All the news that's fit to bury, printed through the night and read at the graveside.
How it is made
The newsroom keeps graveyard hours. Our correspondents file through the night, from
wherever they have most recently been thrown out of. The editor, who has not slept since
1982, spikes most of it. What survives goes to one of our columnists,
who writes it up in their own voice and finds it a photograph, and it is read again before
it is printed. Every story runs on the Newswire the moment it is.
Nothing is off limits, and nobody is spared.
House conventions
Mourning rules
Victorian mourning stationery wore a black border that narrowed as grief eased. Our
stories do the same: a heavy rule while they are fresh, a lighter one through the
week, a hairline after that.
The Morgue
Newspapers have always called their clippings library the morgue. Ours is the archive.
The dagger
† is the old printer's mark for a death. We end every story with one.
The Graveyard Shift
After nine at night the paper turns dark on its own, as the night desk takes over.
The switch in the menu bar overrides it either way.
Rubric red
Scribes and early printers inked headings and initials in red — rubrication, from
the Latin ruber. The word "rubric" comes from it. So does ours: the paper's
name, the capitals and the daggers are printed in a second colour, red.
The Dance of Death
In 1538 Hans Holbein published a series of woodcuts in which Death calls on every rank of
society — the Emperor, the Merchant, the Physician, the Judge — and treats them all exactly
alike. Five centuries on, it still punches up. Each of our desks has its own
plate in the same tradition, and its own period pigment.
Opinion Sepia — cuttlefish ink, shot in self-defence.
The Wake
The paper by email, every morning or on Sundays, and free. Sign up,
and the news is on the mat before the mourners are up. For the long evenings there is
the Parlour: quizzes, games and Madame Grimshaw's stars.