EDITING AN ATLANTIC NEWSPAPER

Hokitika Guardian, 22 January 1921, Page 4

EDITING AN ATLANTIC NEWSPAPER

(By Tom Clarke.) NEW YORK, Nov. 17. “Poldliu will he on with news any minute if you care to come and listen.” So ran the message from the wireless

room. It was past midnight. Slipping on a dressing-gown 1 left my comfortable stateroom and wandered along the Imperator’s de; cited corridors and stairways to a little cabin on the top- 1 most deck. Here, at a bench crowded with instruments and switches, the . wireless operator sat, telephone-: fitted to his head, his right hand ready with pencil, his left slowly turning, this way and that a pointer which caused his receiving apparatus to “search” tlhe ether for the Poldliu call. For every night from the Cornish town comes news of the world for ships at sen. “Good evening, Mr Editor,” said the operator, handing me a spare telephone headpiece to “listen-in.” A lightpitched musical Morse note filled my oars. “That’s the Eiffel Tower, Paris.” He altered the pointer and the “music” changed; “That’s Berlin giving us the time from Nandi.’”" Another turn of the pointer: “That’s the Aquitania, homeward hound Hullo! Here we are Rold.hu. 1 . . . . Thank goodness, no x’s (atmospheric' disturbances) to-night ” He began to write on a sheet of foolscap headed “News Messages,” and as I followed his pencil 1 read of disturbances that day in Ireland, of the rates of exchange, of a London police court, case, of the death of a celebrity in Paris. Blackest night and one thousand miles out from Southampton for New York. Outside a gale played wild music on our aerial wires. Below ;{,(!()() people slept, and here wore three of us in magic communion with some clk eiful fellow in Cornwall who was telling 11s the happenings ot the day just past. 1 glanced at the clock. • It was the hour at which my newspaper comrades in Fleet-street would be doing precisely what 1 was doing, reading and sifting the news and settling the problems of relative importance. The dots and dashes of the Morse codg petered out. AM was silent in the telephones. “Three minutes stand-by to listen for 5.0. K.” said my Irieud, Then Poldliu piped in again and finished all his message. The operator asked if 1 would like some American news for the American passcngeix. “"\Ye ought to pick up Arlington to-night,” he .said, lie moved a switch and started “searching,” and 10011 to my budget of news I was able to add a narrative ol a dockers’ riot in New York, some sporting results, and points from a speech by .Mill a rding. The “copy” was iMton got ready for tli printers. 'There were two of them, in a wonderfully compact little shop. , There was no. linotype. All the. “copy” was set by hand, and the little fourpage sheet, of which three (oliimns were set aside for the late wireless ne.c's;, was printed on a small hand press.

At 7 a.in., tiic “printer's devil” analiened me with the unhappy news that they had not gut enough stuff to fill the paper. I remembered the dance the night before in the lounge. A couple of inchevs hastily written about it and the situation was saved. We gallantly went to press. In a short while the great floating hotel had awakened to another day on the swelling ocean. The first thing passengers thought, of was their newspaper. We were soon sold out. As I watched the people in their deck chairs reading of events in London and New York and Paris only a few hours old I wondered how many gave a thought to mankind’s magic achievements in Science that that little newspaper represented.