Newsrooms ran on sprinting teenagers: reporters shouted 'Copy!' and a copy boy carried the typed take to the editor, the wire desk or the composing room, learning the trade by osmosis. It was journalism's classic apprenticeship — publishers and star reporters liked to boast of having started as one. Computer terminals ended the errand and, with it, the trade's most democratic side door.
Copy boy已不复存在。这里整理是什么消灭了它，以及哪个职业接手了那份工作。
1800 – 1920
The mass press
Steam presses and the penny papers — starting with Benjamin Day's New York Sun in 1833 — made news cheap enough for everyone, and the telegraph made it fast, giving the trade the inverted pyramid and the wire agencies: Havas, AP, Reuters. Circulation wars bred the sensational yellow journalism of Pulitzer and Hearst, but also the interview, the foreign correspondent, the muckrakers — Ida Tarbell's Standard Oil series helped break up the trust in 1911 — and the first journalism schools at Missouri (1908) and Columbia (1912).
当时还发生了什么
1851
Reuter wires the news
Paul Julius Reuter — who a year earlier bridged a gap in the telegraph line with carrier pigeons flown between Aachen and Brussels — opens a telegraph office beside the London Stock Exchange. His agency, alongside Havas in Paris (1835) and Wolff in Berlin, turns news into a wired, traded global commodity.
1887
Nellie Bly goes inside
For Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, 23-year-old Nellie Bly feigns insanity to get committed to the Blackwell's Island asylum and spends ten days inside. Ten Days in a Mad-House triggers a grand jury investigation, budget increases follow, and undercover investigation becomes a repeatable journalistic method.
1945
Burchett reaches Hiroshima
Slipping away from the official Japanese-surrender coverage, Australian correspondent Wilfred Burchett rides trains alone to Hiroshima and types the first eyewitness account of radiation sickness, published in the Daily Express on 5 September under the words 'I write this as a warning to the world' — while occupation officials deny any such illness exists.
1971
The Pentagon Papers
Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaks a secret 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times. When the Nixon administration wins an injunction, the US Supreme Court rules 6–3 within weeks, in New York Times Co. v. United States, that the government cannot restrain publication — the modern high-water mark of press freedom.
那份工作如今在哪里
The witness who finds out what is happening and tells the public — from Rome's Acta Diurna to the Panama Papers, still asking questions power would rather skip.
📰 Journalist →