JOURNALISTIC RESOURCE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2396, 11 January 1909, Page 2

JOURNALISTIC RESOURCE.

SOME NOTABLE EXAMPLES

There has been some little discussion in the “Daily News” of late concerning journalistic resourcefulness. An America newspaper- office found itself in trouble one morning because the engine had broken down, but the editor was a man of courage. He borrowed a friend’s motor-car and an ingenious engineer connected up the printing machinery with the sixty horse-power petrol engine. The same device was adopted by more than one newspaper in Paris, when a strike had 'deprived-the offices of both electric light and power. The “Daily News,” however, capped this story with an accouut of the resourcefulness of Mr. 4’. P. Ritzema, when he was editing the “Northern Daily Telegraph” at Blackburn. “It was a veteran newspaper man recently connected with this journal,” says the “Daily News,” “who once found himself faced by exactly the same difficulty when producing a paper m a certain northern town. , Motor-cars were not invented then ; but this man of resource sent round to the town clerk, whom he knew, and borrowed the municipal steam roller, knocked a hole in the wall of his works, connected up the "machinery with the engine, and went merrily to press.” This paragraph had a curious sequel. It provoked the “Northern Daily Guardian,” of Hartlepool, to declare that the “Daily News” had appropriated an incident in its own history. But it proved, on investigation, that the steam roller plan had occurred to more than one great mind. Air. Ritzema. had used it at Blackburn in 1888. The Hartlepool newspaper adopted it eleven years later. The “Guardian” had trouble with its engine and borrowed the steam roller belonging to the West Hartlepool municipality.. The steam roller whs placed in the street. A belt- was passed round the fly-wheel and passed through a window, which nad to be enlarged to admit it. It was another editor,- this time at Nottingham, who came to the rescue when the - fuel feed of a gas engine went wrong. He found a length of 'rubber tubing and carried one end to a street lamp outside the office, obtaining thus a sufficient supply of gas to enable work to proceed. ’