In September 1942, photographer Marjory Collins walked into the New York Times building in Times Square and spent days documenting exactly how one of the world’s most powerful newspapers got made. The United States had been at war for less than a year, and the demand for accurate, fast news had never been greater. What Collins captured was a massive, carefully timed operation involving dozens of departments, hundreds of workers, and machinery running around the clock.
The process began in the wire room, where telegraphers sat at their stations receiving messages from Times correspondents stationed across the country and overseas. Two major services — Western Union and Postal Telegraph — fed a constant stream of dispatches into the building.
Wire services like the Associated Press also delivered dispatches directly to the newsroom. Every incoming report had to be copied quickly using mimeograph machines so multiple editors could receive the same information at the same time.
Copy boys ran the mimeographed sheets through slots in the wall to the newsroom, where they were sorted and sent to the right desks. The pace was relentless — dispatches flew out of the mimeograph machines so fast during deadline rushes that copies piled up on the floor.
The newsroom itself was divided into specialized desks. The foreign desk handled international stories, and editors there made real-time decisions about what to print and what to kill. Discarding a story was done physically — the editor impaled the copy on a metal spike, a move known as “spiking” a story.
The telegraph desk handled all U.S. news from outside New York City, while the bullpen — the central editorial hub — is where the managing editor and his deputies made the big calls on story placement and page layout.
Not all content came from wire services. Drama critic Brooks Atkinson wrote his theater reviews by hand. The paper also maintained a radio room where operators received short-wave transmissions from foreign correspondents, including one based in Switzerland. A separate operator monitored Axis propaganda broadcasts, tracking what enemy nations were claiming on air.
The Times also kept a department known as the “morgue” — a reference library of old clippings, dictionaries, and archived materials that reporters and editors used to verify facts and add context to stories. Tommy Bracken, a 51-year employee, ran the morgue and knew its contents better than anyone.
The art and photo departments worked in parallel with the news operation. Cartographers drew maps of the war in Europe using reference charts, while darkroom technicians prepared photographs for print by inspecting negatives before transferring them to zinc plates. The Times syndicated its photographs internationally, sending some by clipper plane to Europe every day.
Once edited copy reached the composing room, linotype operators typed each story into machines that cast the text as solid metal slugs — one line at a time. Those slugs were then arranged by hand into full pages. Make-up men assembled the page layouts on large flat stones, placing each line of type precisely according to the editor’s instructions.
A proof press printed test copies of each page so editors could check for errors before the final plate was cast. Completed pages were tracked on a timing board — as each page’s make-up was finished, the time was marked down. Page one was assembled last, right as the deadline closed in.
Completed page mats were sent down a chute to the stereotype room, where an Autoplate machine cast them as curved metal plates. Each plate was numbered for easy identification and loaded directly onto the rotary presses.
Paper reels weighing 1,608 pounds were transported from the reel room to the presses. Each reel contained enough paper for roughly 1,300 newspapers. Once the paper was threaded and the plates locked in, the presses started rolling. A pressman pulled copies from the first run and inspected each one for print defects before the full run continued.
Printed papers moved off the presses onto fast-moving conveyor belts, where cutting and folding machines processed them automatically. Every fiftieth copy was slanted sideways by the machine itself to make counting easier. Workers then bundled the papers and loaded them onto trucks for delivery across the city and beyond.
Between editions, pressmen returned to the reel room to rest before the next cycle began. The whole operation — from wire dispatch to bundled newspaper — repeated itself multiple times each day, every day, with wartime urgency driving every step.
