A dozen reporters, great and small, are at the desks in the middle of the room, busy with pencils. In a side room three or four others, converts to the typewriter, are pounding out copy. In another room Riggs is dictating to a stenographer the day’s doings in political life.
Four or five “rewrite men,” the “long wait” and his helpers, the “short waits,” are slipping in and out of the telephone-booths, taking and writing news articles from twenty points in the city where the Mulberry Street reporter, the police-station reporters, the Tenderloin man—who covers the West Thirtieth Street police-station, the Broadway hotels, and the theatrical district—and the Harlem man are still busy gathering news.
From a room wisely distant comes the rattle of the telegraph. Half a dozen wires are bringing in the continent’s news. Half a dozen boys, spurred by their chief, Dan O’Leary, carry the typed sheets to the proper desks.
The dramatic critic comes in and sits down at his desk to write two-thirds of a column about a first performance. The music critic has sent down a brief notice of the night’s opera.
Most of the reporters finish their work and go out. One or two remain to write special articles for the Sunday papers. A sporting reporter is spinning a semi-fictional yarn of life in Chinatown. A police reporter is composing little classics of life in Dolan’s Park Row restaurant.
At one o’clock there is a rumbling of the presses in the basement, and soon copies of the first edition come to the desks of the news-masters. Lord suggests to the night editor a shift of front-page articles. Clarke, his pencil flashing, marks in additions to the story of a late accident. A cub waits patiently for a discarded paper, to see whether his piece has got in. An older reporter, who wrote the story in the first column of the first page, does not look at his own work, but turns to the sporting page to read the racing entries for the next day—his day off.
At 1.27 A.M. Clarke rises and goes home. At two o’clock Lord closes his desk. Most of the desk men disappear; the work is done. The night editor—Van Anda or the imperturbable Smith—remains at his desk, with the “long wait” reporter to bear him company. At half past three they also go, and the watchman begins to turn out the lights. Down below, the presses are tossing forth the product of a night’s work in the big, bare, old room.
A story of the Sun would be incomplete without a sketch of its little sister. The Evening Sun was established by Mr. Dana nearly twenty years after he bought the Sun. He saw a place for a one-cent evening newspaper, for the only journal of that description then published in New York was the Daily News, which was largely a class publication. The leading evening newspapers were the Evening Post, the Commercial Advertiser, and the Mail and Express, selling for three cents and catering to a highbrow or a partisan clientele.
The first Evening Sun was issued on March 17, 1887, at an hour when the St. Patrick’s Day parade was being reviewed by Mayor Hewitt. With its four pages of six columns each, its brief, lively presentation of general news, and its low price, the paper was an immediate success—though not the success that it is to-day, with its sixteen pages, its wealth of special articles, and the many features that make it one of America’s best evening newspapers.
The new paper had no titular editor-in-chief. Mr. Dana was the editor of the Sun and had the general guidance of the evening paper. Dana’s associate, the publisher of the Sun, William M. Laffan, took a deep interest in the welfare of the new venture, and the Evening Sun was often referred to as his “baby.”