Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1913-08-03

duct of the news, passes continuously through precarious series of per- sonal equations. Say an accident has happened The reporter interviews five witnesses and from the first gets three conflicting stories. Their per- sonal equations enter into these stories in the fear, the anger, the ex- citeme1t or the distrust which colors them. There is personal equation number one. That reporters personal equation enters into weighing these conflicting details and determining what represents the probable truth. That is personal equation number two. I1 order to get the story into his paper in time he has to telephone 1t over an indistinct wire to rewrite man working in noisy office. That rewrite mans patience, alertness, in- telligence, constitute personal equa- tion number three. .
 Having been told by the night city editor to write two columns of his story, some other big news breaks unexpectedly, crowding the paper, and the managing editor orders our story cut down to one column. The quickness, deftness and imagination of the copy reader in cutting the story in half without impairing it's accuracy by the omission of essen- tial details, constitute personal equa- tlon number four; and when, on top of all of this, you have the lesser personal equation of the compositors, and the proofreaders and the make up men, you can sec how discourag- ingly great the chances are for hon. est inaccuracies, even in the most conscientious newspaper.
 Writing of "a Newspaper.
 Look at it from another point of view. In a big newspaper office in a night 166,OOO words are written by a large proportion of 1000 different contributors, reporters and cores pondents employed by that paper; 50,0oO words of this come in by wire and 10000 by telephone. These latter are written by four rewrite men, 113,OOO words are brought in by forty reporters and various news as- sociations and the whole mass of 166,O0O words is read and handled in six hours by twelve copy readers and reduced and condensed to 6O,0OO from 166,0OO.
 They are put in type by fifty-six linotype operators at a rate of six teen words minute and are printed at the rate of 12O,00O papers an hour. This fearful pressure, which con- petition enforces and which the pub lie demands, should make people sit- ting comfortably at their breakfast tables little more charitable than they are in flaying ''the wantoa in- accuracy of reckless press If these breakfast table critics would only spend few hours, say between ten at night and two the next morning, in newspaper office, watching the difficulties with which the paper has to contend in getting writing, print ing and distributing facts in time for its critics breakfast, I believe they would be more charitable.
 Hardship of Reporters.
 Where inaccuracies versus sac- curacies are concerned, we should re- member that the one inaccuracy slaps us in the face while the thou sand accuracies we take for granted; but we do not stop to realize that each of those thousand unpreteltious accuracies represents the hard and painstaking work of some unkonwn reporter, work done often in the face of physical hardships, of deliberate deceptions, of supercilious rebuffs- work where the truth has to be dug or torn out of organized conspiracles of silence, of prevaricatioa or of out right lies. Fear, ignorance, vanity, suspicion, anger, all are in league against the ascertaining of the truth. And mark you, for this accuracy for which he has sweated blood, the re- porter gets no thanks.
 For an exclusive story he is re- warded. for brilliantly written story he is praised, but for an accur- ately written story he receives no acknowledg cement. For accuracy. at Whatever cost of time and tribulation is expected of him as a matter of course. That is one of the things we take for granted We no more think of praising him for it than we think of praising woman for her virtue or d soldier for his courage.
 More and more are newspaper men becoming inspired by pride in