Towards three o'clock in the morning all the curved plates have been fixed on the machines; final proof copies—that is to say, first impressions of the paper—have been passed; the machines start, and up come complete copies of the paper as you see it at the breakfast table, the club, or in the railway train.
The first complete copies are carefully scanned by dozens of eager eyes in the hope of finding some tiny blunder which it is not too late to remove.
Each of these modern printing presses depicted here has a nominal capacity of 48,000, or 96,000 copies per hour, according to the size of the paper.
THE MACHINE WHICH EATS PAPER AT THE RATE OF 20 MILES AN HOUR.
It is a speed truly terrific. The carts that are waiting outside the newspaper office in the night seem to be filled almost by magic. One hears the machinery start; a few minutes later the race for the distributing agents and the railway trains begins. Upstairs such of the editorial staff as have not gone home are enjoying the same kind of chat at the conclusion of their labours as other men do at their clubs. Nor are we newspaper men clubless even at that hour. The Press Club, hard by Fleet Street, keeps its doors open for journalists until five a.m.; and for the printers and others there are special hostelries open to them, and to them only, by legal enactment. Railway companies, too, provide trains for us, though not so many as they should, thus enabling us to get away from the city to the pure air of the suburbs at a time when all the world is sleeping.
HOW THE PAPERS COME UP FROM THE "INFERNAL REGIONS."
Newspapers are commercial concerns, and their proprietors are as anxious to attractively stock their columns as tradesmen their shop windows. We do not say so in our journals, but privately we are entirely aware that we are racing each other for attractive news. As to what does or does not sell in a newspaper, always an important question, opinions differ greatly. I doubt whether any two editors of metropolitan daily journals would agree on that point, the fact being that what pleases one audience does not necessarily interest another. Sometimes a newspaper will adopt a feature that has proved successful in a contemporary with most disappointing results in its own case. Now and then a particular feature will spread throughout the whole press. At one time the public is bent upon foreign news, at another time upon matters purely domestic, but I think all are agreed that the average metropolitan reader nowadays turns to his foreign news before he reads anything else. Two or three years ago there appeared to be a positive craze for sporting intelligence. To-day mere sporting news seems to have lost much of its attraction. The year before last the amount of cricket in the evening journals was a source of amazement. This year I venture to think cricket will reach its proper level.
