In the fall of 1877 he bought the Syracuse Standard, but in six weeks he returned to the Sun and became assistant night city editor under Ambrose W. Lyman, the predecessor of S. M. Clarke. Ballard Smith, who succeeded William Young as managing editor in 1878, named Lord as his assistant, and Lord succeeded Ballard Smith as managing editor on December 3, 1880.
For thirty-three years Lord inspected applicants for places in the news departments of the Sun, and decided whether they would fit into the human structure that Dana had built. Edward G. Riggs, who knew him as well as any one, has written thus of him:
Like Dana, he has been a great judge of men. His discernment has been little short of miraculous. Calm, dispassionate, without the slightest atom of impulse, as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove, Lord got about him a staff that has been regarded by newspapermen as the most brilliant in the country. Independent of thought, with a placid idea of the dignity of his place, ever ready to concede the other fellow’s point of view even though maintaining his own, Lord was never known in all the years of his managing editorship of the Sun to utter an unkind word to any man on the paper, no matter how humble his station.
One of Lord’s notable performances as managing editor was the perfecting of the Sun’s system of collecting election returns. Before 1880 the correspondents had sent in the election figures in a conscientious but rather inefficient manner—by towns, or cities. Lord picked out a reliable correspondent in each county of New York State and gave to the chosen man the responsibility of sending to the Sun, at nine o’clock on election night, an estimate of the result in his particular county. This was to be followed at eleven o’clock, if necessary, with the corrected figures.
“Don’t tell us how your city, or township, or village went,” he said to the correspondents. “Let us have your best estimate on the county. Don’t spare the telephone or the telegraph, either to collect the returns or to get them into the Sun office.”
The telephone was just coming into general use for the transmission of news, and Lord saw its possibilities on an election night.
As a result of the new system, improved from year to year, the Sun became what it is—the election-night authority on what has happened. So confident was the Sun of its figures on the night of the Presidential election of 1884 that it, alone of all the New York papers, declared the next morning that Mr. Cleveland had defeated Mr. Blaine, although the Sun had been one of the most strenuous opponents of the Democratic candidate. Blaine, who had wired to the Sun for its estimates, got the first news of his defeat from Lord. Eight years later, when Mr. Cleveland defeated President Harrison, the winner’s political chief of staff, Daniel S. Lamont, received the first tidings of the great and unexpected victory from Mr. Lord.
In the late eighties the Sun was supplementing its Associated Press news service with a valuable corps of special correspondents scattered all over America and Europe. The news received from these Sun men led to the establishment, by William M. Laffan, then publisher of the Sun, of a Sun news agency which was called the Laffan Bureau. This service, originated for the purpose of covering special events in the live way of the Sun, was suddenly called upon to cover the whole news field of the world in a more comprehensive way.
Lord’s part in this work, when Dana decided to break with the Associated Press, has been graphically described by Mr. Riggs:
“Chester,” said Mr. Dana one afternoon early in the nineties, leaning over Lord’s desk, “I have just torn up my Associated Press franchise. We’ve got to have the news of the world to-morrow morning, and we’ve got to get it ourselves.”