NEW STYLE.
(Setting type by machinery at 40 words per minute.)
Accuracy, indeed, may be considered to be the feature of English journalism. The stress of newspaper competition in New York induces the younger journals to rush anything into type that comes to hand, and the American public does not seem to mind it.
But I pity the English journal which should print one or two items of false news. The average Briton, who is a plodding, painstaking man, takes his newspaper as seriously as his breakfast, and one or two mistakes in his newspaper, or his eggs, would make him change his caterer. He has no sympathy for "enterprise" which leads him astray. And from this fact arises one of the differences between the English and the American newspaper. From the American aspect, ours is dull, slow, stupid, and behind the times. On the other hand our journals are typical of the painstaking, plodding nature of our people, and, like our public buildings, are often much better than they look.
DISTRIBUTING CARTS WAITING FOR THE EVENING PAPER TO COME FROM THE MACHINES.
To return to our visit to the newspaper office. All the evening long as news arrives it is cut down and measured as to its importance, corrected, given its proper heading, and sent upstairs by pneumatic or other lifts to the composing department. Towards eleven o'clock at night every brain is concentrated on its task. At one o'clock the worst is over. There is time for a cigar or a cigarette. One may be waiting for important news from a war correspondent, or merely keeping the paper open for any news that may arrive between one and three in the morning.
CYCLIST DISTRIBUTORS "LOADING UP."
The type is first set into columns by machinery, corrected and re-corrected; these columns are then made up into pages, which are again corrected, each page being tightly screwed into an iron frame (I am purposely using no technicalities). A papier maché or other mould is then taken of each page, and into this mask (or matrix) hot metal is poured, and the pages come out in the form of curved plates ready for fixing on the machines. It is a difficult process to explain without ocular demonstration, and I have been so long accustomed to the work that I have lost all sense of its beauty and ingenuity.