The world of news media has been revolutionised by digital media, but a recent piece in the Guardian about the changing role of the sub-editor evoked a long-lost world where writers filed copy on paper which was then sent in wire baskets to the sub-editors who were given story lengths and had to cut the story to the designated length. It would then be given a headline, which had to be written to a designated size and involved calculations to assess how many characters would fit. As Suzanne Warr writes, the edited copy then went to the next level: the revise sub. ‘When we started, the revise sub was slightly frightening,’ veteran Guardian sub Barry Johnson, now retired, told Kerr. ‘He’d been in Bomber Command and was rather abrupt, though kindly, and he’d sit there smoking his pipe. He’d glare at his travelling alarm clock and glare at the copy, puffing his pipe more as the evening went on. If he didn’t like a headline, he’d literally throw it back at you.’