‘Shut Down the Presses as Soon as Possible’

Times Insider shares historic insights from The New York Times. In this piece, David W. Dunlap, a Metro reporter, looks back at some of The Times’s stop-press orders.

The first edition of next morning’s New York Times was roaring off the presses at 9:37 p.m. on Sunday, March 31, 1968, as President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed the nation on television.

We already knew what the story was: The president had decided to curtail bombing in Vietnam. Reporters at the White House had been given advance copies of the speech just before 8 p.m., and our correspondent Max Frankel had written the news that was leading the newspaper, under a three-column headline.

Larry Hauck, the assistant news editor in charge of the night operation, liked what he saw when a stack of copies, still warm and smelling of ink, was delivered to the third-floor newsroom from the basement pressroom. “Nice paper,” he said.

The next words, from someone watching the speech on TV, were: “My God!”

Contrary to anyone’s expectation, the incumbent Democratic president — elected four years earlier in a landslide before being beleaguered by a war that had fractured his party — was saying he would neither seek nor accept a nomination to run for another full term.

And so came Mr. Hauck’s moment, the one that editors dream about and dread, the one in which they pick up the phone and bark out that crisp, unmistakable, immemorial command:

“Shut down the presses as soon as possible and make sure none of the papers now being printed are distributed in the city.”

Hmm. Not much romance in that.

But that’s what Mr. Hauck said. (He allowed 50,000 copies of the first edition to be released from the pressroom in order to reach the planes, trains and long-haul trucks that were waiting to carry them across the country.)

A stop-press order, like the one given last Saturday morning when Muhammad Ali’s death was confirmed, is so rare that colleagues remember who made the calls, even if there isn’t much drama to the call itself.

David Geary, a former editor on the news desk, is credited with three press stops: on Sept. 3, 2005, to account for the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist; on May 1, 2011, when President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden; and on June 24, 2011, when the New York State Legislature passed, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed, a measure giving a legal standing to same-sex marriage.

By his own account, it took Mr. Geary those three times to work up the confidence needed simply to holler, “Stop the presses.”

Election night in 2000 was such a roller-coaster ride that two stop-press orders were given. Tom Jolly, now an associate masthead editor, described the scene in the newsroom at 2:15 on Wednesday morning when Times reporters learned that Vice President Al Gore was preparing to speak with supporters, presumably to concede the race to Gov. George W. Bush:

“The executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, ordered us to stop the presses to print a new headline, ‘Bush Appears to Defeat Gore,’ and a new story that began with the unequivocal lead: ‘George Walker Bush was elected the 43rd president of the United States yesterday by one of the tightest margins in history … ’ But moments after we sent the pages to the press room, we learned that Gore had been told to hold off on his concession speech because Florida was still in doubt. Joe stopped the presses again, backtracking to the headline that had been on the page most of the night, ‘Bush and Gore Vie for an Edge,’ and a new lead saying that the outcome of the race ‘seemed to balance on no more than a few thousand votes’ in Florida. It was the seventh version of A1 that went to the presses that night.”

The news desk editor who was responsible for calling the pressroom, Mr. Jolly said, was Bob Sheridan, an unflappable pro who brought a nearly affectless calm to the most frenzied situations.

On July 17, 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed as it took off from Kennedy International Airport. Jesse McKinley, then a news assistant, remembered Mr. Sheridan “picking up the phone and, like he was ordering the world’s worst pizza, practically whispering — without emotion, per Bob’s manner — ‘Stop the presses.’ ”

Mr. Sheridan wasn’t much more audible on May 19, 1994, when confronted with the news that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had died. As Mr. Jolly recalled:

“He simply picked up the phone and said in his quiet voice: ‘We’ve got to stop the presses. We just got word that Jackie Onassis is dead.’ When he hung up, I said: ‘Bob, that’s it? You don’t yell it? That’s so disappointing.’ ”