—Opening of Hotel Waldorf |
| ” | 15—Married Four Days, Then False |
| ” | 17—Dinner, Friendly Sons of St. Patrick |
| ” | 18—Parade and Show, Barnum & Bailey |
| ” | 19—Church Quarrel, Rutherford, N. J. |
Phillips was then one of the Sun’s best reporters; not as large a figure in the office as Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Spears, but one entitled to assignments of the first class. A list of his assignments soon after he joined the staff in the summer of 1890 would be monotonous—Jefferson Market police-court day after day; the kind of work with which the Sun broke in a new man. Once on space, with eight dollars a column instead of fifteen dollars a week, Phillips got what he wanted—a peep at every corner of city life. In a little more than two years as a space man he picked up much of the material that is seen in his novels.
A Sun man takes what comes to his lot. When W. J. Chamberlin returned from Cuba, his first assignment was a small police case. But a really good reporter finds his opportunity and his “big” stories for himself.
It would take a small book to give a list of the “big” stories that the Sun has printed, and a five-foot shelf of tall volumes to reprint them all. Some of them were written leisurely, like Spears’s stories of the Bad Lands, some in comparative ease, like Ralph’s stories of Presidential inaugurations and the Grant funeral, or W. J. Chamberlin’s eleven-column report of the Dewey parade in 1899. In these latter the ease is only comparative, for the writer’s fingers had no time to rest in the achievement of such gigantic tasks. And the comparison is with the work done by reporters on occasions when there was no time to arrange ideas and choose words; when the facts came in what would be to the layman hopeless disorder.
Such an occasion, for instance, was the burning of the excursion steamer General Slocum, the description of which—in the end a marvellous tale of horror—was taken page by page from Lindsay Denison as his typewriter milled it out. Such an occasion was Edwin C. Hill’s opportunity to write his notable leads to the stories of the Republic wreck in 1909 and the Titanic disaster in 1912. But the Sun and Sun men never have hysterics. Tragedy seems to tighten them up more than other newspapers and newspapermen.
Introductions to big stories tell the pulse of the paper. Read, for example, the Sun introduction to the great ocean tragedy of 1898:
Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 6—The steamship La Bourgogne of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, which left New York on Saturday last bound for Havre, was sunk at five o’clock on Monday morning after a collision with the British ship Cromartyshire in a dense fog about sixty miles south of Sable Island. The ship had 750 persons aboard. The number of first and second cabin passengers was 220 and of the steerage passengers 297, a total of 517. The number of officers was 11, of the crew 222. Eleven second-cabin and 51 steerage passengers and 104 of the crew, a total of 166, were saved. All the officers but four, all the first-cabin passengers, and all but one of the more than one hundred women on board, were lost. The number of lost is believed to be 584.