I love the opening description in this story of news in the 19th century, Ghosts of Newspaper Row:
“The reporters would pant up five flights of stairs to reach their dingy, dim newsrooms, where light eked through the dirt-cloaked windows and the green shades over the oil lamps were burned through with holes. They wended through hobbled tables piled high with papers, walked past cubbies so chaotically stuffed with scrolled proofs no outsider could guess the system. The reporters reeked of five-alarm smoke, or had coat pockets bulky with notes and a pistol from the front, or were tipsy from a gala ball, or dusty from a horse race. If they held important news in those notebooks, a copy boy would crowd by their elbow as they wrote, snatch the ink-wet sheets from their hands, and rush them off to the copyholder to “put them into metal.”
Great story about the work of a journalist. “Those reporters did not cherish the silly illusion that their names would echo through the ages,” writes Elizabeth Mitchell. “They skipped the stage of “I’ve never heard of him” to immediately become what might be valued forever: their words.”
