Word: copydesker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...made the Daily News, the late Captain Joe Patterson, demanded that his headline hunters make their heads "understandable, applicable and bright." The man who keeps them that way is tall (6 ft. 3 in.), red-mustached William Bernard Murphy, 53, copydesk chief. A paper like the Daily News is only as good as its copy desk, and the desk is as good as its chief, who must combine speed, accuracy, zeal, bad temper, and a quick eye on guard for double meanings...
...good eye is still enough to oversee the output of his 14 "rim men." They are all experts at trimming and polishing copy, as well as heading it up. They are not hampered by the shibboleths of most copy desks (Newsmen may end heads with prepositions). The News copydeskers are well-paid men by copydesk standards: they start at $110 a week and go up to $140, plus bonuses for prize heads...
Dartmouth had kicked him out for cutting chapel too often. He later found that the Columbia School of Journalism "had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A. & P." The "colorless, odorless and tasteless" Times fired Liebling from its copydesk for identifying an unidentified basketball referee as "Ignoto" ("unknown" in Italian). He quit his next job on the Providence Journal when the publisher fired a reporter to make room for the son of a local bigshot. (Liebling dedicates his book "to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism...
...dwelling house in the night time, with intent to commit a felony therein," and I in turn have been hammering it into the cubs. Now comes TIME and undoes a lot of hard work. Some of the newcomers have been waving the Dec. 30 Miscellany column under the copydesk's nose and pointing to the line about "burglars" tunneling into the Clayton (Okla.) State Bank. The persons who swiped those 33,300 pennies were thieves, yes; burglars, no. Tell 'em so, will...
...landing on the Oregonian for his second copydesk stretch, he got $45 a week, wrote Westerns for the pulp market on the side. After twelve years he was publisher, already deep in the job of restyling the stodgy Oregonian, pepping it up for a successful circulation battle with the Oregon Journal...