is desired. Then your staff man spends half his time plugging nickels into telephone slot machines ahead of the rewrite man frantically pushing his pencil across loose sheets of copy paper and trying to hear above the din of voices and telegraphic apparatus.
News Service Staff Small
Before being initiated into the mysteries of the rewrite system, I had the idea that each office in New York handling a news service of this type had a mammoth staff. There were precisely five on the United Press day desk, handling the local distribution for New York state and New Jersey, tending the cable amplifications and the big stories for all wires. Of course, there were others supervising distribution, but this was the entire writing and reporting staff.
Sometimes our four telephones are all
going at once, and the only sound that
made of sheets of yellow flimsy and car
bons. One of these copies goes to the
strikes the ear of an intruder is a chorus of “Yap yap? yap—- Go on.” (“Yap” is the handy S. N. A. version of the word “yes.”) As fast as we take them down we write the stories—that is, until the telephone rings again—-on books
ticker man and is punched out on a white
paper ribbon and run through two tickers
serving our entire clientele scattered from
the Bronx to Bowling Green and from
Brooklyn to Newark, New Jersey. Each
take of the story comprises a book and
the last paragraph must not be run over
on another page, but additional notes
should be put in a fresh add. This makes it possible to break in and give preced
ence to more important items while trans
mitting a long report.
We’ll concede this point, thought I,
because so much of the rewrite is done from the daily papers without necessitat
WIDE 'Assn Covnm-:1)
ing phone calls or trips out of the office. Now, the Standard News, I reasoned,
The work is almost entirely dependent on the telephone. Half a dozen county court houses and the state capital at
must depend on itself alone; it must,
Trenton purr or blat or bray their hottest items into weary ears at this end of the
therefore, have a large office. ALL News Tnnnenomzn
wire.
But, the Standard News, I have since discovered, is staffed with one city editor and four desk men. And it serves 26 newspapers and news distributing agen cies in and around New York. Its re porters are mere voices. Sometimes they materialize on Saturday mornings to call for little white envelopes, but most of
them I know by mere vocal inflections. ,There is “Mr. Sin-(pause)-ger of Lon (pause)-gisland City” and “Hrrrumph hum hum Cottrell of Hrrrumph hum ha
Jersey City” and “Capital S-Stakesing of Capital E-Elizabeth Capital N-New Capital J-Jersey” and “B for black
We cover Brooklyn better than
even the Brooklyn Eagle handles it. We
have a man in every police station in the four boroughs outside of Manhattan
the City News takes care of the last men tioned. The minute a man crosses to the east end of Brooklyn bridge, boards a ferry or gets off the subway on the other side of the Harlem river and breaks his
neck or a plate glass window he is in our territory.
And all this vast accumulation of events ranging from abandoned babies to murder and sudden death comes trickling in by telephone and goes tickering out on paper rolls.
It’s a rapid, efficient system; but think B-r-o-w-n Brown of R for Red R-i-v-e-r- t-o-n Riverton,” and about 200 more of of the slender pocketbooks of the Gresh am or Goshen representatives of the them, mostly small-town newspaper men. From early morn until early morn Portland papers if the Oregonian, Jour they telephone in, without request, all nal, Telegram and News suddenly in the principal local happenings as rapidly stalled a system of canned correspond
ence.
as they transpire.
[71
