JUST OUT!
The clerks, who have been receiving and checking advertisements all day, have sent them to the printing department, where advertisers' announcements are being put into print as rapidly as nimble fingers can operate quick machinery, and then, save for the presence of one or two clerks, the advertisement and commercial side of a newspaper "shuts down" for the day. The sub-editors appear, reporters come in with the results of their day's labours, news arrives by the tape and other news machines in a constantly increasing quantity for the next nine hours. First comes the news from China or India. The Indian correspondent puts his telegram on the wire at eight or nine o'clock in Bombay, which is equal to four o'clock in the afternoon in London; and this difference of time, even allowing a couple of hours for transmission, makes him always first in the field with his news. But, on the other hand, the American news will not arrive until very late indeed, for when it is seven o'clock in the evening at New York it is midnight here.
"How do you manage to find all the little pieces of news to put into your paper?" is a question that must have been asked of every journalist.
That is not the difficulty. One's heaviest task is the keeping out of the items of news. On an average day it is safe to estimate that twice or thrice as much intelligence comes to a newspaper as it can possibly use. At times like, say, the last Jubilee, or at any moment of public excitement, news pours in in a manner appalling to contemplate.
OLD STYLE.
(Setting type by hand at 10 words per minute.)
The wonder is that there are so few mistakes in journals. When it is remembered that those who handle and pass the news have often but a second to decide as to its accuracy, that it often comes from parts of the world to which it is impossible to refer speedily by telegram, that it frequently consists of statements made by public men, who may disavow them when put to the test—when it is remembered that the sub-editor has to contend with the errors of shorthand, of the telegraph, the electric cable, and the telephone, I think that British newspapers, and London metropolitan newspapers in particular, are an object lesson to the world in accuracy. Laborious publications like the Army List, and the London Gazette, which are compiled by a leisurely Government staff, contain as many errors in proportion as the hastily produced modern newspaper.
