CHAPTER VI
THE MECHANICAL PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF A NEWSPAPER

The process of the production of a modern newspaper is one of the curiosities of industry. It is inconceivably complex. To begin with, for every single letter used in every word of the day’s issue—there is an average of about six letters to each word, nine words to a line, two hundred lines in a column, seven columns in a page and ten or twelve pages and often more in a standard morning daily—a reproduction in metal has to be made and placed in its right position between two others. That is to say about three-quarters of a million individual little metal stamps have to be made every day afresh in a certain order, never twice repeated; they are used once and then entirely destroyed. That is but the first miracle. Another is that in the output of a popular morning issue from fifty to sixty miles of double-width paper—that is four times the width of the front page—representing the denudation of perhaps thirty or forty acres of forest land, will be devoured every day. The third and most amazing miracle of all is the pace at which these huge operations are done. All these little distinct metal stamps will be made in the right order in from six to eight hours by less than a hundred men. The miles of paper will be eaten up in perhaps from two to three hours including intervals at a rate of output representing the printing of something like fifteen thousand copies of the paper per minute or two hundred and fifty per second in the offices where the largest circulations are produced.

Let us now take these processes seriatim and see if we can understand them in detail. The first point to realize about a newspaper is that everything has to be done, not at the double, but at some quicker pace, of which there is no example in ordinary life. Perhaps a Cabinet Council planning some revolutionary legislation may work quicker or a council of war summoned to meet in an emergency. The feat can only be accomplished by the strict training of all concerned to do each his own job with an intense concentration, regardless of the simultaneous carrying out by others of a hundred corresponding tasks. The news or special article as it leaves the author’s brain commences at once its progress in the form of words through the minute mechanical processes required to carry it to the breakfast table. It may never get written at all. In several New York offices only type-written matter is accepted by the city editor and the typed copy has to be either by dictation to shorthand or to the machine or executed by the reporter himself. The most progressive method of all, which has not yet been completely adopted but I have no doubt soon will be, is the use of the dictating machine, which is a special form of phonograph. The records, when the proper degree of accuracy and self-confidence have become general in a reporting staff, will ultimately come to pass direct to the compositor, thus saving one intermediate stage.

The three chief processes through which the written word has to pass in order to get into print are composition, or the assembling of types, stereotyping, or the preparing of the types for fast rotary printing, and printing proper. Of these the first is the most difficult and complicated, and has been the slowest in coming to the modern standard of perfection of all the three. As every one knows, the old-fashioned method of composition consisted in setting up together various movable types so that they successively formed words and sentences. This process has proved much too slow for modern newspaper production. The hand compositor, as he was called, could not put together more than 1,200 or 1,500 typical letters per hour. The composing room staff had to be very numerous, and the issue of very large papers was physically impossible. Besides there was the difficulty of dealing with the types themselves; they were difficult to handle in a mass for fear their order might be disturbed; they were easily injured and worn out, and they had to be distributed afresh in their proper cases after every use.

All this has been abolished by the invention of various forms of composing machines, of which I shall describe the one that is most often in use in newspaper offices. I am told on good authority that out of about 2,000 offices in the United Kingdom only about six have not at least one Linotype machine. This Linotype machine is probably the most ingenious mechanism ever planned and, with the exception of a few calculating machines, resembles the human brain more than any other. The Linotype is not content to assemble made types, but it makes them line by line as they are required. It is constituted of a keyboard actuating a magazine containing matrices, or letter-moulds in intaglio, together with a casting mechanism. By tapping the keys the operator can bring to a suitable position in the casting machine, opposite to the blank end of a small mould of exactly the size of a line of type, these various matrices in due order so as to form successive words in a sentence. When the matrices are assembled in their proper place, as he is informed by the ringing of a bell, the operator will touch a lever releasing molten metal into the empty mould and thus obtains a metal slug representing the line of type which he has to set up. The machine shaves and trims this slug to an exact size and returns the used matrices to their appropriate channels in the magazine ready for use in another line. By this method the handling of separate metal types is abolished. Fresh new printing surfaces are presented for every issue and the old ones destroyed. Above all the pace of output is more than quadrupled and very much larger issues can be produced than was possible under the old system.

The latest development of the Linotype composing machine is the provision of several magazines of matrices of different founts of type, so that for varied setting such as is generally required in advertisements successive lines of type can be used from different magazines. As many as four magazines have been attached to one machine. Besides the Linotype which is the most useful machine to a newspaper there is a German machine called the Typograph, operating in a similar fashion. The Monotype machine, very valuable for certain purposes such as catalogue work in a general printing office, casts each single type separately and sets them together. Matter set in this way lends itself more easily to small corrections.

The Linotype slugs with their new type-shaped faces are then assembled into columns and screwed up in frames so as to form a page, but they are as yet very far from being a suitable printing surface. The reason for the next transformation of these type surfaces is, as follows: it is impossible for any fast printing to be done from a flat surface. The only possible device for securing rapid pace according to our present notions of machinery is the use of rotary motion. In other words the paper must be made to run between two wheels, one of which has a type surface and the other a soft blanket. So that we have to convert a flat type surface into a curved one for our fresh purpose. This process is called stereotyping.

Stereotyping accomplishes this purpose in two ways; it can make a semi-circular plate or a tubular plate. In the first case, which is the more usual method, the printing cylinder in the press is of double size and will contain two full newspaper pages on its circumference. In the second, adapted to a new form of press, the page encircles the whole cylinder. The process of transforming a flat surface into a circular one was long done by hand, and in a great many offices continues so to be done. On the surface of the square page of type is placed a damp mould, resembling papier-mâché, composed of several overlying sheets of thin tissue and heavy backing papers; the type with the mould on it is placed inside a steam press, when it is effectually squeezed into the face of the type and dried by heat at the same time. A hard mould is thus made in about six minutes, showing the impressions of the newspaper page in intaglio. This dry mould is of course flexible and can be placed in a cylindrical casting box and cylindrical plates having an exact reproduction of the type surfaces on their curved exteriors are rapidly cast and sent down to the machine-room. It is from these curved plates that the newspapers themselves are actually printed and not, as many people naturally suppose, from the type itself.

The hand production of stereotype plates is already out of date in most progressive offices. The first improvement is the substitution of a dry “flong,” as the paper mould is technically called, thus eliminating the five or six minutes spent in drying at the cost to some extent of accuracy, a fault which is in process of diminution. The second is the use of elaborate machines called variously autoplates, junior autoplates or multiplates according to size and design. These also arise from the newspaper passion for speed and they carry out automatically the casting, trimming and planing to a true edge of stereoplates, which was formerly carried out slowly by hand. To see a double autoplate turning out these monstrous heavy page-sized plates complete at the rate of six a minute gives one an impression of an intelligence also something akin to human. The only limit to their speed is the necessity for allowing the metal of the plates to cool sufficiently during the process to ensure that their cylindrical accuracy will be exact before they start on their journey to the machine-room. In a few minutes later these same plates will be revolving on a fast modern press at the rate of 16,000 revolutions an hour with a surface speed of rotation of approximately twenty-two feet per second. The degree of accuracy of plate-casting required in order to get good printing at this rate of production is very great and has only been effectively secured in very recent times.

Before proceeding to examine the habits and constitution of the printing-press itself let us take a peep inside a modern press room. In the first place it is almost sure to be irregular in shape and though very large and high not large enough or high enough to hold comfortably all the machinery that is in it. Expansion is the law of a newspaper’s existence and hardly any newspaper ever succeeds in building itself a machine cellar, which it will not ultimately grow out of. The difficulty and expense of acquiring new printing press accommodation in crowded and valuable areas assures an irregular shape to most modern machine rooms. Imagine an immense cellar perhaps twenty to thirty feet high with huge irregular piles of machinery reaching almost to the ceiling. There is no general lighting, for the path of the rays from the ceiling lights is broken up in all directions by the tall presses, but everywhere there are bright handlights conveniently placed so as to illuminate instantaneously every square inch of the masses of metal work. In some cases lights are turned on for the moment in the central parts of the gaunt machines themselves. Everywhere on the outside of the presses are to be seen handles and bells and indicators so that to the uninitiated there seems to be no central point of control, no pineal gland where the soul of things is situated.

Just before press time in a big office order begins to appear. The men group themselves systematically at various stations round the presses, which are half ready to start. That is to say, that the machine is more than half clothed with the plates of those pages, which have been the earliest to go to press. Then comes a clang, indicating from the stereotype room above that the last plates are cast and probably on their way. Down the hoist they come singly, almost too hot to be handled. One by one the cellar-hands take them and fit them on the plate cylinders, where the turning of a single cog fits each into position. A big double sextuple machine such as the one illustrated (Fig. 2), printing a twelve-page paper, will want eight plates of the last page to start it, so that this last operation may take as many minutes. Then the lever is pressed down and the printing begins with a sound like a sustained purring, punctuated by regular sobbing. In this respect the latest presses are showing marked improvement with every fresh design and the noise is by no means overwhelming. A few years ago rapid printing in great masses involved considerable distress to the ears for any one forced to remain for very long downstairs in the printing cellar.

There are now-a-days so many distinct varieties of printing-press available and used for newspaper printing that it is a matter of some difficulty to select a suitable type as representative. I have chosen two, which are here illustrated. One is the double-sextuple press recently installed by Messrs. Joseph Foster & Sons in the office of the London Daily Mail (Fig. 2). It is not by any means the largest in the world but it is the latest in design and a typical fast rotary press for rapid work. The other (Fig. 3) is a typical small press such as a provincial evening paper would find convenient. The small illustration (Fig. 1) above, shows the end-on section XYZ of a semi-cylindrical plate of large size compared with the smaller sized section of a tubular plate M, where a single page of the paper to be printed goes completely round the circle, except for a narrow margin at the bottom of the page, a space, which is taken up on the cylinder by clamps, which hold the plate firmly.

On the double-sextuple machine here illustrated by a section of the machine from the side the reader will observe that it is really a combination of six separate machines arranged in three tiers. The paper is carried in six huge reels, three at each end of the press. The paper in the course of printing comes from the reels at each end to the central portion of the press down into the four folding mechanisms in the centre of the press, where they are automatically folded and delivered ready for sale.

Now the chief marvel of a modern combined printing press is its power of being used to print separately a large number of small sized papers or by leading the paper through the press in a slightly different way to print a mammoth paper folded all together and receiving contributions from all six reels at once. In the particular machine in question, which is used to print a comparatively small sized paper, any six of the separate machines can be run separately, if a small paper and a small output only is wanted. When required, they can be combined in pairs or in threes or all together, either for an immense number of small papers or for a moderate number of very large ones. With a Daily Mail of eight pages the two lower tiers of the press could be run with an output of 132,000 copies per hour. For ten pages half the upper tier, using half length reels, could be run to supply the supplementary two pages per copy at the same rate. To produce a twelve-page paper the whole upper tier could be run and again produce them at the same rate. The larger sizes would involve a lesser rate of output. From fourteen to twenty-four page papers would be produced at the rate of 66,000 per hour, and twenty-four to forty-eight page papers at 33,000. To change over from printing one size paper to another would not be a matter of more than half an hour.

The course of each sheet from the reel through the printing cylinders is exactly the same. The paper has to be printed on both sides and on one only at a time. To effect this it passes between one pair of cylinders, one of which carries the stereotype plate containing the raised surface of type, whose course we have already followed; the other is covered with a hard rubber blanket, sufficiently pervious to allow the slightest possible indentation of its surface as the irregular type faces come opposite to it with the rapidly-flowing paper ever between them. This slight but rapid indentation gives a clear cut impression and applies the ink without smudging to one of the surfaces of the paper. The impression of ink on the other surface is given by going through another pair of similar cylinders but with their relative positions reversed—i.e., the plate cylinder must now come in contact with the other side of the paper.

The merits and defects of fast rotary printing depend wholly on two conditions, as far as the workmanship in the press is concerned, apart from the several qualities of paper, ink and accurately made stereotype plates, which are here supposed to be all of normal excellence. These two conditions are the degree of the impression allowed between the plate and the impression cylinders and the proper supply and distribution of the ink. Both these are matters requiring the highest technical judgment, and where illustrated work is concerned, as is increasingly the case in modern newspapers, slight variations have enormously different results. Conveying the ink, which in printing is a thick glutinous fluid, mostly oil and lamp-black, from the long ink cases running from side to side of the press, is the work of a number of subsidiary rollers with various conflicting and combining movements. The ink is allowed to ooze out generously on to a large metal cylinder, where it is pounced upon at once by a cohort of gelatine rollers and pounded and smeared in various directions and ultimately taken by carrying rollers with reciprocating motion to larger gelatine cylinders, which are in contact with the plate-carrying cylinder itself. All this pounding, squeezing and manœuvring are the only means of getting an absolutely even distribution of ink, which the reckless speed of newspaper printing requires. It must be remembered that the speed of the printing peripheries in contact with the moving paper often amounts to more than twenty feet per second.

There is a further complication of refinement required in the printing of illustrated work, which the increasing accuracy of modern times has not yet eliminated. The depth of the hollows in between the raised printing surfaces is very much less in plates reproducing photographic illustrations than in the case of type. It is found that “half-tone” work, as it is called, requires a degree of exactness in the printing plate, which at present it is impossible always to get. One part of a picture to be printed is very often slightly higher or lower than the other. To remedy this in the plate is impossible. Another plate might have fresh faults. Good printing is secured at a fast pace by a process called “making ready.” The printer runs his paper slowly through the press and discovers the faults in the plates containing illustrations by a trial impression on the paper. He then corrects the lightly-inked parts of his illustration by raising the corresponding surface of the impression cylinder. To do this he pastes on various thicknesses of paper on the latter, so that the paper to be printed is brought more firmly in contact with the printing cylinder, wherever the illustration appears to him to require it. The object is to get an even blackness of impression all over the illustration. The correction requires good judgment and skilled attention.

The last stage of the passage of the paper through the press is cutting and folding. It will be remembered that the printed papers are coming down two at a time, side by side into the central folding mechanism. The first operation is a longitudinal cut separating the two papers and making two half width running strips instead of one. Taking one of these strips the next operation is to run the paper over a V-shaped plate, drawing the two edges of the paper together at the bottom and making the central fold of the journal. A transverse cut separates each journal from the other, which are then taken separately sideways for one final revolution round a cylinder, where a knife pops out from the interior and neatly gives it the last fold, which we recognize across the front of our daily paper every morning.

So the papers come out at a pace about a thousand times quicker than one can read the description. Enormous efforts are required to deal with the advancing flood. Any accumulation would be destructive of order. Most of the papers go straight to waiting carts and motors. Others go to the mailing room, where, as in some American offices, they are fed through machines, which with the same operation print the names and addresses on wrappers, affix and gum the wrappers and deliver the newspapers into assorted bags, whose destination is already fastened on the outside.

Once outside, distribution is very much a question of population and locality. Different methods have to be employed to meet fresh problems. In London internal distribution is very difficult, because the local railways and tubes are not organized to handle goods traffic. Horses and carts are now outdistanced except for small consignments. Bicycles can be used to some extent but the motor will be the chief reliance of the future. In this case the problem must be divided up into two parts owing to traffic considerations. At night the roads are free and high speed can be kept up for long distances, so that the utility of the motor is only limited to its capacity, otherwise its tonnage. It has been calculated recently that a motor van can run from Fleet Street to Barnet, a distance of about twelve miles within an hour, stopping twenty-seven times in the last seven miles to deliver separate parcels to newsagents on the way.

The problem of the distribution of evening papers during the day is very much more difficult. One prominent evening newspaper in London has estimated that it costs as much as £1,000 per week to each paper.[8] In the first place competition is much more keen, because, while the morning paper has to reach a limited number of important distributing points at one stated time, i.e., before breakfast, it is the business of an enterprising evening paper to multiply occasions of distribution, as for instance after every race or at short intervals during an exciting cricket match, and also for the same competitive purpose to multiply points of distribution, so as to cover the widest possible field. In the second place the general traffic in London is still conducted at the same pace, at which the animals entered the ark. At all important centres the streets are blocked for half the daylight hours of the day. At Wellington Street, the westward boundary of newspaperdom, five hours daily are lost; in the city the average rate of progression is three miles an hour. For these reasons a large and fast unit of distribution, like the motor-car, is discounted in utility by the blocks in the traffic so that light carts and men on bicycles can hold their own in pace and serve a greater number of independent centres. The bicycle has a special power of penetrating a block because the police are indulgent to newspaper distribution and generally allow them to pass.

The modern method of distribution in London—it was invented first in the provinces—is conducted, as follows: various centres are selected—take the corner of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street for example—where staffs of boys are assembled at stated periods during the afternoon. At fixed times there come at breathless speed bundles of evening “specials” or “extras” by cart or bicycle, which are instantaneously served out to the waiting newsboys. There are thus perhaps a hundred local centres of distribution awaiting the trigger to be pulled in the central office, which will deliver the selected news all over London. Here is the point where the skilled judgment of an experienced journalist is required to select the right news and the right moment. It is a fatal thing to pull the trigger on a small occasion too soon before a big one, as for instance, if one sent all the boys away with a county cricket result ten minutes before the result of the Cambridgeshire. As a matter of fact most boys would know too much about their own business to take a special, just before an important racing event.

The distribution of evening newspapers is probably the chief point of organization, where we are probably well ahead of the American press. On the several occasions, when I have had the opportunity of comparing the two systems, I have found New York papers conspicuously behind ours in this department. This may be due to lesser competition or a less developed organization but more probably to the fact that the American public pay much less attention to sporting events than do our working classes.