The front page of the New York Times on April 16, 1912, tells the story of the Titanic’s sinking in the north Atlantic.

NEW YORK - A listless late shift dragged on that night in the newsroom of the Associated Press and, across town, at The New York Times.

Feet up on the AP city desk, an editor named Charles Crane read an H.G. Wells novel to while away the news-free night. “Telegraph instruments clicked desultorily,’’ he said later, “and occasionally one could hear the heartbeat of the clocks.’’

At The Times, the managing editor, Carr Van Anda, had returned from his usual late supper to an office where a forgettable story about a political feud was being readied for the front page. A copy boy dozed.

In the midst of this somnolence at a little after midnight on April 15, 1912, no one knew that, 1,000 miles away, the “story of the century’’ was breaking - news that would change so many things, including news coverage itself.

At that moment, off the coast of Newfoundland, the Titanic was two hours from sinking.

For more than an hour after striking an iceberg on April 14, the great ocean liner had been sending out distress signals. “CQD, CQD,’’ (Come Quick Danger) the coded Morse message repeated, then the now more familiar “SOS.’’

The urgent calls were picked up by other ships - some of which turned toward the Titanic’s reported location for rescue - and the signals reached onshore receiving stations of the relatively new Marconi wireless radio system.

In no time, the electrifying words reached New York. In the AP newsroom, Crane’s yawn became a gasp when a colleague burst in from an outer office waving a wire message from Canada: “Reported Titanic struck iceberg.’’

Instantly, editors started contacting coastal receiving stations to glean whatever they knew, phoned the Titanic’s owners, cabled London for a list of passengers - who might now be doomed.

“We put out a ‘flash’ and the bare report of the crash,’’ Crane recalled years later in a recollection now kept in the AP Corporate Archive.

At The Times, the now wide-awake copy boy stood by as Van Anda absorbed the one-paragraph wire dispatch:

CAPE RACE, Newfoundland, Sunday Night, April 14 (AP) - At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship Titanic called ‘CQD’ to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.

The Times’ managing editor fired off assignments and began composing a new front page, trying to make sense of the silence that, according to wire updates, had followed the repeated distress calls.

Editors of many other papers would respond by “playing the story safe by printing the bulletins and writing stories that indicated that no great harm could come to the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. Not Van Anda,’’ wrote Meyer Berger in a history of The Times. “Cold reasoning told him she was gone. Paralyzing as the thought was, he acted on it.’’

The great ship’s fate wouldn’t be confirmed for many hours. But the Times city edition headlines anticipated the worst:

New Liner Titanic Hits an Iceberg Sinking by the Bow at Midnight Women Put Off in Lifeboats Last Wireless at 12:27 a.m. Blurred

The story became a turning point for The New York Times. Its coverage set it on course to “secure claim to a position of preeminence . . . among American newspapers that it would never relinquish,’’ wrote Daniel Allen Butler in his history, “Unsinkable: The Full Story of RMS Titanic.’’ 

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Broadcast news, too, got a strong push with this story. David Sarnoff, a young Marconi operator, made a name for himself with days of nonstop updates from a storefront window in New York, drawing crowds so large the police had to keep order. It was the start of a career that saw Sarnoff become the long-serving head of NBC.

The Titanic went down at a time when wireless, a technology that would become ubiquitous, was just taking hold - comparable to our adjustment today to Twitter and the like.

As the stricken ship’s messages were picked up, sometimes by amateurs with Marconi receivers, “you’d get these wireless operators that knew reporters and editors at newspapers, and they said, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’ ’’ historian Butler said in an interview. “This was very much a social network - they were using dots and dashes rather than images over an LCD screen.’’

And sometimes, the fragments of news, traveling lightning fast, got garbled.

That apparently explains some reports of the ship being towed to Halifax with everyone safe. Amid the wireless chatter crackling across the airwaves, someone asked about the Titanic passengers’ safety - and the response somehow got confused with a message that another vessel was safely under tow. Butler traced the mix-up to “two fragments picked up by a wireless station in Massachusetts.’’

At first, reporters simply tried to clarify the “what’’ - what had happened 400 miles off the Newfoundland coast.

The Titanic’s owners, the White Star Line, contributed to the early, contradictory reporting with their silence or misleading statements. Rumors spread, along with hopeful speculation. Finally, an emotional White Star executive, Phillip A.S. Franklin, addressed the press.

He later described the scene: “I got off the first line and a half, where it said, ‘The Titanic sank at 2 o’clock a.m.,’ and there was not a reporter left in the room - they were so anxious to get out to telephone the news.’’

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