Originally titled 'The Newspaper Story', location shooting took place both in the newsroom and the printing plant of The New York Daily News, with real pressmen playing themselves. This was augmented by an 'almost letter-perfect' reproduction of a newsroom on a Hollywood soundstage.
The story is based on the closing of the New York Sun, founded by Benjamin H. Day, in 1950. The Sun was sold to the Scripps Howard chain and absorbed into the "World-Telegram".
In order to get the feel of what it would be like to work for real newspaper, Humphrey Bogart hung out at the city room of the New York Daily News.
During the first day of shooting, star Humphrey Bogart admitted to friend and writer/director Richard Brooks that he had been drinking until late in the morning and had not learned his lines. Earlier in the day, while he had been difficult on the set and resistant to saying his lines (ones he never knew), veteran Ethel Barrymore pushed him to just get on with it, explaining that "The Swiss have no navy." In other words, like actors, they are powerless.