The Metropolitan Newspaper (New York City)

the hour comes when, having drained every source of information, they must make for the nearest telegraph office, which is probably at Long Branch, and a race takes place among the representatives of different papers for precedence in the use of the wire. The competition involves strategy, but they all reach the office within a few minutes of each other, and settle down to the writing up of their accounts, handing the operator page by page as it is completed. An essential quality in all journalists, and especially in correspondents or reporters, is facility of perception, decision, and expression, and if they are without it in the beginning of their careers, the recurrence of the necessity for it develops it. A critic may find many grammatical lapses and inelegancies of language in the printed Descriptions of those tired-out men who are scribbling, with empty stomachs, in all sorts of uncomfortable positions, to the nervous tick-ticking of the busy Morse instrument which is putting electricity into their words under the dark waters of the New York Bay. It is a very easy thing to find fault with them, and it may be very true that their style is artificial AND their diction either impoverished or redundant; but it is outrageously unfair to take no account of the pressure under which they work out their fluent productions, to say nothing further of the unfavorableness of their condition to literary composition. Their note-books have been reduced to a pulp in the rain and spray, amid the pencil marks are all blurred; the notes themselves are disconnected and meagre, having been gathered hurriedly from hurried people; but out of the chaos, without having time for revision, the Froissart of his day, as some one calls the reporter, weaves a continuous, lucid, graphic narrative of the wreck, and not of the wreck alone, but also of the voyage preceding it, incorporating a full abstract of the log, and conversations with the captain, pilot, officers, crew, and passengers, and furbishing the mosaic of detail with a strong picturesqueness of epithet that would not be unworthy of a much greater literary artist. Each man has written between two and three columns before midnight, and lest the intellectual reader fails to understand how great an achievement this is, we advise him to test the matter by putting himself under a cold shower-bath, and then trying to compose, in his wet clothes, an acceptable three-page article for this Magazine within four hours.

The telegraphic dispatches are supplemented by a mass of other facts which have been gathered in time city, such as a history and description of the steamer, the value of her cargo, the amount of the insurance; and when the paper appears in the morning the account of the disaster covers nearly a whole page, and is a marvel of completeness.

In reporting large meetings the number of stenographers on the staff is increased. Let us suppose, for example, that a political demonstration is to be made at the Cooper Union, and that the Tribune is arranging to report it. Many of the speeches are to be published in full, and altogether the proceedings will fill from twenty-five to thirty columns of the next day's paper. Four or five members of the permanent staff can report verbatim, amid all the rest can make good synopses, which in most instances are sufficient. Some of the principal speakers have written their orations, and greatly help the city editors by lending their manuscripts in advance, which are put into type, but others have made no preparation, and the usual corps of short-hand men is augmented by recruits drafted for the occasion from the law-reporting firms of the city. In reality five or six meetings are to be held,