Blake, who has earned the well-worn title of the "boss newsrustler" of the city and for some time the best reporter on the Oregonian and the Evening Telegram of this city; Joseph K. Gift, late of the San Francisco Chronicle, a young gentle man with a nose for news and a wicked eye for the girls. These gentlemen comprise the editorial staff of Portland's popular paper.
THE PRINTS.
The News composing-room is a marvel among the men who "stick the type" . . . Here are fourteen well-chosen who stand at well-filled knights of the "art preservative" cases nightly materializing the thoughts of editors, the vagaries of reporters, and the scintillations of the electric wire into facts for daily perusal. . . . The chief of this department, or, rather, the foreman, is John G. Egan, lately of the San Francisco Examiner, a gentleman well known on the Pacific Coast as a versatile and humorous writer. He is assisted by Frank G. Lee, a veteran printer, recently of Denver. Mr. Egan's staff of "prints" on this, the birth of the new paper, are J. L. Russell, "ad" man, J. J. Galvin, Oscar Dun bar, E. A. Bridgman, John Pitchford, Charles Carroll, Joseph E. Howe, John M. Burns, J. P. Killinger, M. B. Eaton, B. P. Watson, W. W. Watson.
Multnomah Typographical Union No. 58 was to be organized two weeks later, and the names of the News typos are sprinkled in the list of charter members among those of Oregonian, Telegram, Standard, and the several commercial shops, including that of D. C. Ireland & Co. Several of these men were later prominent in Oregon journalism, notably Oscar (O.W.) Dunbar, who nine years later was to found the Astoria Budget.
The News was a six-column eight-page paper, apparently set in leaded minion (seven-point on nine in lino language). It sold for 25 cents a week by carrier, or $10 a year by mail. In a column of advertising on the left side appeared the advertisements of James Armstrong & Co., real estate and general auctioneers; Murphy, Grant & Co., dry goods, etc., San Francisco; Morse's Palace, (C. C. Morse & Co.), wholesale and retail picture frames, mouldings, etc.; Himes the Printer; F. E. Beach & Co., paints, oils and glass, doors, windows; Mrs. L. Pilger, "leading suit and cloak house." The rest of the first page is filled with news from other towns and states, mostly marked special—which in some offices in those days meant rewritten or lifted from another newspaper.
The heads were all labels—four-deck top heads on the front page starting with such keylines as "Shocking Suicide," followed by "A Man Kills Himself With a Charge of Water." Third section—"The
