The Portland daily press., 1892-06-04

crowds, inhaling day and night The
fumes of tobacco and the ali nervadine
dust of packed hotel corridors and
making prodigious sacrifices of mental
and physical vitality to serve YOU. Re
member that as a rule it is shutdown be-
fore theschemes and combinations Of the
bosses begin to develop and become
known. and that after satisfying him
self Of the tendency and features of the
hour the correspondent must turn his
arduously acquired intelligence into copy
and get il upon the wire.
The bane of the newspaper profession.
its oppressiveness, its murderousness to
the men who take pride and achieve
success in it, is that after days labor
has been expended in acquiring infor-
nation, when body and mind are tagged
with exertion and long tension, then
must be performed the most delicate.
the most important, most trying task of
all-putting into words and sentences
the harvest of intelligence, Inference.
logic. Good newsgathering is a failure
without good writing. How difficult
good writing is after day and part of a
night of newsgathering in one of these
human maelstroms, known to the public
as national convention, no man knows
SO well as he who has tried it.
At Minneapolis there will be moro
than the usual necessity for rapid work,
because the telegraphic service is not so
extensive as that at Chicago Or at other
cities in which national conventions
have formerly been held. There will be
rush for the wires, and the correspond
ent who can get his facts quickest and
| put them in words earliest will be the
man to win the plaudits of his manag-
ing editor. Thenewspapers of the coun-
| try will report the preliminaries and
proceedings of the coming national con
ventions as they have never before re-
| ported such gatherings.
| There are papers in New York and
| Chicago which will want and have, if
the wires can be found to carry them, a
hundred thousand words from Minneap-
oils in single night. A hundred thou
sand words will fill eight pages Of the
| paper, and the telegraphic tolls alone to
New York viii cost nearly a thousand
dollars, to say nothing of the other ex-
penses. The big newspapers will each
have from five to twelve men at Mime
apolis, and the same number at Chicago.
The special reports written by these re-
| porters will be in addition to the rou-
tine reports made by press associations.
| A feature OF newspaper work in the
conventions of this year viii be the IL
lustrations. -Four years ago newspaper
illustration had not been so fully de-
veloped as it is today, and while some
capital pictures were then printed the
illustrations of this year will be almost
as perfect from the graphic and the
artistic point of view as those which the
weekly illustrated papers viii bring out
ten days or soslatere The modern news
paper has become such perfect photo
graph of the thought, the occurrences
and the incidents of the day that precious
little is left to the weekly illustrated
| journal or to the monthly magazine.
The modern daily newspaper is the
cheapest thing in the world. There is
nothing else that compares with it in
value per price. For two cents one may
buy New York or Chicago paper of
sixteen pages. Think for moment of
what it is you get for the price of a
postage stamp. First, there is the white
| paper. 1t alone costs one cent. and
white paper, thanks to the development
of machinery and processes, is cheaper
now than it ever was before. To make
white paper, costly machines and appa-
ratus, marvels of ingenuity and intri-
cacy are required. The paper is shipped
to the newspaper Office in huge rolls,
and there it goes through process com
pared with which its manufacture is
mere child's play. The big roll lies on
the sidewalk where it has been dropped
| by the drayman. Tomorrow, you know,
it will appear worked up into printed
sheets. But what is the method of
breathing the breath of life, soul, into
this mass Of white, inert matter?
Early in the morning hundreds of
men in Asia, Africa, Australia. Europe
are the first to contribute their share.
They are news gatherers, telegraph and
cable operators. They write of thrones,
armies, famines, municipalities and
powers. AS soon as the sun has begun
to shine upon the western hemisphere
thousands literally thousands--of men
take up their part Of the work. They
watch, inquire, note, write. They are
scattered from Hudson's bay to Pata-
gonia, from ocean to ocean. Through
an almost infinite variety of channels
the results of their toll, a hundred times
abridged, edited, adapted, concentrates
upon the building before which YOU saw
the roll Of white paper. Her twoscore
of trained editors winnow again the
shower of intelligence which has been
pouring upon them from the four quar-
tiers of the earth. They send at dark
the results Of their labor to room in
which 100 men stand under bright lamps
deity picking 100000 pieces of metal.
All night long the shower continues,
the meteoric rain, and all night long
the nimble fingers ply.
Then fifty or sixty stereotype plates
are made of the pages of TYNE which the