Twenty Million Dollars Spent Gathering News Yearly For N.Y. Herald - Tribune, Says Forrest

"Twenty million dollars are spent each year gathering news for the New York Herald-Tribune," said Wilbur S. Forrest, chief editorial writer of the Tribune, in an interview with the CRIMSON yesterday, "and there are 24,600 people all over the world who are working for the paper directly or indirectly.

"We receive over 13,000,000 words of foreign news in the course of a year, or enough to fill 51 ordinary 32 page, 8 column papers in which there are no ads. Only one half of this is printed, however, for if we used it all our paper would be as dry as the New York Times.

"You might be interested to know how we write our editorials. Every noon there is a round table meeting of the eight men on the editorial staff in which the news of the day is discussed. The man who has the best opinions on some subject in the judgment of the other editors is delegated to write an editorial which contains his own views modified by those of the other eight men. In this way the policies of the paper are sure to be upheld, and any questionable statements are voided.

"We have a great library here in the building which makes it possible to obtain information on almost any man in the United States. Our files contain the name of every person mentioned in the newspapers for the last twenty-five years. The clippings in which they are mentioned are also filed with the name, and thus we can get the low-down on almost anybody in a very few minutes.

"We also have a statistics man on the job at all times. He knows or can easily find figures on anything going on in New York. He gets a report on the amount of snow that has fallen every hour during a storm, and knows how much money is being spent in cleaning it up. He can tell you the amount of capital behind any bank, and knows the stock exchange quotations perfectly.

"Most of our news comes direct from our own sources. Other papers get things we miss, however, and this is called 'punk.' In the first editions of every day's paper some of this 'punk' is included to fill space. As other news comes in we discard it, until in the last three editions it is all thrown out.

"We have to have a lot of special reporters for the various sports, and there are 24 men on this board. There is one lady employed who does nothing but take care of the cross word puzzles, and she is better than Roget's Treasury of Words as a reference book."