This has resulted in a specialization of reporters--one man runs for the news and another man writes it.

Some of the runners never come to the office.

They receive their assignments by telephone, and their salaries by mail.

There are even a few who are allowed to telephone their news directly to a swift linotype operator, who clicks it into type on his machine, without the scratch of a pencil.
This, of course, is the ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarely possible.
A paper of the first class, such as The New York World, has now an outfit of twenty trunk lines and eighty telephones.

Its outgoing calls are two hundred thousand a year and its incoming calls three hundred thousand, which means that for every morning, evening, or Sunday edition, there has been an average of seven hundred and fifty messages.
The ordinary newspaper in a small town cannot afford such a service, but recently the United Press has originated a cooperative method.