SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE

Vol.

NOVEMBER

XVI

ELECTION NIGHT

IN

A

1894

No. 5

NEWSPAPER OFFICE

By Julian Ralph

R BENNETT showed

his

pubhc curiosity when he put up a newspaper building so knowledge

of the

largely of glass as to reveal to the people in the streets the movements,

and something of the methods, of the workmen who produce

his

daily journal.

The

crowds which gather at the windows betray the same interest in the subject that is shown wherever a reporter appears to do his work. To us who are en-

gaged in the business, reporters seem all too numerous, and yet no sooner does one produce his book and pencil in a public hall or place than a whisper leaps from the mouths of the people, there is a visible stir to bring the man or woman into general view, and interest in the business in hand is thereafter divided with the newspaper-historian. In some measure the newspaper directors have always made themselves responsible for that degree of mystery which clings to the business and keeps a keen edge upon the popular curiosity regarding it. There are still newspaper editors who try to pose as petty czars before their subordinates, declining counsel and refusing explanation as a general in command would scarcely do in the heat of battle. There are newspaper establishments in which the editors' rooms are as difficult of access, even to the other workmen in the building, as an inventor's closet, or the dressing-room of an and never actress; and there is not any newspaper office that is as •can be

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Copyright,

1894,

open to the public as a

even

store, or

as a bank. I once heard the editor-inchief of a New York newspaper speak of " that mystery which the j^^^^^lic always associates with the editorial sanctum." The utterance was priggish, but it sprang from a fact which has at its root the essence of journalism for, if everyone knew what was to be published in a newsj^aper, who wrote each article, and who furnished the facts, the business could not be carried on. What is meat to the mass of readers may be poison to the persons concerned, and, even as it is, there is a constant battle between those who are gathering the news and those who would like to keep it out of print. Thus it is that, in maintaining some degree of mystery about the work, a great deal more comes to be fancied to exist, and the work of journalism remains greatly interesting to all happily to those who live under its exciting influence as well as to those who get only occasional glimj)ses of its processes. But there is one night in every year, in every great newspaper office, when work is done that is the least understood of all that goes on in the making of a daily paper one night when the highest state of fever attends the excitement and strain of the most intense work that falls to the lot of any men, except soldiers in war. That is election night. That is the night when a few men sit down at six o'clock before virgin sheets of paper, with the knowledge that before two o'clock the next morning they must cover those sheets with the elec-

by Charles Scr ibner's Sons.

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