"Breaking" or Broken?
Submitted by Aaron Barlow on August 24, 2011 - 12:45In 1972, I spent a summer as a copyboy for The New York Times, working nightside in the newsroom. Often, after the Late City edition was out, there wouldn’t be that much to do, not unless the bells on the news-service printers at one end of the room started ringing. They alerted us that something significant had occurred, something important enough that a decision might be made to stop the presses for an update to the edition. This happened often: we had plane hijackings, the shooting of George Wallace, and a number of other events that (among other things) gained me valuable overtime when they were not resolved until the wee hours of the morning.