Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls
HOW NEWSPAPERS ARE MADE
We will suppose that it is a great newspaper, in a great city, printing daily 25,000, or more, copies. Here it is, with wide columns, with small, compact type, with very little space wasted in head lines, eight large pages of it, something like 100,000 words printed upon it, and sold for four cents—25,000 words for a cent. It is a great institution—a power greater than a hundred banking-houses, than a hundred politicians, than a hundred clergymen. It collects and scatters news; it instructs and entertains with valuable and sprightly articles; it forms and concentrates public opinion; it in one way or another, brings its influence to bear upon millions of people, in its own, and other lands. Who would not like to know something about it?
And there is Tom, first of all, who declares that he is going to be a business man, and who already has a bank-book with a good many dollars entered on its credit side—there is Tom, I say, asking first of all: “How much does it cost? and where does the money come from? and is it a paying concern?” Tom shall not have his questions expressly answered; for it isn’t exactly his business; but here are some points from which he may figure:
“How much does it cost?” Well, there is the publishing department, with an eminent business man at its head, with two or three good business men for his assistants, and with several excellent clerks and other employès. Then there is the Editor-in-Chief, and the Managing Editor, and the City Editor, and a corps of editors of different departments, besides reporters—thirty or forty men in all, each with some special literary gift. Then there are thirty or forty men setting type; a half-dozen proof-readers; a half-dozen stereotypers; the engineer and foreman and assistants below stairs, who do the printing; and several men employed in the mailing department. Then there are tons and tons of paper to be bought each week; ink, new type, heavy bills for postage; many hundreds of dollars a week for telegraphic dispatches; and the interest on the money invested in an expensive building; expensive machinery, and an expensive stock of printers’ materials—nothing being said of the pay of correspondents of the paper at the State Capitol, at Washington, at London, at Paris, etc. Tom is enough of a business man, already, I know, to figure up the weekly expenses of such an establishment at several thousands of dollars—a good many hundreds at each issue of the paper.
THE N. Y. TRIBUNE BUILDING AT NIGHT.
“And where does the money come from?” Partly from the sale of papers. Only four cents apiece, and only a part of that goes to the paper; but, then, 25,000 times, say two-and-a-half cents, is $625, which it must be confessed, is quite a respectable sum for quarter-dimes to pile up in a single day. But the greater part of the money comes from advertisements. Nearly half of the paper is taken up with them. If you take a half-dozen lines to the advertising clerk, he will charge you two or three dollars; and there are several hundred times as much as your small advertisement in each paper. So you may guess what an income the advertising yields. And the larger, the more popular, and the more widely read the paper, the better will be the prices which advertisers will pay, and the more will be the advertisements. And so the publisher tries to sell as many papers as he can, partly because of the money which he gets for them, but more, because the more he sells the more advertising will he get, and the better rates will he charge for it. So, Tom, if you ever become the publisher of a newspaper, you must set your heart on getting an editor who will make a paper that will sell—whatever else he does or does not do.
“And is it a paying concern?” Well, I don’t think the editors think they get very large pay, nor the correspondents, nor the reporters, nor the printers, nor the pressmen. They work incessantly; it is an intense sort of work; the hours are long and late; the chances of premature death are multiplied. I think they will all say: “We aren’t in this business for the money that is in it; we are in it for the influence of it, for the art of it, for the love of it; but then, we are very glad to get our checks all the same.” As to whether the paper pays the men who own it—which was Tom’s question: I think that that “depends” a great deal on the state of trade, on the state of politics, and on the degree to which the paper will, or will not, scruple to do mean things. A great many papers would pay better, if they were meaner. It would be a great deal easier to make a good paper, if you did not have to sell it. When, then, Jonathan shall have become a minister, he doesn’t want to bear down too hard on a “venal press” in his Fast Day and Thanksgiving sermons. Perhaps, by that time, Tom will be able to explain why.
“How, now, is this paper made?” “But,” interrupts Jonathan, “before they make it, I should like to know where they get the 100,000 words to put into it; I have been cudgeling my brains for now two weeks to get words enough to fill a four page composition—say 200 words, coarse.”
The words which are put into it are, besides the advertisements, chiefly: 1. News; 2. Letters and articles on various subjects; 3. Editorial articles, reviews, and notes; 4. Odds and ends.
The “letters and articles on various subjects” come from all sorts of people: some from great writers who get large pay for even a brief communication; some from paid correspondents in various parts of the world; some from all sorts of people who wish to proclaim to the world some grievance of theirs, or to enlighten the world with some brilliant idea of theirs—which generally loses its luster the day the article is printed. A large proportion of letters and articles from this last class of people get sold for waste-paper before the printer sees them. This is one considerable source of income to the paper, of which I neglected to tell Tom.
A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE WASTE-PAPER BASKET.
As for the “odds and ends”—extracts from other papers, jokes, and various other scraps tucked in here and there—a man with shears and paste-pot has a good deal to do with the making of them. If you should see him at work, you would want to laugh at him—as if he were, for all the world, only little Nell cutting and pasting from old papers, a “frieze” for her doll’s house. But when his “odds and ends,” tastefully scattered here and there through the paper, come under the reader’s eye, they make, I am bound to say, a great deal of very hearty laughter which is not that laughter of ridicule which the sight of him at his work might excite.
OFFICE OF THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF.
About the “news,” I must speak more fully. The “editorial articles, reviews, and notes,” we shall happen upon when we visit the office.
A part of the news comes by telegraph from all parts of the world. Some of it is telegraphed to the paper by its correspondents, and the editors call it “special,” because it is especially to them. Perhaps there is something in it which none of the other papers have yet heard of. But the general telegraphic news, from the old-world and the new, is gathered up by the “Associated Press.” That is to say, the leading papers form an Association and appoint men to send them news from the chief points in America and in Europe. These representatives of the Associated Press are very enterprising, and they do not allow much news of importance to escape them. The salaries of these men, and the cost of the telegraphic dispatches, are divided up among the papers of the Association, so that the expense to each paper is comparatively small. Owing to this association of papers, hundreds of papers throughout the country publish a great deal of matter on the same day which is word-for-word alike.
Two devices in this matter of Associated Press dispatches save so much labor, that I think you will like me to describe them.
One is this: Suppose there are a dozen papers in the same city which are entitled to the Associated Press dispatches. Instead of making a dozen separate copies, which might vary through mistakes, one writing answers for all the dozen. First, a sheet of prepared tissue paper is laid down, then a sheet of a black, smutty sort
