Dude, who even knows.
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Oh also if you’re like “what is up with how newspapers used to have all these tiny little quips like in @yesterdaysprint?”
Before compositing software, matching the printed length of stories to the physical length of columns of type was a skilled craft, and the compositors kept little short squibs like these on hand as shims to fill a bit of unused white space.
Using your staff’s idle thoughts for this – which could be prepared ahead of time and deployed as needed – was cheaper than subscribing to wire reports and having rewriters chop interesting ones down to fit fresh each day, as better-resourced papers did.
(This was the origin of the journalist in-joke tradition of the “bus plunge” story, where every report of a bus tumbling off a mountainside road anywhere in the world would be run at some length, using the verb “plunge”)
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Oh also if you're like "what is up with how newspapers used to have all these tiny little quips like in...