Stop the Presses!

We actually stopped the presses three times when I was working at the News-Sentinel: Once when Pope Pius died, once when President Kennedy was assassinated, and once when a banner headline contained a spelling error. This would have been a firing offense except that the headline written by a young copy editor had been read and passed by both the copy chief and the news editor (the original typed headline mysteriously disappeared.)

It was a matter of "I" before "E". The headline contained the words "Seize" and "Siege" ("I" before "E", and I still look both those words up in the dictionary before I write them.)

Stopping the presses in those days was expensive. The front page (it was usually the front page and the final edition which went for street sales) had to be recomposed, lead type and zinc photoplates changed or adjusted, then made once again into a cardboard mat into which metal curved to fit the presses would be poured to form a plate. Copies of the newspaper which were being replaced were discarded and printing began again, often with all the union printers on overtime.

I actually shouted "Stop the presses" myself at the Spokane Spokesman-Review when I was the only person left in the editorial room one Saturday afternoon and the first copy of the Sunday Women's Section hit my desk...with an engagement announcement for the publisher's daughter in which her name contained a typo.

The pressroom chief and I decided to blur the typo with a red-hot iron rod instead of trying to remake the page. Nothing was ever said about the tiny smear which appeared in the newspaper.

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle is the first edition to be jobbed out for printing instead of being printed at the Chronicle's own presses. The paper is five columns wide, about a half-inch narrower, with puzzles and comics now so small it is difficult to read some of the type. There are no wrinkles in the paper and the color pictures are perfectly registered.

Two hundred pressmen at the Chronicle have lost their jobs. "Well, where are they printing it?" Nicodemus asked. "Fremont?"

He thought he was kidding. The San Francisco Chronicle is now printed in Fremont.

(Engraving, Johannes Gutenberg, 1398-1468, inventor of the mechanical printing press.)