Day city editor, Chicago Herald and Examiner · earliest documented carrier of the adage, 1918
Edwardson did not write this line. His desk is simply where it first surfaces in print. In November 1918 the New York trade weekly The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers reported a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, carrying what Quote Investigator ↗ calls the earliest strongly matching expression it has found. The item gave no attribution, and none has been established since — the placard was already repeating something the trade said to itself. Barry Popik, working the same ground, calls it flatly “an old newspaper saying of unknown authorship” ↗.