Then to a reporter sitting idly about: "Get your hat and coat quick; go down to the White Star Line office and telephone all you can about the 'Titanic' sinking off Newfoundland."
Then to another reporter: "Get the White Star Line on the phone and find out what they've got of the sinking of the 'Titanic.' Find out who is the executive head in New York; his address and telephone number."
And in another part of the room the city editor was saying to the office boy: "Get me all the 'Titanic' pictures you have and a photo or cut of Captain E. J. Smith."
Two boys instantly went to work, for the photos of men are kept separate from the photographs of inanimate things. The city editor selected three:
"Tell the art department to make a three-column cut of the 'Titanic,' a two-column of the interior, and a two-column of Smith."
In the mean time the Associated Press bulletins came in briefly.
Paragraph by paragraph the cable editor was sending the story to the composing room. What was going on upstairs every one knew. They were sidetracking everything else, and the copy-cutter in the composing room was sending out the story in "takes," as they are called, of a single paragraph to each compositor. His blue pencil marked each individual piece of copy with a letter and number, so that when the dozen or so men setting up the story had their work finished, the story might be put together consecutively.
"Tell the operator," said the cable editor again to the office boy, "to duplicate that dispatch I gave him to our Halifax man. Get his name out of the correspondents' book."
"Who wrote that story of the '"Carmania" in the Icefield'?" said the night city editor to the copy-reader who "handled" the homecoming of the "Carmania," which arrived Sunday night and the story of which was already in the mail edition of the paper before him. The copy-reader told him. He called the reporter to his desk.
"Take that story," said the night city editor, "and give us a column on it. Don't rewrite the story; add paragraphs here and there to show the vast extent of the icefield. Make it straight copy, so that nothing in that story will have to be reset. You have just thirty minutes to catch the edition. Write it in twenty."
"Get the passenger lists of the 'Olympic' and the 'Baltic,'" was the assignment given to another reporter, all alert waiting for their names to be called, every man awake at the switch.
In the mean time, the story from the Montreal man was being ticked off; on another wire Halifax was coming to life.
"Men," said the city editor, "we have just five minutes left to make the city [edition]. Jam it down tight."
Already the three cuts had been made, the telegraph editor was handling the Montreal story, his assistant the Halifax end, and
