Here follows the list of names and identifications. The account of the accident occupied four columns in the paper, illustrated with three line drawings—one of the plunge, one of searching for the car, one of raising it.
The Oregonian carried an editorial condemning the motorman for not driving with his car completely under control on a track slippery with frost, and another editorial saying a stop should be enforced before every draw, whether the draw is open or closed. "What can be said in extenuation of his stupidity and recklessness?" asked the Oregonian. A coroner's jury later censured the motorman.
While this story and the date 1893 by no means mark the final arrival of "modern" reporting and newswriting (there were many lapses before this sort of thing became standard), this type of news-narration became more and more general until the opening years of the twentieth century saw it universal in metropolitan papers and usual in all but the most formless of the smaller publications.
Development of the headline from the old days of single-line heads at tops of column and side-heads in capital and small-capital letters through much of the paper down through the age of overdisplay to the present rather medium emphasis through headlines, can be traced through Oregon papers as well as anywhere outside of the great metropolitan centers of the country. Starting at the very beginning, for Oregon, in 1846,[1] Printer John Fleming on the Oregon Spectator had nothing bigger to set on any of the news items than little side-heads of caps and small caps of the body type of the paper, except for a few bold-face heads, single-line, slightly larger, over the longer items. This can be attributed not only to the scarcity of space in the little four-column paper and the lack of big news but also to the fact that it didn't seem to have occurred to anyone anywhere else to use anything bigger—so there were few if any models of real headline display.
The New York Tribune of Greeley & McElrath in 1843 was using just about the same size and style of headlines; so were some of the other papers. New York city news was running mostly under side-heads, with the eight-point capital line "City Intelligence" at the top—and, as explained elsewhere, this word intelligence was merely a synonym for news and did not mean anyone's personal IQ.
A big murder trial in New York in 1843 was headed by the Tribune. Trial of Antone Gieser (one line), or on some other days there was merely a little hanging indention of two or three lines like this:
Trial of Gieser for
Murder of a Family on
Long Island.
Other papers were doing the same sort of thing.
- ↑ For a general treatment of this subject, see Helen O. Mahin, The Development and Significance of the Newspaper Headline.
