Practically every day on the socials, under the hashtag #BrokenTimes, I bring receipts to my claim that The New York Times is failing us and democracy. I do not wish to join in the cacophony from the Trumpists about “fake news.” To the contrary, I do this hoping to hold The Times to account and make it better. As we approach the critical midterm elections, here are just a few examples of The Times’ failures so far on one day — October 30, 2026.
In the lamentable tradition of The Times and #ButHerEmails, the paper has been harping this week on its story about two Dan Sullivans in the Alaska senatorial election. Its primary source for the supposed investigation of perfectly legal acts retracted all that she told The Times, but it went ahead with the story anyway. On this day, the Democrat, Mary Peltola, responds to its accusations and says she knew nothing about “tricking voters.” Look at the home-page block above — with a magnifying glass — and you can see how The Times played that: hidden as an also-ran heading under its live blog. By midday, even that small note had fallen off the home page, where earlier in the week the original story was emblazoned all the day long. So determined is The Times to deliver its hatchet job.
The Times looks at the world through Republican-colored glasses. You can see that on the home page and above in its coverage of the South Carolina senatorial race, covering it from the perspective of Darline Graham rather than that of the opponent that could pull off this upset, Dr. Annie Andrews.
That is even more the case in The Times’ coverage of my congressional district, NJ-7, where the paper devotes a long puff piece about disappearing nepo-Rep. Tom Kean Jr., even though they could not get an interview — or returned email — from him. The Times calls him “press-shy.” He’s also constituent-shy. His opponent, Rebecca Bennett, is not mentioned until the very end, after much ink about the “esteemed” Kean family’s history starting the nation, about Kean’s “grasp of policy and an instinct to work back channels, if not a mic”, and his “mild, under-the-radar manner.”
And through whose lens is The Times covering California’s gubernatorial race this day? Through that of the Republican, Steve Hilton.
In Michigan — as my cohost on our Breaking the News podcast, Julie Roginsky, said today — The Times is setting the Democrats up for a fight or fall by portraying Abdul El-Sayed as the standard-bearer for “the left’s potency heading into the next presidential contest.” This critical race isn’t critical enough, it has to represent something bigger: a trend.
The big story after election day will be whether elections still stand: whether the Republicans will undermine or refuse to accept the vote. This is where The Times fails us most profoundly: by refusing to recognize the dire gravity of democracy’s fall. Here, it covers the merely “unusual” election-year activity of the Justice Department. It’s far more than unusual. It is election interference, voter disenfranchisement, authoritarianism. But if The Times refuses to call lies lies, it is even more adverse to calling fascism fascism and reporting on it.
Instead, The Times leaves it to the alien oligarch in our midst, Elon Musk, to declare the risk to democracy if … [checks notes] … Democrats win. Who the hell decided that The Times should give such serious, indeed even-handed coverage of Mr. Musk’s “extensive rationale for his involvement to date” in attempting to buy elections? Editors like to think that their super power is what we call “news judgment.” That is terrible judgment.
The Times loves polls and predictions. I contend that prediction is not journalism; it does nothing to inform the electorate but could influence elections. And as for polls, I often quote the late Columbia Prof. James Carey, who cautioned that opinion polls preempt the public discourse they are intended to measure. I wrote about that in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
Now is prime season for polls. The day before, The Times had Nate Cohn putting forth four predictions for how the Congressional races could turn out, all signifying nothing. And today:
This would imply that the pollsters do not want to believe polls that do not show Trump winning.
The real issues that concern voters, the polls tell us, are corruption and prices. On this day, The Times acts as if it is representing the Little People by counting how many millionaires there are in the Senate. Well, if any of them own a home and are lucky enough to have a 401K these days, that might put them over the line to be called millionaires in an inflationary economy. I wonder how many editors at The Times are millionaires.
Let’s round out this day with The Times with another angle on the news: Melania Trump. It’s not enough that The Times has swallowed her propaganda whole, giving her credit over the Pope for a local cease fire in Ukraine. They wanted another excuse to repeat it over again, so they turned to the reliably cringe-inducing Vanessa Friedman to break the news that Melania’s new coat is not black and white but brown.
The republic may be teetering on the razor’s edge of fascism, but at least it’s comforting to know that she wasn’t wearing a tan suit.
And as I write this, The Times’ day is not yet done.
See also this very good video by journalist Jonathan Katz. We are singing in harmony, in a minor key.
At least one New York Times journalist — columnist Michelle Goldberg — has at last begun covering the real AI story: not the technology but the technologists and their cult of faux philosophies that lead them to claim Promethean powers to destroy humanity. With their self-fulfilling prophesies of extinction, the AI boys grab the attention of unwary media and policymakers while distracting from the real costs and dangers — and benefits — of the machines they make.
The calls of doom have been coming from inside the AI house, though Goldberg notes that coverage of them — which I will critique here — is “incomplete, because it doesn’t account for tech leaders’ messianic dreams.” In recent columns, another Times columnist, Georgetown computer science Professor Cal Newport, has begun to explore the AI boys’ insane philosophies. “This exaggerated grimness,” Newport writes, “makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies…. The time has come to push back.” He says their nihilistic doom trolling has to stop.
That’s a start. I wish their coverage would go deeper by citing the work of Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, who catalog the AI cult’s full range of creeds under the acronym TESCREAL — for Transhumanism, Extroprianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Nevermind the specific doctrines. What is worthy of your — and media’s and policymakers’ — attention is that Gebru and Torres show how all these beliefs have their roots in eugenics.
Goldberg does note that some of their plutocratic adherents quote fascists and Nietzsche. Their goal is to select Übermenschen as they play God, building mythical, supposedly conscious “artificial general intelligence” and “superintelligence;” transforming themselves into man-machines with chips in their heads; using AI to help them live forever; populating Mars and the universe beyond with their progeny; and claiming responsibility for the future, never mind today’s trivial concerns. These überwealthy zealots have the resources — technology, capital, celebrity— and access to power to pursue their fevered, fascist dreams.
That is scary shit. But that’s not the scary shit we see covered in news media.
Instead, news media lap up the AI overlords’ claims of suprahuman power. Right across The Times’ home page from Goldberg and Newport, editors regurgitate whole the doomsters’ pronouncements without bothering with basic reporting, finding other authorities who disagree. Where is bothsidesing when we need it?
First, journalists unquestioningly accept as gospel the doomers’ assertions that their creations are capable of such danger, while there are many who believe these claims are just a perverse form of macho marketing meant to demonstrate to investors how very powerful and valuable they are.
Second, this is classic regulatory capture: The “frontier” AI companies call for regulations that they will help lawmakers draft, which will raise the bar for entry into their market for the open and international startup competition we so badly need to challenge them.
Third, the doom scenarios seduce click-hungry media into giving them free publicity and that lures equally dupable politicians — Bernie Sanders and Ted Lieu leading the pack — to call for simplistic, instant solutions: namely unplug AI. Meanwhile, vestigial pro-business Republicans wait for Trump’s inscrutable instructions. See how The Times practically scolds pols for not panicking enough:
Out of all this arm-waving, either nothing will happen or Anthropic and OpenAI will succeed in blocking new competitors while getting ultrawealthy on their IPOs. And few pay attention to the real perils these technologies raise for the environment, labor, education, and culture.
There’s another critical risk: that we all lose the opportunity to develop and put to use these promising, often impressive technologies in medicine, science, carefully considered educational applications, and daily life. Such is always the peril of moral panic.
I am not an AI doomer, as you will surmise. Neither am I an AI accelerationist: “Damn the torpedoes, warp speed ahead.” Having studied the history of technologies related to media in my books, I recognize lessons from the past: that disruptive technologies, especially those related to speech, induce panic at first; that before long the public comes to harness new technologies; that the technologists and their power eventually fade into the background; and that, with fits and missteps, society figures out how to make good use of its machines. We did it with movable type, steam, electricity, and electronics, and I believe we’ll get there with the internet. We can figure out AI, too.
AI in its many flavors — large language models are just one limited instance — are proving to be amazing. In some areas — analysis of proteins, possibly theoretical math, perhaps medicine discovery, and certainly coding — they are surpassing human ability. But that by no means is any indication of either general or super intelligence. To me, AGI is just another abbreviation for BS. I hold that artificial general intelligence is a wasteful goal fueled by the hubris of the AI boys. As the sane AI pioneer Yann LeCun instructs, machines programmed and trained to perform specific tasks will be faster and cheaper to build — and control — than some fabled, all-powerful überbrain of Oz.
I believe we should understand what these technologies can and cannot do and cover them accordingly. That is why I cohost two podcasts — AI Inside and Intelligent Machines — to keep up on the news. This is also why I am editing a series for Bloomsbury Academic — Intelligence: AI & Humanity — to invite scholars and writers from the humanities and social sciences to this critical conversation, for they are not heard enough.
Our first book in the series will be by Rumman Chowdhury, an expert in AI ethics and governance. She will examine our definitions of intelligence over time. What fascinates me about AI’s entry into public discourse and culture is that its presence forces us to reexamine our own ideas of intelligence, creativity, art, learning, trust, labor, the firm, and even — in the case of the AI cultists who claim deific powers — religion. (See this relevant interview with Inken Prohl in Die Zeit: “With AI, we have created a religion.”)
Coverage of AI in mainstream media is consistently appalling. It too often accepts the PR of the AI boys — whether utopian or dystopian, accelerationist or doomster — without challenge, skepticism, or balance. When the AI boys talk about “AI safety,” journalists rarely exhibit the sophistication to ask whether that is safety in the common sense (environmental, educational, cultural) or in the AI cultists’ overblown sense (doom and extinction).
When we hear of episodes of supposed AI agent “swarms” going “rogue” and “hacking” into systems, journalists use scare words to pump up the drama by attributing malign motives to overgrown calculators. Worse, they give us incomplete reporting. They should be asking what the AI companies fail to tell us. In the case of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, we need to know what the company told its model to do before we can decide whether it disobeyed those instructions. We also deserve to know how OpenAI let its system go unmonitored for so long. Instead of just accepting the AI CEOs’ versions of the story, we need to demand greater transparency, and that will come only through tougher reporting.
Media’s anthropomorphism badly clouds the discussion. Let’s be very clear: AI does not think. It calculates. AI is not conscious or sentient. AI has no sense of meaning. It has no motive and no sense of right or wrong, thus it is not lying or cheating. If it breaks laws or norms, we likely should hold responsible those who programmed or instructed it.
We need journalists to do more rigorous and skeptical reporting, to study lessons from the history of technology, and to seek out scholars and experts rather than just taking the word of AI’s CEOs, VCs, and disaffected nerds. The end result is that policymakers and the public are ill-equipped to both use and judge these technologies.
And we are using them. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans aged 18–49 say they interact with AI at least once a day — even as they express growing unease unto antipathy toward the technology and the data centers it runs on. The South Korean government will provide AI access to all citizens for free: universal AI as a right. Artificial intelligence is here to stay; there is no turning it off. We deserve the right to have a voice in how AI is developed, governed, and used.
To do that, we require well-informed journalism. This is not that:
That story offers no credible scenario of extinction. It cites the fabled paper-clip hypothesis of the former Oxford philosopher of Effective Altruism, Nick Bostrom, who contended that a machine told to do nothing but make paper clips could monomaniacally make paper clips of us all. Oxford shut down Bostrom’s Elon-Musk-backed Future of Humanity Institute when old email of his was revealed to have said “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word. This is why when discussing the doomster beliefs of AI cultists, the context of eugenics matters. But no mention of that by The Journal
In that article, while fueling the “freakout” it purports to report on, The Journal waits until ten paragraphs in before labeling extinction prognostication a “fringe opinon.” At least it does that.
In this,The Times accepts AI companies’ excuses for why they can’t stop their AI from going rogue, while at the same time accepting their assertions that they can create AI that is “aligned” with human values.
Well, if you want to worry, here’s the real troubling news: This idea of AI alignment — of guardrails to prevent bad outcomes — is ultimately a fool’s errand, for there is no way for any AI company to predict and prevent every possible malign or accidentally harmful use of AI. That is the reality we need to be discussing.
Instead, in that headline, The Washington Post anoints Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and — gulp — Elon Musk as our “top AI leaders.” No, these are the profoundly self-interested CEOs of three companies selling AI, who are given free space to promote their own agendas without proper context. They share one interest: to pull the ladder up after them and make it more difficult for competition — especially Chinese AI companies and more importantly free and open models — to challenge them. Here, The Post is acting as their agent.
Can AI be dangerous? Of course, it can. AI has been used by Russia to guide autonomous drones to kill Ukrainians. Perhaps our greatest fear is that AI could be used to craft bioweapons. But The Timesconcedes that even with instructions, it’s tough to actually make them.
The more frightening truth — one that should be on our minds after this anniversary — is that in the wrong hands, any technology can be used as a weapon … even passenger jetliners. We have met the problem, and it is us.
I do see the need for wise policy around AI, including:
Demand for full transparency from AI companies. Congress would do well to sic expert staffers (not grandstanding pols) on the AI companies to dig into programmers’ and executives’ negligent behavior in cases such as the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident.
Support for open-weight models (the closest AI gets to open-source) to provide competition to OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. These frontier companies want to frighten policymakers into banning these upstarts, especially those from China. Do not fall for it.
Support for fundamental, frontier AI research in universities to provide more competition to the IPO-mad frontier companies and to have this work done under the ethical, open, and peer-reviewed standards of the academy. We could also use a modern-day Bell Labs with a public mission to do AI research.
Support study of AI and its impact and implications by scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
Are there alternatives sources for good coverage of AI? Not many. Here are a few: If you want to dig down into the rathole of the AI boys’ philosophies, there is no better place to start than Gebru and Torres’ TESCREAL work. If you want to follow the big, big money behind this movement and what it is building on college campuses and many acronymed institutes, follow the investigations of researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt. And for clear — though not simple — explanations of the recent scares over AI, I recommend Newport’s latest podcast, particularly this episode and this.
Perhaps journalism’s greatest folly is that it treats the self-serving heads of companies that make AI as experts and even intellectuals, though many of them left college early, which is why their frequent manifestos sound like the work of freeze-dried sophomores. News media need to seek out the expertise of historians, ethicists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, economists, and community leaders to help inform all of us about the opportunities and risks of the age we are entering.
Now twenty-five years after I must write of my regret.
All this time, I had convinced myself of the common belief that the trauma of 9/11 brought us together as a nation and showed us a model of what we could be.
That was myth. I was wrong.
After a decade of Trump, of American fascism, of my own profession’s — journalism’s — negligent failures in the face of it, how could I still believe that we are in any way better now than we were before? That the United States has twice elected an incompetent, ignorant, bigoted, dangerous, warmongering, authoritarian to the presidency is evidence that this nation has learned nothing and indeed fails to respect learning. That Germany — of all nations — can see one of its states grant an electoral landslide to right-wing extremists demonstrates that any lesson, no matter how profound, can be forgotten.
9/11 led to extremism in response to extremism. It elevated a fringe culture of conspiracy theorism to the core of right-wing politics and media. It enabled a security state built on constant suspicion and paranoia. It led to a sense of American victimhood and entitlement, muffling the empathy we should have for the suffering of other nations under attack. It made permissible an interchangeable American bigotry aimed at one group and then any group.
I do not mean to sound cynical. But to deny the cynicism that has taken root and spread in this nation in the last twenty-five years would itself be an act of cynicism.
If there is a way out of this, it is not through annual incantations of lost unity. It must be through fighting: fighting authoritarianism, ignorance, suspicion, bigotry, terrorism — domestic and foreign — and fascism. That requires that we — beginning with political leaders and journalists — first recognize these palls on the land so we may organize to oppose them. We must specify which institutions are under attack — democracy, education, equality, inclusion — before we can defend each.
My first emotion after surviving the attack on the World Trade Center was anger, not relief. In the flush of the moment, I at first titled the blog I started a few days after the attack “World War III;” before long, it was Buzzmachine. That was misplaced anger, anger that could be exploited.
Anger properly channeled is a powerful force. We who defend democracy must direct our anger at those who threaten it, at those who have exploited 9/11 to seize power. I am angry at institutions — universities, media companies, law firms, civil service — that fail to defend themselves against unjust attack. I am angry at my fellow journalists for succumbing to their reflexive tropes of imagined unity, objectivity, normalcy.
After 9/11, we asked when we would return to normal. In the midst of COVID, we asked the same question. But in truth, normalcy is nostalgic fraud: the belief that there is some better day to return to. If you are Black, Latino, an immigrant, disabled, LGBTQ, female, poor, or in any way disenfranchised, that day never existed. The past is nothing to fight for. What we must join together to fight for is a different and better future: progress.
Looking back, I see that 9/11 robbed me of dreams. It allowed the forces of the past — of so-called conservatism — to set their agenda of protection, exclusion, and reversion, instead of progress.
On that beautiful, clear, September day that I shall remember for the rest of my days I witnessed and survived horror. The specific aftermaths in my life — a heart condition, two cancers, PTSD, and burdens on my family — are nothing next to the loss and trauma so many others have experienced, bearing scars still. On that day and to this day I know how fortunate I am. But I am also angry at the progress and potential we have lost. I am angry at myself for not fighting hard enough to regain them.
The story of labor and the Linotype is unexpected in many aspects. For this Labor Day, I’ll share a bit on the subject from my book Hot Type. (Links to buy the hardback and audiobook versions and signed copies are here).
Printers waged their first strike against publishers in occupied New York in the winter of 1776. They came together to form what would become the International Typographical Union (ITU) in 1850.
All through the nineteenth century, a few hundred inventors tried to build the machine that would automate typesetters’ work. One might think, then, that they would follow in the paths of the Luddites and Captain Swing and destroy the contraptions. But those earlier protests were against feudal factories more than technology; the workers were not yet not organized into unions like the typesetters; and Swing’s followers ended up swinging from gallows. Besides, typesetters watched the experience of pressmen; with the introduction of steam-powered presses, their ranks shrank but then grew as publishing did.
More than the machine, typesetters feared the intrusion of women into composing rooms and forbade entry of black men — most notably Frederick Douglass’ son. (In Hot Type, I tell his story and that of Gussie Lewis Troup, who organized the first, regrettably short-lived women’s typographical union.) Typesetters were generally sanguine about the machine because so many of the 300 attempts at building one had failed.
Until the Linotype, the machine at the center of my book. On July 3, 1886, the first working Linotype invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler was hoisted up into the nonunion composing room of the New York Tribune, under the eye of its publisher, the villain of my tale, Whitelaw Reid. From Hot Type:
At the start of July 1886, a decade after he first met [his muse, James O.] Clephane, Mergenthaler supervised the installation of a Linotype in the New York Tribune composing room. “Through the Frankfort Street end of the composing room ran a huge flagpole,” that machine’s first operator, John T. Miller, recalled fifty years later, in a commemorative issue of the company newspaper, The Linotype News. “To that pole, that memorable afternoon in 1886, a block and tackle was attached. Nine stories below, in the street, was the first Linotype. It was completely boxed, and on top of it stood a man to guide it up through the network of telegraph wires. . . . As the man who made the dangerous ascent (I’m sorry I can’t remember his name, if I never knew it) threw one leg over the large window sill, he gave loud expression to his relief.” The composing room foreman gave that man thirty-five dollars for his perilous duty. “And soon Ottmar Mergenthaler and Charlie Letsch” — a nineteen-year-old assistant who had accompanied the machine from Baltimore — “had the Linotype in working order.”
The Tribune composing room was lined with hundreds of compositors’ typecases, which ran from one side of the building to the other. There were also three Burr machines, an unwieldy typesetting device that had survived multiple inventors, owners, bankruptcies, and names (it was later called the Empire). The Burrs composed and distributed type as [the machine Mark Twain backed] Paige’s Compositor did, a letter at a time. “The middle one of our three Burr machines had been shunted aside to make way for the new device,” Miller recounted. “Naturally, the arrival of the new and improved contraption made a big stir. All of us who could manage to, crowded about for a good look at it. Most of the hand men didn’t think much of it, and many said so. Even we Burr operators were a little skeptical.” The Burrs would soon be sold and four more Linotypes ordered.
The New York local of the ITU — known as Big Six — had a spy in Reid’s scab composing room. “‘The experiments were carried on in a partitioned-off end of the composing room floor, doors locked: entrance, except to pass-holders, forbidden,” J. W. Sullivan of Big Six recalled years later. “But one of № 6’s half dozen card men under cover on the then non-union Tribune got me a sketch of the machine with some of its type-faced slugs, explained its principles. . . . I could not rid myself of the conclusion that Gutenberg’s epoch-making invention of movable types had had its day.”
Here’s the surprising bit: The ITU did not forbid the machine. It embraced the machine, but under one condition.
The next year, the ITU dispatched “some of its most thoughtful and conservative members” to witness an “improved Linotype first-hand and report back. “It was found that this machine was capable of some excellent work, considered from a mechanical stand-point, and produced lines perfect in spacing and with a clear face, from which plates were made as readily as from type,” their report said. The delegation gathered data from twelve days’ work in one composing room in Brooklyn and another in Manhattan, where an experienced compositor was pitted against an expert typist. (The typist was a tad faster.)
The committee came away with a recommendation impressive for its foresight: “It is concluded that printers ought to stand ready to operate the machines, and that unions should in no way discourage their use, but should insist that their members be employed” to operate them. “It is not thought that there is anything apprehensive in the situation or that there is need of a panic in typographical circles.” They advised against “the foolish effort to stand in the way of mechanical improvement.”
And so, the typographers’ union made a bold and strategic decision not to reject the Linotype but to control it. On March 3, 1889, a newspaper publisher asked the union whether it would object to his introduction of a machine. “It is the sense of this union,” №6 resolved in reply, “where an employer desires to introduce typesetting machines the union should merely insist payment of the scale of the union and the employment of its members to do the work.” The national union followed suit, directing that “where typesetting machines are used, practical printers shall be employed to run them and also that subordinate unions shall regulate the scale of wages on such machines.” . . . .
The ITU came to recognize the inevitability of technology invading its sphere. “This is the day of the machine,” said a report to the union’s 1893 convention. “The machine is with us, and it behooves us as craftsmen to get closer together, en masse, and take care of it in a manner to show our appreciation of so important an invention and reap whatever benefits it may be possible for labor to derive from labor and dollar-saving machines. The web press is with the pressmen as the typesetting machine is with the compositor.”
It was a risk. By one accounting, the ITU lost 36,000 positions in short order, including older members who felt incapable of learning a new way to work. But with the new technology, media industries exploded.
“After 5 years the trade has about adjusted itself to normal conditions, and the membership of the printers’ union is to-day greater than its membership of compositors ever was,” the ITU’s Donnelly testified in 1900. “The policy adopted by the typographical union was not to oppose the machine, but to admit its success and make the best of it; to try and master it,” he explained. “The spirit that was manifested by the members was something of this kind: ‘Here is something that will take my bread and butter away from me and I must try and become its master.’ They endeavored to learn the machine as quickly as possible.”
One key to printers’ survival and success was that publishers chose not to pocket their machine dividends — a 66-percent saving in the cost of typesetting, with half the errors to boot. Instead, proprietors invested in more, bigger, and more competitive publications.
In my research, I was impressed to see federal commissions convened at the turn of the century to study the impact of new technologies on work and the economy. If only our current government were capable of such sane and sober study and analysis of AI’s entry into the workplace and culture; we need it.
There seems to be a lesson in the ITU’s actions: Rather than fighting and trying to forestall the inevitable arrival of new technology, it is better to take control of it. That worked well for the ITU for three-quarters of a century as it lobbied successfully for the eight-hour work day and drastically improved the working conditions — and health — of its members. The ITU — and particularly New York’s Big Six — became immensely powerful.
Until they weren’t. In the 1960s and ’70s, new technologies threatened: punched paper tape that could run a Linotype without an operator, like the robot it appeared to be; cold type (shining light through letters onto photographic paper to set text); computerized hyphenation and justification of text; computers in newsrooms, allowing publishers to “save keystrokes” and eliminate typesetting in composing rooms; and finally PostScript, which turned letters into shapes to be described to and displayed by computers and printers.
This time, the ITU tried fighting the technologies. A series of strikes over these issues killed six of nine New York newspapers — and eventually the union along with them.
The lessons the ITU and its leadership faced with these new technologies was different from the lessons learned with the Linotype. For all these fascinating stories, you’ll need to buy the book.
With the publication of my new book, Hot Type, I’m sharing brief excerpts to give you a sense of the stories in it. Mark Twain is the Zelig of the tale, reentering often, as if a tour guide. Here, he comes on stage as Samuel Clemens, a young printer’s devil working in his brother’s Hannibal newspaper before hitting the road as a tramp printer. This is my way to explain the job, the craft — the art, some would say — of setting type. Following this in the book is an account of the tremendous technological innovations in publishing — steam-powered presses, stereotyping, the telegraph — that Sam saw in this period, all of which will lead the way to the Linotype.But you won’t find that here. You’ll have to buy the book .
In 1847, at age eleven, a fatherless Samuel Clemens begged his mother to let him leave school to work. Two years later, after Sam’s teacher decamped Missouri to join the California Gold Rush, Jane Clemens relented and allowed her son to undertake an apprenticeship at Joseph Ament’s Missouri Courier in Hannibal. He worked as a printer’s devil — composing room dogsbody — for no pay, only food, board, education in the trade, and the promise of two suits. Sam slept on the floor of the office above Brittingham’s Drugstore and received just one suit, a too-large handme-down from the too-large publisher, which “gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent.”
After serving two years, Sam went to work in the Hannibal Journal, a paper bought and run by his brother Orion. It was a dreadful weekly blatt filled with endless transcripts of boring speeches, treacly serialized fiction, and random, useless items passing for news: an inch of snow in St. Louis the week before, a robbery a state away in Illinois, how many brooms orphans manufactured daily in Cincinnati (twenty dozen). In Sam Wheeler, Detective, Sam the author described a village paper that might as well have been his brother’s.
It was a wretchedly printed little sheet, being very vague and pale in spots, and in other spots so caked with ink as to be hardly decipherable. The first column was occupied by “Original Poetry” of the sappiest description. The next four were occupied by a selected story which was as sappy as the poetry. The remaining column of this first page was made up of short paragraphs of vapid, heart-breaking, infuriating rot entitled “Wit and Humor.” The other outside page was built wholly of advertisements: three columns consisted mainly of glorified quack-poisons . . . headed with blurred portraits of the assassins who invented the nostrums, and tailed with lying testimonials from people who had never existed; the two remaining columns were thrown into one, which sang the praises of “Bagley’s Celebrated One-Price Emporium” in riotous display-lines of forty-line pica shot full of shouting exclamation points.
The Clemenses were not noted for their business acumen. The boys’ father, John Marshall Clemens, failed at running multiple general stores. As will become clear in these pages, Sam would prove to be a disaster at business, saved from poverty and obscurity only by his talent as a writer and speaker. Brother Orion was the least proficient of the clan. Stumbling into the newspaper business when he worked as a printer in St. Louis, Orion returned to Hannibal to buy the Journal for $500 on credit, and he promptly cut the price of a subscription from $2 to $1 a year and reduced the price for advertising. “Thus,” said Sam, “he created one absolute and unassailable certainty — to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. The paper was a dead failure. It had to be that from the start.”
In the Hannibal Journal, Sam began to write in his rascally voice under the noms de plomb of Rambler and Epaminondas Adrastos Blab, not yet Twain. Once, when Orion was away, young Sam took the opportunity to write and print a news item, illustrated with a childish woodcut, mocking the editor of a rival newspaper, who had purportedly gone to the river to put an end to his lovesick misery. “The satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole Journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more,” reported Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine. Said Sam: “My literature attracted the town’s attention, but not its admiration.”
Mostly, Sam set type, fitting it in page forms, inking it, pressing dampened paper atop it. He was, according to Orion, good at the job, “as swift and as clean as a good journeyman.” Sam stood at the typecase with the text to publish in front of him and a composing stick in his left hand. With the practiced sixth sense compositors acquire, his right hand reached for the correct box from which to pluck the next letter, capitals in the upper case, the rest organized by frequency of use in the lower case — the biggest box for e. Light was supplied by windows in the day, at night by a candle stuck in the d box, dripping its tallow on the k box next to it.
This was not a task for the fumble-fingered. Each metal letter was small, less than an inch long and no thicker than a half-dollar. Sam’s finger felt for a notch molded into one side of a letter’s shaft to make sure it was positioned correctly. Then he added it to his composing stick with a clink. The letters were mirror images of how they would appear in print. As the line filled up, he needed to think ahead and decide whether to split the next word — compositors had to know rules of spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, and grammar. Once that was done, he calculated the spaces, thin or thick, needed between each word to evenly fill out — to justify — the line.
Typesetting, justifying, and correcting all the words in just the paragraph above could have taken an hour of Sam’s labor. Once the type was set, the compositor’s job was still not done, for after the sorts were used in the press and cleaned (in the stench of long-ago composing rooms, that was accomplished with lye and often urine), they had to be redistributed back into their proper nooks in the typecase for reuse. That was not so simple as it sounds, for one had to read each piece of type in mirror image, making sure not to confuse the d and b — minding, as they say, one’s p’s and q’s. At a big-city paper, that paragraph above might have earned Sam twenty-three cents. Orion promised to pay his brother $3.50 a week but “he never was able to pay me a penny as long as I was with him.”
On the press, Sam worked with a colleague. One of them inked the type laid out in a form on the bed of the press. The other placed a dampened sheet of paper in a holder called the tympan, folding down a protective frame called the frisket. He turned a winch called the rounce to move the form and paper under the press’ flat, horizontal platen. Pulling the press’ handle brought the platen down onto the paper and type, transferring ink and text. He then winched the bed back out. The paper came off the type with a kiss, a sticky smack, and they did it all again, as often as 250 times in an hour. The speed of that process determined the natural limit of a newspaper’s circulation: how often the pressmen could pull that lever in the time between the news being set in type and it becoming too stale to sell. The Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge’s Penny Magazine figured in 1833 that the maximum press run for a daily newspaper was 5,000; for a weekly magazine, 20,000. That ceiling on the scale and reach of media was about to explode. And all the skills Sam learned as a journeyman printer would eventually be rendered obsolete by a succession of new inventions….
