The age-herald., 1900-06-03


 He it is who is responsible for the make up'-the typographical appearance of the paper; the methods of head display, that presentation of news by the size of letters and lines that constitutes so large a feat ure of modern journalism; the first page that shall attract as it lies on the news stand: who does for a paper what the binder does for a book.
 He is the Draco of the establishment and the accorder-in-chief of space. Seven col- umns have been allotted to telegraph, five to cable and seventeen to the local news, and copy has been kept down to these rela- tive requirements, when all calculations are upset by the news of a New York Central train running into the Hudson, with many drowned, the result of the sudden change of route. At once there is a new allotment of space and by the time this new grouping of things is in running order 1t is again upset by the neck and neck an- nouncements of a fool panic at an uptown theater and the assassination of another Kentucky governor.
 After all is done there is still the prob- lem of putting thirty-one columns of mat 7fer into twenty-one columns of hole, and | te~I he must do the great rearranging
 notwithstanding act The last rearrange-
 ana ana conc. -he rushes back to the com
 ment made, ss3d attends to tue new
 posing room al. naper. ouicklys and
 'make-up" of the = ,sifion If articles
 with no sainsaying the pos written. new
 must be changed new heads :: his must
 values made of earlier news All ts.- with l be done at doube-quick time, but ssa l l double-distilled coolness. The hour haf9
 of the clock is sliding along and the min- i ute hand galoping after it; in the press | room the boilers throbbing and the
 press belts beginning to tremble; in the
 mailing rooms the mail clerks and bundle
 men are preparing their wrappers and on I the streets the vans are being driven up | ready their Ia gb Outside
 the building the great public will soon be | clamoring for it's paper, but the one man l who knows this and who knows that the 1 loss of a few minutes means the loss of
 many hundreds of dollars, still quietly l points his finger to a line of type and
 calmly says Change that, please" Even when the paper has gone to press
 and is actually being printed the cable has 1 been known to drop down some such little | message as ''The pope is dead" One great 1 comprehensive oath, a dozen orders in half 1 a dozen seconds and the latest shake-up l is met. The paper must be called back, l and that great item with it's accompanying l nine columns of biography must be insert l ed. l leave you to imagine the pandemo- l nium that ensues, but despite the growls and tremor of the entire establishment, the i change is made-a change so radical that 1 the days planning falls like a house of
 cards, and a feat of cool generalism and l Journalism is accomplished that would
 make a man famous-in any other busi- 1 ness.
 Of the purely mechanical work done on i the paper, such as machine typesetting
 presswork, electrotyping, etc., it is scarce l ly within the province of this address to l speak, that being a branch of the subject 1 whose treatment would trespass fully as
 much on your patience as l have already 1 done.
 Back of all, the power that moves and
 controls the entire system, is the proprie | tor or editor-in-chief Like the engineer, 1 he keeps his well-trained hand on the 1 lever, and knows the working of the whole l machine down to the tiniest cogwheel. His | word is law, his responsibility no one l doubts his experience with expenses is one to shudder at and his profits every l one covets.
 l It is possible you may do me the com l pliment of remembering that l said just now that news is a commodity of trade, 1 that it is buyable and sellable, but the processes of purchase and disposal are | much more expensive than most people l imagine. I have been furnished with a few | figures which will. l think, interest you.
 We have, in round numbers. 1,50O people
 on our pay roll to whom was paid out last l year something over $2,5000o0 in wages. l l shall also hope that you will recollect l my having said that the writing mans | earnings on paper are measured by the space those writings fill, you will derstand that these millions include the | amounts paid to reporters and other regu- l lar writers for their printed news. But | they do not include all the expenses at l tendant on getting that news neither do they comprehend the expenses incidental to getting news from elsewhere. Last | year, for instance, the telegraph and cable | tolls lay close up to $200,000 By the bye, l these tolls included one item of SS,600 for l single telegraphic message, the comforta- | ble little fortune having been paid out for | the amazing enterprise of a special corre- | spondent, who cabed from Manila Presi l dent McKinley's manifesto to the F'ilipinos 1 at the heart-breaking rate of $6.20 a word. Nor must I forget that the lease and | operation of a single copper wire from New | York to San Francisco costs annually $3S,- l 1S0 but then that wire is the longest cop 1 per wire in the world, being 3,S1S miles long | and it is as thick as my ladys thumb. l Next to wages the heaviest item of eX- pense-as you gentlemen of the publishing guild will readily understand-is that of white paper last years paper bill touching the S1 ,500, GOO mark; whie-and this will sur
 prise you-the printers ink bills Oolack and
 colored) call for $125,000
 But these figures are wearying by their
 size and if l were to say To sou that one
 daily issue of all editions has reached the
 astonishing record of 1880, ,G22 copies and
 that the press capacity producing that
 number is that of S64 900 eight-paso n9pers
 
 large statistics, however, which furnish much explanation of this crystillization of fact and figure, that the newspaper prop erty with this circulation is todSy worth 200 per cent. on it's investment. Which inevitably brings up the question the conclusion, it was the beginning. of this whole matter-What does make
 great daily paper?
 We have together watched the ptepara- tion, the publishing of paper but what
 has been said is only the catalogue ds- scription of an art gallery compared to a luminous essay of Ruskin. It is art talk without a heart.
 What has been given is the description of the manufacture of great paper, not what makes it great
 We'll, surely not the personality of the editor according to the old-time standard "a standard which made the editorial more powerful than the news, standard which
 made what one man said greater than ev
 erything that all the people on his paper did
 Surely not the establishment of class
 news; for with the limitations of locality
 or kind of information that you print comes the limitation of the purchasing