Show A PLEA FOR OPERATORS It has been the custom among newspaper news-paper men for years when they have failed in getting news to their papers from distant points or when they have been scooped on the Rialto Horatio by the other fellow on that blackmailing sheet to fire loads of abuse at the telegraph tele-graph operators on or near the scene of work and assure their managers that said operators were wholly to blame Since the days however when practical newspaper men after years in the harness har-ness themselves have come to control leading dailies this class of excuses is not so potent as of yore We clip the following from the Omaha Heralds bright correspondent Tennis touching the late yacht races to show how the operator is damned when the newspaperman newspaper-man should be the victim The yacht races made a lot of trouble for the reporters in the matter of getting off bulletins from Sandy Hook That isnt far from New York in miles but by telegraph its as distant as Chicago The night before the first trial race three reporters went down to the Hook put up at the operators house and by next morning had a mortgage on him The other men coming in the morn ing perceived an immediate dullness in the atmosphere and although they warmed things up with a good deal of emphatic language lan-guage they had no show there that day not even when they threatened to clean out the office by force of arms if their dispatches dis-patches were not sent The Associated was one of the journalistic institutions that was left out Of course when the next race came off there had been a change at the Sandy Hook office and dis datches went as they were filed according to the rules of the company The Associated Press did not propose to run any such risk however and when the first of the international interna-tional races took place they had a private arrangement by which a wire and an operator opera-tor were at their service so that while to all appearances the bulletins were going in with the rest and taking their chances in reality they were being ticked off over the special 1 wire ahead of everything else The regular newspaper correspondents dont know yet how it was that the Associated Press beat them so badly that day Few people have any idea of the amount of ingenuity that is sometimes involved even in these days of nearly perfect telegraphic tele-graphic facilities in getting information into newspaper offices in time for use At all important points the telegraph companies are careful to keep on duty men who are able to perform feats in the way of Rotting off press matter even to the taking of manuscript man-uscript that would have made Horace Oree leye compositors turn pale dividing it up among half a dozen operators and getting it into newspaper offices hundreds of miles away an intelligent consecutive story but fully half of the best news of the dnv hnn pens in at points not important and the special correspondents getting off a train just at evening in some small village a days journey from the city where somebody has had the bad taste to commit a murder or do some other interesting thing more likely than not finds at the station shanty a man in charge of the telegraph office who has never seen a dispatch longer than twenty words and who is benignantly and patron izingly ignorant of pretty much everything except that his regular time for closing comes in half an hour and he hasnt had any orders to keep open later than usual A dispatch addressed to the nearest district manager reading something like this I j shall have so many thousand words to send to such and each a paper tonight Operator t refuses to keep open and send it handed in with a tender of prepayment generally j I defeats the early movement The operator tf guesses hell keep open Once in a while he is green and sends the message The answer he gets back makes his hair stand on end and he will stay on duty till dooms day if the specials last that long Occasionally it is impossible impos-sible to get each a dispatch in before the closing hour and then the only thing to be done is to pay the operator This is not expensive They generally cost about 150 or 2 in country towns And the money is only invested at any rate for a statement of the case to the officials of the telegraph company brings back in thd coarse of a few months after the proper amount ofcred tape has beengone through aipolite little note from the company inclosing a check for the amount of the blackmail and the statement that it had been deducted from the salary of the operator Getting the men to stay however is only the smallest part of the labor of getting off a dispatch at one of these stations Nothing more appalling than the ignorance of these operators on any subject outside of the sending send-ing of dispatches about the running of trains can be imagined The only thing the correspondent cor-respondent can do is to hong over the instrument in-strument telling what every other word is and prayerfully hoping that he is not sending send-ing The ballot perpetuated the pare ogio where there was written The bullet penetrated pene-trated the peritonaeum It will be seen by the foregoing that the fellows who went down first and placed a mortgage on the operator were enterprising men knowing that the chances were limited they laid for said chances and got them They will never write about the obtuseness or ignorance of that particular operator but sure as death they will roast some other operator opera-tor who mortgages himself to some other correspondent Tennis would never talk that kind of stuff in the Nassau Street Press Club rooms for he knows the crowd would ring him down with chestnut gongs but he believes it ig good stuff for the general reader It is not The general reader should not be misled mis-led for the amusement of anybody and justice to the hardworked operators of the monopoly should stay the ruthless I quill of Tennis The writer knows I personally a hundred men many of whose names are bright marks in the journalistic profession who have climbed mountains in wildernesses swam rivers flagged belated trains jumped box cars footed it through the morrasses of Louisiana Lou-isiana and the jungles of Florida steamed hundreds of miles on either coast in winter or summer invaded mines factories jails and myriads of places in search of the elusive item of news braved death by assault and by sickness literally faced the devil in his den for news and they have none of them ever berated a telegraph operator The operator is hard worked at his regular business and the coming of the stray newspaper man adds to his labors He owes the newspaper nothing and his services are the property of the company He is frequently annoyed by some sprig of the profession classed among it as fresh and he would be more than human if he did not rebel at the airs and domineering manners of some who gain positions of trust on the great dailies All of the foregoing tends to prove that Tennis got badly scooped on the yacht races and that is why he writes so glibly against the wireponnder |