No other paper in New York had the news. The Sun rubbed it in editorially on January 3:
Deeply conscious as we are of the deplorable lack of modern enterprise which has hitherto deprived the Sun of the distinction of repeatedly announcing the fall of Port Arthur, we have to content ourselves with the reflection that when finally the Sun did print the fall of Port Arthur, it was so.
Soon after the election of Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, the head of the Sun bureau in Washington, the late Elting A. Fowler, made the prediction that William Jennings Bryan would be named as Secretary of State. Nearly every other metropolitan newspaper either ignored the story, or ridiculed it as absurd and impossible. The Sun never made inquiry of Fowler as to the source of his information. He had been a Sun man for ten years, and that was enough. Fowler repeated and reiterated that Bryan would be the head of the new Cabinet, and sure enough, he was.
The Sun correspondent in a city five hundred miles from New York was covering a great murder mystery. Every other New York newspaper of importance had sent from two to five men to handle the story; the Sun sent none. The correspondent saw that the New York men were getting sheaves of telegrams from their newspapers, directing them in detail how to tell the story, and to what length; so he sent a message to the Sun advising it of the large numbers of New York reporters engaged on the mystery, and of the amount of matter they were preparing to send. Had the Sun any instructions for him? Yes, it had. The reply came swiftly:
Use your own judgment—Chester S. Lord.
That was the Sun way, and the Sun printed the correspondent’s stories, whether they were one column long, or six. The Sun could not see how an editor in New York could know more about a distant murder than a correspondent on the spot.
It was the Sun’s way, once a man was taken on, to keep him as long as it could. One day Mr. Lord sent for Samuel Hopkins Adams, then a reporter, and asked him whether he would like to go away fishing.
“A Sunday story?” inquired Adams.
“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Lord. “A vacation, rather. You’ve been fired. Go away, but come back, say, next Tuesday, and go to work, and it’ll be all right. Don’t worry!”
Adams learned that a suit for libel had been brought against the paper by an individual who had been made an unpleasant figure in a police story which Adams had written.