FLEET-STREET.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 26, 31 January 1912, Page 4

FLEET-STREET.

I.— ITS MANNER. OF MOVEMENT. (By A. J. Heighway.) Here in London are 4000 men and women ever driving flying fingers, ever cudgelling weary brains, to supply matter for the insatiable press.- Of daily 'and weekly newspapers there are over 500 coming damp from tho whirring Hoe. Monthly and quarterly publications bring the total of periodicals to 2000. At! The flow of this Niagara of paper and ink never ceases, the crushing deluge never pauses. Day Emd night the machines are racing, eating paper, miles in a minute. The clamorous greed of the press knows no rest. Here the threads of the world centre. Every single minute messages flash in from Jericho or Timbuctoo, Saskatchewan or Polynesia. The slaves in* attendance are ever cramming the giant press witjh fresh qopy. With the rush of greed it takes this in its capacious ,maw, tears it, chews it, swallows it, digests it, spews it forth to infinity. It is all monstrous, colossal ! The sacred walls of the British Museum were incapable of holding specimens of all the papers published in Britain. Land was bought out in tho suburbs— at Hendon — and a large special building erected for current newspapers. And day after day cartload follows cartload there, ton upon ion mounts. Is the historian of the future to give attention to this, religiously to peruse this— this — thia mountain of verbiage, this inky "mirror of humanity^' this complacent' corridor of crime, this impassive Tecord of human foibles, actions, notions, ideab, insufficiencies. .Fancy isome patient delver in distant ages, after laborious excavanon, 'bursting into this building. See him walk down those dusty corridors,^ prying here and- prying there. Imagine him commencing to read, becoming interested, vowing never to cease till h© had Teat* all. He was still there at the crack of doom ! ' - • MECHANICAL PERFECTION. ■ Let us see the means by which this stupendous output is achieved. We must take.it in detail — and but one example — it is impossible otherwise. The best printing room in, London is undoubtedly that of Ed. Lloyd's (Ltd.) the circulation of whose Lloyd's News amounts now to nearly 1,500,000 copies. By the conditions under wnich this enormous output is attained j*ou will have some basis for a slight comprehension of the magnitude of the operations of the modern Fleet-street. Huge circulations are now the order. The main and subsidiary issues of the Daily Telegraph clear the 1,000,000 mark. The --Daily Mail is just below it/, bub on occasions tops it. The LonI don papers go to prfcse with their first ; editions very early— soon after midnight — 30 that the scene which is about to be described as happening at Lloyd's may. b© seen any morning in a score of offices by those able to obtain the privilege. , THE PUBLISHING. And when the printing is done there comes the organisation of despatch. The daily- issue - of the London morning monsters runs into hundreds of tons. An issue' of- Lloyd's. News weighs 250 tons ! Yet-the publication is so Organised- that no delay . i» suffered. „ Scores oi motor cars are owned by the big companies. Special trains afo run as recouped, even special boats employed. It i$ Absolutely one of. the. sights of London to watch, from -the; neigttbourhpod- of FJeet ; street, the p^blicatjptt from "different offices' of ■ edition^ 'af ( tefi edition. In Salisbury- | square, lor insl^ce^d3'have r 'Telays df ;, motors, and dozens of earth. The " machines of a score of bicycle boys are spread along^ the pavemjent^ The. lad*. 1 themselves, ideal London types, stand I by in large groups and indulge in .the. I inevitably 1 .lArking. ■ Then the paper' } comes. Out rush ihe loaded lomee, away fly the cars, hooters sounding dcs» perately, away rattle the horse-drawn -vehicles, away scortfh the cyclists whose \ manoeuvres in London's traffic border ,*on the miraculous, away dash the foot- ' runners with shrieks of "SpechuJ !" "Latest edition 1" He is a .dull man I wbpse'r'pulse does not 'then quicken. | 'A dull roar permeates the building. As the first solid' steel door is swung back the noise increases ten-fold. When the second gives way you shrink in diemay from the Titanic crash that falls Upon you. There is a huge, brilliantlylit basement. Seven great double octuple perfecting machines , of 100,000 separate parts eachi of 120 tons weight, are Tacing under the dynamic energy of 150 horsepower each. There iB one solid, rasping roar. You cannot hear or speak. You can merely drink in impreesiona. Each monstrous machine i& 50ft long, 27ft high, and 12ft wide. Each machine is •drawing from eight reels of paper four and a-half miles in length. The machine draws from each of its ends, and ejects the completed paper— folded, pasted, and counted and tied -in bundles in 'the middle. It can print from 2 to '64 pages^, according to requirements. . When, n\ is printing an 8-.page paper 61 copies are produced for every tick of a watch. In one hour the seven machines' can thus produce 1,537,000 copies. .Each machine is attendted by"iß>men)-'-i# equipped with 128 stereotyped "splaW, weighing nearly 3, tons, , has lOpcomjiosition inking rollers weighing 5G00"lb, and-usee half a' ton of ink in each "run," • The consumption of paper is.awful.;;. awful.; ; In' ; 6ne, hpur. f the seven, machines, use^OQty'miles'of paper of a page in iwidtn^; 7 fit -fourteen 'bOurs the. globe- i« le^circlecCi'The changing of reels' is eff£c£e<l with a minimum of delay xby means of v revolving turrets which can ?b» . loaded in preparation while ther' maciihie js ift imoson., ..Each monster is driven by! :afl ; electrical equipment' 'controlled merely by a thumb ' switch. The flexibility of control is marvellous. Eaten" taa^chine can be moved a fract'on of a' turn of the cylinders or maintained on continuous^ runs at any speed up to the maximum. • ORGANISATION/ The same principle of organisation and mechanical .perfection is carried into every departmfinkof'an up-to-date newspaper. Passing T>ver for the moment the ( systems for the collection anil supply of news, we look into the sub-editor's ,room. On thejAmericanised papers the sub-editors' are not 'jgojely concerned with the filling out and correction of news. In the early, .part , of the evening that is a main portion of their work. But* even then some are detailed, to compilg a a proper "story" from different incomplete versions that may have come to hand; to pick out the essential points of a subject from half, a dozen quarters, and rewrite the whole of it, And he must pack the whole of >his news into hiß headings. There are probably thousands of busy men in London and ekewhere whose reading of a newspaper is merely a run througn the headings. The brainy sub-editor is the man who enables him, from that process, to acquire at least a working knowledge of the big things that are moving., Then, as the evening wears on, things take such a^ehape that it becomes toughly pos-' sible to gauge supply and demand— see how much matter there is for so much space. Invariably there is too much matter, ' and a constant process goes on of further, condensing that material which ie already in. type. All the day's news muet be gob in in some form or other. "Held-over" matter is, dead — a day late ie a year late. So an item may be "cut" and "act," "cut" and "reset" half a dozen v tiniee iv an .even-

ing-^-all in accordance with" the x pressure which the later news sets up in proportion to the earlier. To see the sub-editor's room of the Daily Mail is to see absolute concentration. A dozen men of the utmost sharpness are packing, packing, packing. You see also the acme of strenuousness. No tenser work takes place on this earth than that witnessed m the "sub's" room when the cable brings a message that may paralyse nations — when the lino, man waits for his last "flimsy," the stereo man waits by his furnace, the machine man in the basement warms up his monster — and the clock is within two minutes of press time. THE FLASH OF THE WIRE. As an aid to the full comprehension of the significance of the modern Fleetstreet a visit to the great Central Telegraph Exchange is invaluable. There you find the most up-to-date portion of oue huge room entirely devoted to the despatch of "news." This one phase of the subject ib worth au articlo in ifcselt, and in the space at disposal an indication only can be given, first, of the magnitude of the work done, and secondly, of tiie despatch attained. On the first point you must try to realise that in the first fortnight of the General Election there passed through these instruments 15,000,000 words of press matter. In an ordinary day between 160,000 and 180,000 messages are sent through. Now for despatch. Suppose the Press Asso-^ ciation hands in a message of 200 words for distribution to its principal clients in 1 seventy provincial towns.- That message is ticked out on a machine which, instead of having but one "tape," has eight. There . you have straightway eight . messages for transit. Each of those -"tapes"i s then handed to an operator, who < simply places it in ohe slot of a machine. Now, this machine has direct communication with seven or eight large towns — that is to say, it- automatically communicates with that number of, exchanges, and as the -tape runs through the, machine at this end, a similar tape is coming, out of a corresponding machine in each of those eight exchanges. The rate of transit is 200 words a minute, so that it is possible by Berforming the same action on each of 19 other central machines which communicate with from five to eight exchanges, to have that 200-word message in the seventy different towns well under 120 seconds from time of receipt. This "Creed" instrument is the latest telegraphic triumpiU, and facilitates immeasurably the despatch of news. Then for the speedy delivery of messages from the Central Ofiide to the recipient newspapers in' London the system of pneumatic tubes is largely used. The office has over fifty tubes communicating wiih diiferent branch offices, and messages 'are immediately despatched to the point nearest for delivery purposes. Some of the biggest newspapers lease altogether frpm the Government special wires between towns, and maintain their own operating staffs. The Daily Mail has this system between Manchester and London, and between London and Paris, and by means of it finds itself able to issue similar editions in those three centres at the same time. Operators work all night in transferring the "important news. The other papers adopt the same plan for their special purposes. The Manchester Guardian, ior instance, and the Scotsman, Edinburgh, not to mention other provincial journals, have their own wires from theijr London offices, and are thus able to give- their readers the ' Very latest London new*i. * • . • . . ; In the football season the publication of results is a very triumph of. organisation and ' despatch. "Tims'" , will barely have blown before the waiting crowds outside tile Chronicle om^'ttwill have all the particulars and .relative standings pf the Southern League convle«C Then "edition after 'edition pours out. The first edition of, an evening . paper is made about 11 *.m. This contains all the newa v of the morning, papers, as well as much that is new,' Then, at varying intervals of about an hour, ' subsequent editions are brought out right up to 6.30, when, in the majority of cases, "Final" is deservedly inscribed on the front page. SPEED ! In such fashion iB the demand of the public met. The main iunction of the modern press-r-the gathering of news— r is performed now N as it never' was before. At every single point the one aim of getting to the public first is kept in view. So, fast as bottled lightning can do the work, every incident of note is hurried to 1 this London market. So fast as the brain of man and finger of man can fly, the news is on the machine in process of multiplication ten thousand times. So fast as motors can dash, so fast as boys can scatter, the damp sheets are in the hands of the public. And tha public maintains the greedy, rush. Hardly any longer is the paper "read" j it is "skimmed." And the evanescent impression is wiped away by the next sensation., Such, is the work of the modern Fleet-street.