"WE" AND HIS WORK.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXIX, Issue 7831, 25 June 1909, Page 4

"WE" AND HIS WORK.

An oblong packet of greyish, white paper lies on your breakfast table. Morning by morning its like has occupied the self-same corner with that regularity which dims the wonder of many another daily miracle. You take it up, open it into a more or less unhandy sheet, glance over its closelypacked columns of print—seldom beautiful and sometimes barely legible—and suddenly you forget breakfast, boots and morning train. For the magic carpet of the Twentieth Century has swept you out of the familiar circle into the vision of a world's epic. You are gazing on the; inspired self-sacrifice of thousands for their country in frozen Manchuria, or on the no less inspired devotion of the gallant score or two, who, almost at your doors, are risking their lives' to save their fellows from the burning mine or the storm-shattered wreck. Or you may be joining in the laughter of a hemisphere as your magic carpet whisks you into a comedy or farce of real life, among people you have never seen, in lands you may never visit except by its aid. Our newspapers are all-pervading, all-illuminating, sometimes with a true light, sometimes with a false light, sometimes mischievious, more often beneficient, but with all their imperfections moulding unceasingly the conditions of the world we live in. And the entity that is at the back of each of them is only known to men as the editorial " We." That personage to do his work well must be a composite creature, compact of many brains, or he is not entitled to the dignity of the plural pronoun. He must have the brain of the diplomatist, of the politician, of the man of culture, of the commercial hustler, and of a General directing a campaign. He is the embodiment of many interests, many points of view, and and many sympathies. Out of the ever-shifting flux of the world's doings day by day, "We" draws, night by night, things foreseen and unforeseen. Morning by morning he presents it all, classified, docketted with headings, summed up here in! epigram, there in a drawing, ennobling, horror-moving or mirth provoking. The thing is a triumph of organisation. There must be such a linking-up of the internal mechanism of a daily paper's staff that its members work together with the mutual understanding and flexibility of a football team. The whole scheme of a night's work may be thrown to the winds when half done or even regarded as finished. Take, for example, the picture of what happened in probably a score of offices on that unforgettable night when England received the news of the defeat of Colenso, Magersfontein and Stormberg had staggered our optimism. But the big guns had been booming all day on the Tugela, and Buller's men were straining at the leash. The hours passed, leaders were written hopeful that at last the final blow was to be struck, all the growing tension of the situation was reflected in the headings and the leaded type. In a lull before going to press the leader-writer and the nighteditor discuss the outlook, one doubtful, the other hardly confident. As the latter turns to go a messenger puts in his hands a despatch. He glances at it and sees the too familiar, " I regret to report." It is Buller's message of defeat. The leader-writer sits down with clenched teeth to his article, subeditors and printers throw themselves on copy and proofs, the paper goes to press a few minutes later than visual, and that is all. The reader in the morning sees nothing of the wreck of a night's arrangements. He sees only the crystallisation of the unforeseen in an appointed and organised form. The sheer bulk of the matter compressed daily by " We " and his myrmidons into his halfpenny or penny or threepenny packet is hardly "realised even by those who share in the performance. An ocean of words pours into the office. Advertisers proclaim their wishes in an infinity of forms. Telegraph instruments print off the news on endless yards of paper tape, the telephone hiims almost unceasingly, and the sub-editors decipher and reduce to reasonable dimensions the effusions of hundreds of hurried scribes. As the flood of copy reaches the printer, he distributes it to his men, who, plying the keys of the linotype, turn out thousands of bars of metal, each bearing a line of the paper of the morrow. It is no uncommon feat for the printer to set and arrange in seven working hours from 200,000 to 250,000 words, or three or four the mass of a sixshilling novel. When the lines of type have been marshalled in columns these are laid in page form inside heavy iron frames, which are screwed close all round, so that the page is practically a solid plate of metal. From this the stereotyper takes, his mould by pressing .on the face of the page a sheet of soft papier mache, which is baked dry and hard wjjjle in close contact with the type, the "matrix" thus formed he casts in semicircular moulds the plates which are to go on the cylinders of the printing machine. In three or four hours he will use eight to ten tons of molten metal in the production of some three hundred semi-cylinders for the equipment of the complicated mangles which 'do the printing. These in their turn will in the small hours of the morning devour over forty tons of paper, printing and cutting and folding it into thousands of copies of the finished journal. There is no other achievement of man's intelligence which effects so startling a transformation, which creates a tangible organic whole out of so vast a tangle of raw material, much of it not eve" m existence when the magician \\e begins his daily labours.—Fred Miller, in the Press Album.