The newsroom rush of old

The New York Journal American newsroom typified its time: crowded, messy and organized—like the floor of a factory—to get the news out as quickly as possible in five afternoon editions a day.

Those were the days. Michael Shapiro in the March 2011 issue of Smithsonian magazine paints a picture of newspapers of bygone days. Even then–speed was important. We are posting a big part of the story, but you wil want to click on the headline to read it all.

By Michael Shapiro
No image brings a tear to the eye of even the crustiest ink-on-paper romantic like a yellowing photograph of the city room of a deceased newspaper. The men in this photograph, circa 1950, are putting out the New York Journal-American, which was born in 1937. The Journal-American was once the city’s most widely read afternoon newspaper—yes, afternoon paper, a once-grand tradition of American journalism that has gone the way of the Linotype machine, the gluepot and the spike onto which editors would stick stories they deemed unworthy of publication.

Its newsroom was typical of the time. The furnishings look as if they had been plucked from a garage sale—scarred wooden desks, manual typewriters perched on rolling stands, hard-backed chairs. The congestion borders on the claustrophobic; note the proximity of one man’s cigarette to another man’s ear. Everyone sits within shouting distance, which was imperative, considering the ambient din—ringing phones, typewriter keys, calls for the copy boys. This was a factory floor. The man who manned the telephones—there were few women on the staff—began his shift by wiping blown-in soot off the desks.

“It wasn’t a place for comfort,” said Richard Piperno in an interview before he died in January at age 88. He started there as a copy boy in 1940 and stayed 26 years. “It was a place for work.”

The photograph captures the city desk, the heart of the newsroom, with its editors facing off at the center and the copy editors arrayed around their horseshoe of a communal desk—the “rim”—to the right. It is not surprising that they are leaning forward, in various states of enterprise. The Journal-American put out five editions a day, plus extras for big stories, from its home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In a city with seven daily newspapers, speed was a matter of survival.

[Thanks to Charlie Buffum for calling this to our attention]