The age-herald., 1900-06-03
amusement and of every class of entertain

amusement and of every class of entertain ment, good and bad.
 Then, too, newsgatherers do not differ | from their fellows in the great humar | tendency to leave everything until the last whether it is salvation or trunk packing | And so it happens that, from the minute l the night city editor takes his seat to tn' l minute of his last leaving it, there Is [ 1 never ceasing coming and going Of repor I ters, messenger boys stray individuals
 with exclusive information, and calls iron
 all the branches and bureaus and station. 1 of the paper, from Poughkeepsie to Tren | ton and from New Haven to the last cor
 ner of Staten Island. For nowadays the | local editor, like a modern Richelieu, sol | emnly draws a circle around himself witt , a general radius of one hundred miles. ant | says "all within the circle is my baili | wick" = | Staff men are waiting to make thei" | ports and to be instructed how Ni re- | them; a pile of unexamined cop-.1 treat
 desk. and the copy readeE+py IS on HIS | tiously idle; there is tbS[s are ostehtd- l of the teIenhone hc,. .IS constant whang | announeement rape1 and the sing-song
 ters says tl gby the boy that 'headquar-
 on Hesespnere is a general alarm of fire
 duriprler street, with great loss of life,
 sLfng which hurly-burly an excited tip !ster rushes past the door-guard to say that there has been a fatal collision of cars on the Brooklyn bridge, and the cool man of the establishment quietly announces that Rockney and Whitafeller have com pleted the. arrangements for a fifteen bill lion dollar trust for the monopolizing of New York's fresh air and have syndicated all the stock of the only road to heaven
 What do you suppose you would do under these circumstances? What the night city editor has to do is to keep perfectly cool or, at any rate, to pretend to be so, to decide instantly what to do and who shall do it and in almost less time than I am telling you, the managing and night edi- tors will have been informed of the new trust of all trusts and a page "feature' will be planned; the man at headouarters will have been told to go to the fire and that two office men and an artist have been sent to assist him; two other men and an- other artist will have rushed by the tipster on their way to Brooklyn bridge; the wait ing reporters will have been told just what to write; word will have been passed to the copy readers to cut down everything, and the editor VII then light his pipe and turn to the pile of copy.
 The copy readers whom I mentioned just now are the real editors of the paper-that Is, the reading editors, according to the old fashioned meaning of the word. They read practically all the manuscript, or copy, as it Is called-the actual directors of the pa- per editing by proof-making straight the crookedness of its grammar; see that it | conforms in every way with the policy,
 
 for the barred words, of which there is a list in every office; ascertain that there are no Implications of stories; and write head lines that shall be nuggets of fact and gems of dicton in type that runs seven let ters to the column.
 The desks of the copy editors have been called the slaughter house. For nearly everything nowadays is written at what are called space rates, and a man is paid at so much a column-not, however, at so much a column as he writes it, but at so much a column as it is printed after leav- ing the copy desk
 But the copy desk Is not the slaughter house of the office; it Is the clearing house. To it come all the rough drafts of news | and to it belongs the duty of seeing that | the proper balances are struck between l material and space. That is given thirty | two columns of matter to read and sixteen | columns of space to fill, it is the duty oi l the desk to edit out sixteen columns, an6 l to do so with such expedition and judg- | ment that publication shall not be de- | layed and the story not marred in the cutting of it.