KryTane^an Vocati ooal L\bra.'~(-i 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 O^, 1^ 
 
 ' '00
 
 VOCATIONAL SERIES 
 
 THE NEWSPAPERMAN
 
 VOCATIONAL SERIES 
 
 THE TEACHER By Francis B. Pearson 
 
 THE ENGINEER By John Hays Hammond 
 
 THE NEWSPAPERMAN By Talcott Williams 
 
 THE MINISTRY By Charles Lewis Slattery 
 
 THE ADVERTISING MAN 
 
 By Earnest Elmo Calkins 
 
 THE PHYSICIAN By J. M. T. Finney 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
 
 VOCATIONAL SERIES 
 
 THE 
 NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 BY 
 
 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 
 
 DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, ENDOWED BY JOSEPH 
 PULITZER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, I9I2-I9I9 
 EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1930
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 
 ^9^ 
 
 TO 
 
 S. W. R. W. 
 
 FOR A SPAN HERSELF A WORKING NEWSPAPER- 
 WOMAN, TO WHOSE CARE AND INSPIRATION I 
 OWE ALL I HAVE DONE AS A NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 G78622
 
 So thou, O son of man, I have set thee 
 a watchman unto the House of Israel. 
 
 — ^Ezekiel 33 : 7.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Choice of the Calling . 
 
 II. The Appointed Task, Theory . 
 
 III. The Appointed Task, Practice 
 
 IV. The Personal Equipment . 
 V. Letters and the Newspaper 
 
 VI. Newspaper English . 
 
 VII. Professional Training . 
 
 VIII. Pay and Pecuniary Reward 
 
 IX. The Competition of "Public- 
 
 ity 
 
 X. Differing Aims and Tasks 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 19 
 
 45 
 69 
 81 
 
 93 
 114 
 
 145 
 
 177 
 1 83 
 
 Index 
 
 205
 
 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE CALLING 
 
 The man or woman who turns for em- 
 ployment or a life's labor to the newspaper 
 faces first the conditioning fact that he 
 cannot win without a special and particular 
 equipment not needed in other callings. 
 This is equally true of all periodicals, the 
 daily, the weekly, or the monthly, to journal- 
 ism in any of its five forms of article, story, 
 news, comment, and paid publicity. Any 
 man who has health, strength, physical and 
 mental, average ability, industry, and the 
 untiring will, can garner a fair harvest in 
 divinity, law, medicine, engineering, or busi- 
 ness. The top may not be his, but a fair, 
 commodious middle can be won in which 
 and on which he can live in comfort all his 
 days and leave a shapely tombstone in a 
 lot, with room for a growing and surviving 
 family. 
 
 Not so in journalism. For a livelihood 
 in this calling, a something, known to the
 
 2 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 newspaperman, not easily defined even by 
 him, is inexorably demanded. A man may 
 have all the desiderata just named and be 
 able also to write, and still lack that one 
 thing needful which separates the Martha 
 of the commonplace life from the Mary who 
 wanted the last news on this world or the 
 next and did not care whether the dishes 
 of the last meal were washed and the food 
 of the next meal cooked. 
 
 The newspaperman, the journalist, re- 
 porter, editor, critic, publicity man, adver- 
 tiser, publisher, or whatever name is given 
 to the calling the newsman pursues under 
 these various names and titles, each and all 
 has to remember that journalism is one of 
 the arts of expression. An ill-favored art 
 it may be, but mine own, and none the less 
 so, because those who enter it take that 
 which no man else will. Being an art and 
 not a profession, many are called and few 
 are chosen. 
 
 There are tenfold more men In the various 
 paths of the engineer than seek the news- 
 paper. Lawyers are thrice as numerous. 
 Fourfold greater is the number of those who 
 practise medicine or stand in the pulpit than
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 3 
 
 of those who turn life into copy. The 
 number is smaller than in other recognized 
 callings, and, outside of journalism itself, the 
 family council that sits on the boy's future, 
 or a girl's, usually discourages this path as 
 dubious, amorphous — not as yet a profession 
 which law or custom ranks with the best. 
 The newspaper family looks forw'ard more 
 hopefully to this life task. If it does not, 
 the boy who has a journalist for a father is 
 very apt to tread in his father's footsteps, 
 however his father may forbid and forefend. 
 So of all the arts. Each has a hazard 
 and a handicap not known to any of the 
 callings longer practised, better known, 
 more systematically studied. Simple is the 
 reason. A profession has its defined field, 
 its established preparation, its ordered en- 
 trance, regulated by statute or prescription. 
 He who enters it, follows rules and needs a 
 definite body of knowledge. If the clergy 
 faces no requirements established by law 
 and enforced by opinion as well as the 
 courts, the road to the ministry is hedged 
 on either side by the practice, custom, prece- 
 dent, and regulation of great religious com- 
 munions whose action has all the force of
 
 4 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 statutory provisions. To each of these 
 caUings there are metes and bounds. 
 
 JournaHsm is an unfenced field. The 
 man who enters it faces all the chances and 
 opportunities of the future and the manifold 
 accidents of the arts. A man may enter it 
 late in life, or, if he enters it early, may find 
 that success in some other field, some adven- 
 ture, achievement, public acclaim, or the 
 sudden discovery of a special gift may carry 
 a new man to post or position over the head 
 of men laboring for years on newspaper or 
 periodical. Less and less do these sudden 
 entrances to the high places of the news- 
 paperman's calling prove successful, but 
 they remain and will remain to the end a 
 possible competition to be weighed, consid- 
 ered, and reckoned with in forecasting the 
 future. 
 
 In an art this is inevitable. The stage, 
 dramatic and lyric, is perhaps the only hu- 
 man calling in which no man or woman has 
 won a conspicuous post after forty-five, very 
 infrequently after forty, not often after 
 thirty, and the greater figures have begun 
 before twenty. Of painting, sculpture, and 
 verse, it is equally true that they flower and
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 5 
 
 fruit in adolescence, and the gleanings of the 
 harvest never equal the early reaping. But 
 taking in all the arts together, for all those 
 in which the technic of form is the very 
 life-blood, the conditioning factor of its ex- 
 istence, as in acting, youth is indispensable. 
 As the arts diminish in technic, the vis6 
 of youth on the passport of success is of less 
 importance. The earlier a man enters a 
 newspaper office the better for him; but the 
 open door of achievement is open at least to 
 thirty, so multifarious are the demands of 
 the newspaper, so many are the paths of 
 journalism, so wide is the net of publicity 
 thrown that a win is possible and has been 
 garnered in all the decades of life. 
 
 This gives span for delay and for longer 
 preparation, but it also makes it more diffi- 
 cult for the individual to decide, and he 
 must decide, and none other, whether he 
 has the special aptitude which the news- 
 paperman needs. This is vitally necessary. 
 A misfit is not comfortable in the court- 
 room, the church, or the hospital; but it is 
 not as much of a hell as work in a newspaper 
 office to the man who has gone just far 
 enough to know that he is not fit, and too
 
 6 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 far easily to retrace his steps. Thiers said 
 that the newspaper was the best of calHngs 
 to the man who left it and used it as a step- 
 ping-stone to a career. The American city 
 is thronged in all careers with men who 
 learned life as reporters and used its oppor- 
 tunities to enter another calling; but the 
 years under thirty are too precious for ex- 
 periment. Life is no laboratory, with the 
 shelves full of reagents and open to experi- 
 ment at all hours. 
 
 No question is asked so often by seekers 
 after advice on entering journalism as to 
 whether a postulant has this special ability 
 needed by the worker in the newspaper and 
 the applied literature of the magazine. No 
 one knows or can tell. If your path has led 
 you to look over the student work of the 
 pen, pencil, chalk, and brush, or of the mod- 
 elling stick, you are perfectly familiar with 
 the sudden stiffening shock, akin to the rigid 
 pose of the pointer from nose to tail-tip 
 when he picks up scent, which comes to you 
 when the real thing, pictile or fictile, strikes 
 you. The work of infant prodigies in draw- 
 ing has gone past you for weeks, a tedious 
 procession of dwarfed and sterile shoots
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 7 
 
 born to see no fruitage, and suddenly you 
 rip open another envelope and, spread on 
 your desk, are the uncouth lines of genius. 
 Here is genius, though the material may be 
 no more than cats cut out of white paper 
 en silhouette. Cats front, ears up; cats 
 couchant; cats stretching one leg out be- 
 hind; cats with tails mast-high above two 
 ears, the wedge-shaped front, two perpen- 
 dicular legs, and naught more. You know 
 you will see the initials (C. D. G.) before 
 you in childish print through a long future. 
 So in the early work of the first semester of 
 an art school you look vacantly over the 
 array of casts misdrawn and shading mur- 
 dered, and with a start you see one drawing 
 that has what you could neither describe nor 
 define but know an original artist is before 
 you. It was thus on a wailful of sketches 
 of Market Street, Philadelphia, on a rainy 
 day, that I first saw the work of Robert 
 Henri. 
 
 But this is not possible, nor is it the privi- 
 lege of the man who is trying to see in a 
 youth, shy or de-shyed, the possible reporter 
 of the future. The call of the cub of the 
 newspaper jungle is not so immediate as
 
 8 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 that of the artist. It is often wholly unrec- 
 ognizable. This is because the cry of the 
 pack is not so definite, so idiosyncratic. 
 The capacity to write is a mere tool to the 
 newspaperman. He may write very ill and 
 still be a superb newspaperman. Every 
 journalist of experience has known men who 
 could not compose and only wrote halting, 
 monosyllabic, mechanical sentences, who 
 were excellent reporters. This is so far rec- 
 ognized that the last differentiation in news- 
 paper work in large cities is the division of 
 the staff between the reporter who goes out, 
 gets the facts, and telephones his summary 
 to the "write-up" man, who proceeds to 
 clothe the bare bones of the searcher with 
 the garniture of style, sentiment, and "hu- 
 man interest." This decreases accuracy 
 and, ordinarily, increases the interest of the 
 reader. At least this is assumed, but there 
 are enough newspapers with large circula- 
 tions and large profits who will none of this 
 inevitable inaccuracy, to show that the 
 reader does not always prefer varnished 
 truth. This subdivision of labors is almost 
 precisely similar to the respective tasks of 
 solicitor and barrister in an English civil
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 9 
 
 suit. The facts are all gathered by the 
 solicitor and most of the law. The local 
 color, if I may use this term of the august 
 process of an English court, is freely applied 
 by the bewigged barrister. The American 
 lawyer would not accept this for an instant, 
 though every one with a wide acquaintance 
 at the bar knows many firms whose strength 
 lies in this division of legal roles between its 
 members. On the other hand, the English 
 newspaper would not, for an instant, accept 
 the "write-up" man, and presents its local 
 news close written to a mechanic mould. 
 The American wants form in his newspaper 
 as in life and so much else of his days, and 
 in his buildings. 
 
 This runs through the whole field of the 
 American newspaper, and is a national bent. 
 A dramatic criticism must first of all be 
 good reading, and some critics schooled in 
 this path unconsciously sacrifice accuracy to 
 epigram, and the merits of a presentation to 
 a taking description. Politics, finance, offi- 
 cial acts, and the entire round of serious re- 
 ports catch the same habit because, in spite 
 of the great and frequent success of sober 
 accuracy, those who are seeking circulation
 
 10 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 are always tempted to a primrose path of 
 dalliance with veredicity, instead of win- 
 ning that shyest of all damsels, the truth, 
 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 
 
 Yet a publisher whose utmost stretch of 
 written utterance is the business letter, 
 "Yours of loth Inst, rec'd and contents 
 noted. Would say in answer," and so on, 
 comes not infrequently to be recognized and 
 accepted by an entire newspaper ofhce as 
 having the best nose for news, the best eye 
 for heads, and the best choice for first-page 
 "stories" of any man in the building. A 
 newspaper owner in a big city has this gift, 
 and none other of the usual head furniture 
 of the newspaperman; but this is enough 
 to explain his position and assure his suc- 
 cess. 
 
 From these various angles there gradually 
 emerges what the newspaper demands as 
 inexorable, indispensable newspaper work 
 from the man or woman who seeks it. 
 Knowledge is needed. Nothing a newspaper- 
 man knows but is useful to him. However 
 strange, however distant, however far-flung 
 the information may be, the hour is sure to 
 strike when that group of facts will be
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING ii 
 
 wanted In order to gather, to express, to 
 edit, to present or to comment upon the 
 news of the hour. Writing is most desir- 
 able, though not indispensable, but a man's 
 path is smoothed, his chances are improved, 
 his future is assured if he has the supreme 
 and precious gift of style. It may be lim- 
 pid, effective, arousing, inspiring, appealing, 
 picturesque, persuasive, elevated, humor- 
 ous, any or all these. Each has its place in 
 the newspaper. No labor is too great and 
 no toil misplaced which secures this. Most 
 precious of all in the newspaper is a style 
 qua style, like that of Defoe, Franklin, Cob- 
 bett, Dana, or Brisbane — nervous, close- 
 written, iterant, corrosive. But a news- 
 paper career may be won without style. 
 
 The essence of the newspaper is that it 
 attracts, gathers, and keeps its audience, its 
 circulation. So of any periodical. At this 
 point, and this alone, it stands apart from all 
 else in the year's flood of the printed word. 
 The newspaperman, to secure this circula- 
 tion, must have two capacities strongly de- 
 veloped. He must have an instinct, an in- 
 stinctive power in divining and discerning 
 the relative public interest in each event as
 
 12 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 it comes. He must feel, next, this inci- 
 dence and value as to country, state, city, 
 and, most precious and important of all, 
 upon the circulation area. 
 
 This capacity has behind it a vivid inter- 
 est in the moving show of life, the round 
 world as it turns and all that passes with it. 
 For high success there must be joined a 
 flaming desire to advance and improve. 
 The first is necessary; the second inspires 
 and directs news to the definite end of 
 awakening a demand for reform and im- 
 provement. Curiosity this is not. The 
 good newspaperman is never curious. Paul 
 Pry has no place in a good newspaper office. 
 Nothing so numbs personal curiosity as 
 newspaper experience. There is no news- 
 paperman in the crowd that flocks around 
 a fallen horse or a smashed taxicab. He 
 knows that the event will have its due record 
 and run its due course to the newspaper 
 office, without casual aid or accidental as- 
 sistance. For myself— and I have ques- 
 tioned scores of newspapermen — only once 
 did "news" cross my path in the making, 
 when a pistol-shot, as I walked home at i 
 A. M., brought me bounding up the steps
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 13 
 
 of a house whose door was opened by a 
 scared maid, with murder attempted in the 
 story above. 
 
 A great concourse of news, an active news- 
 paperman, who remains a reporter to the 
 end of his days will gather, not because he 
 himself sees it, but because any of a hundred 
 hints uncovers the possibility of "news." 
 This is not curiosity. It is not an appetite 
 for events as such. Most that happens is 
 not news. 
 
 "If a dog bites a man," said Charles A. 
 Dana, "that is not news. Every one knows 
 that dogs bite men. But if a man bites a 
 dog, that is news." More than the percep- 
 tion and discovery of the unusual is needed 
 to make real news. Some social relation 
 must exist. "Visualize," said one teaching 
 journalism to a neophyte, "the long porch 
 of a summer hotel on the beach. You can 
 see It. Endless piazza, windows every so 
 often opening Into rooms, hanging screens 
 without. If a screen was caught and en- 
 tangled, would you stop and straighten It 
 or would you go to the office and ask them 
 to send some one?" The boy with the 
 newspaper instinct will straighten the en-
 
 14 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 tangled screen. The boy who goes to the 
 office, no matter how well he writes, is not 
 a newspaper man, and will not be, until he 
 has unlearned this attitude, and has an in- 
 stant desire when something hangs crooked 
 to straighten it at once. 
 
 This is a complex of many causes within. 
 The social structure must mean much to 
 him. It was the one nation most successful 
 in self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-con- 
 trol, and self-government which gave the 
 world Shakespeare, the one poet and dra- 
 matist to whom all the ways and words, 
 the wandering and wondering of men were 
 known. Not for him Achilles and Ulysses, 
 not for him Agamemnon and the Mycenean 
 line, the hero of Rome's beginning, or Hell, 
 Purgatory, or Heaven, but the whole struc- 
 ture of human life, its warp and its woof, 
 all that live and move and have their being, 
 and all that men do and desire are in the one 
 thousand characters of the English poet. 
 He began with kings and the pageant of 
 history, but as his plays grow they gather 
 a larger and more complete array of all who 
 are in the earth of man and his imaginings. 
 
 The race that produced him, the institu-
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 15 
 
 tions which he saw in the very moment of 
 transition to the rule of the many, the 
 composite tongue he used so freely that the 
 total of his diction equals the number of 
 separate words used by Homer and Virgil 
 together, this people in its various homes 
 and this tongue have the overwhelming 
 share of the world's newspaper circulation, 
 as nearly as one can make out, about eighty 
 per cent furnished by a tenth of the world's 
 population. 
 
 These things are not matters of accident. 
 They are not adventitious. The supreme 
 figure in the letters of English-speaking folk 
 reflects the same universal interest in all of 
 humanity as does the newspaper in English. 
 The journalist of Continental Europe pri- 
 marily seeks to express himself. The jour- 
 nalism of London seeks to express the life 
 of which it is a part. Few names of its 
 writers become known as compared with 
 those whose names are known in Paris, Ber- 
 lin, and Rome. Take the newspapers of 
 New York and our other great cities, and 
 each expresses its environment more closely 
 than newspapers in foreign cities. They 
 print more local news per hundred columns
 
 i6 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 of print. They give local news a more con- 
 spicuous place. Local expression, a keen 
 sense of the organism whose flow and ac- 
 tion they record, an avowed purpose to 
 improve and advance its administration, its 
 growth, its prosperity — to boom it, this is 
 the evident avowed end and being of the 
 American city paper. Whoever knew an 
 English paper avowedly "booming" its 
 city? Its stafif would not recognize the 
 word coming down the pike. 
 
 This dyes American journalism and, like 
 madder stalks fed to cattle, the very bones 
 of the American journalist must be red with 
 this spirit. 
 
 This zeal for the advance, this deep-rooted 
 desire to see all schools, streets, homes, 
 trade, politics grow better, burns Uke a 
 flame, consuming and unconsumed, in the 
 soul of the American journalist. Its WDrse 
 side is local gossip, casual events, fruitless 
 exposures, but the noble aspects are appar- 
 ent in the scores and scores of journalists 
 we have all known who give their lives to 
 reforms, their days and nights to making 
 transparent the vast life of the cities in 
 which they live, and into whose life they 
 build themselves.
 
 CHOICE OF THE CALLING 17 
 
 This is not universal, but it is omni- 
 present. It enters into every newspaper; it 
 is present in every city room; it glows in 
 every editorial page. Not even the stifling 
 flood and the dead-weight of 7,000,000 of 
 population gathered from all the earth can 
 prevent every daily in New York City from 
 speaking as the guardian of the city, re- 
 gretting its ills and its failures, its corrup- 
 tion and its iniquity, rejoicing in its reforms 
 and advance, in season and out of season, 
 revealing the life and the soul of the city. 
 
 If a young man and a young woman at 
 the threshold of this great calling glow with 
 this devotion, if the great tides of a city 
 move them and for them earth knows 
 naught more fair, they are chosen for the 
 calling and share its thrills and its deeper 
 throb. By this sign shall they know their 
 call: "The zeal of thy house hath eaten me 
 up." This enthusiasm will take many forms 
 and shapes and be present in many simili- 
 tudes, the city as a whole, its administration, 
 its education, its health, its housing, its self- 
 government, its purity, its beauty, its wealth 
 and its commerce, its traffic by sea and by 
 land, the surging values of business and ex-
 
 i8 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 change. Any one of these may absorb a 
 Hfetime. Every daily and every weekly 
 journaHst who does me the honor to read 
 these Hnes knows full well that I have laid 
 bare the secrets of his heart, conscious or 
 hitherto unconscious, and set in ordered 
 array the cherished purpose of his soul for 
 city, county, village, town, state, country. 
 This is the call of the pack; happy the cub 
 who hears it, and hearing, follows.
 
 II 
 
 THE APPOINTED TASK, THEORY* 
 
 This underlying purpose of American 
 journalism colors alike Its preparation, Its 
 training, and Its mission. In Individual 
 newspapermen the urge to the general ser- 
 vice varies, as does all, good and bad, In the 
 illimitable mosaic of human character and 
 the crowd. For myself, I have never known 
 a working journalist who had not some 
 share of it. Large, small, smaller, smallest, 
 the urge was there. The newspaper always 
 professes and protests its desire to serve the 
 
 * This chapter was the opening lecture of my course in 
 the "History of Journalism," delivered when the School 
 of Journalism in Columbia University began its first ses- 
 sion in October, 1912. For forty years I had been an 
 active journalist in many fields — reporter, Albany corre- 
 spondent, news editor, Washington correspondent, man- 
 aging editor, critic in literature and art, editorial writer, 
 and on my appointment as director of the school I found 
 myself, in my new post, called to give the faith and creed 
 that was in me for use in teaching the calling 1 had prac- 
 tised all my active life. After years of study and obser- 
 vation of a profession to which I had given all I was, I 
 present this, nine years later, as still, for me, the interpre- 
 tation of the journalist's work. 
 
 19
 
 20 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 community. Hypocrisy? Sometimes. All 
 hypocrisy is, at bottom, a recognition of 
 accepted standards. The work of the news- 
 paper is always for the mass. Profit-mak- 
 ing it may be, but the accepted and asserted 
 purpose is the benefit of the community by 
 giving it what the mass needs to know, and 
 knowing, knows itself. 
 
 This is the difference between literature 
 and journalism. Literature is the voice of 
 the individual as to what might be or su- 
 pernally is; the newspaper Is uttering to the 
 many what the few and the many do in 
 their relation and reference to the mass. 
 This is the reason for the recognition and 
 acceptance by the common law, as uttered 
 by courts through centuries, that publica- 
 tion of certain evil conduct, on the border 
 between law and morals, is lawful and justi- 
 fiable when said of a man running for office, 
 or holding it as a public trust; but subject to 
 damages, if said of a private person whose 
 personal life has no public relation. The 
 mere fact that a special Incident has taken 
 place Is not, the law holds, sufficient ground 
 for publication, if it be injurious to an indi- 
 vidual, unless some public end is served.
 
 THEORY 21 
 
 The area and definition of a public end 
 steadily widens and finally will include any 
 misdeed. Even then, publication will have 
 for its justification public use rather than 
 private ends. The individual entering the 
 calling needs to understand that the prime 
 end and office of journalism is not for per- 
 sonal expression, but the use of one's capa- 
 city, power, and will to express the tide of 
 events for public ends and advance. 
 
 Literature and journalism use the same 
 weapon, writing. They occupy much the 
 same battle-field. Confused thinking and 
 confused comparison are inevitable. No one 
 can clearly draw the line between them. 
 There is much literature, and some very 
 good literature — in journalism. There is 
 much journalism, and some very bad jour- 
 nalism, in literature. In dealing with litera- 
 ture, it is on the whole a misfortune that, 
 under modern democratic conditions, so 
 much stress is laid by publisher and author 
 upon the audience. In journalism it is a 
 constant obstacle and discouragement that 
 the journalist is judged from the standpoint 
 of the author. Authorship has almost noth- 
 ing to do with journalism and journalism
 
 22 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 has almost nothing to do with authorship, 
 though there have been great authors who 
 were journaHsts and journahsts who would 
 have been great authors if they had not 
 sought the higher and more difficult task of 
 journaHsm. The man who writes a book 
 which is read once by a thousand people for 
 each of a hundred years is an author and an 
 author who has won most unusual success. 
 The journalist who writes an article or a 
 series of articles of the dimensions of a book, 
 read by a hundred thousand people, has 
 exactly the same number of readers, has 
 affected the same number of human beings, 
 and has had, as far as statistics go, to coin 
 a phrase from railroad reports, the same 
 number of "reading years" to his credit. 
 Numerically they have had the same re- 
 sponse from the reader. Practically we 
 know that they occupy an entirely dif- 
 ferent position in the world of letters and 
 in the world of human values. The man 
 who has written a book that survives a cen- 
 tury, to have its thousand of readers each 
 year, has expressed himself. The journalist 
 who has succeeded in his task and is read 
 in a succession of a hundred days by a hun-
 
 THEORY 23 
 
 dred thousand readers, has expressed the 
 community. The book and its author were 
 important from their individual weight. 
 The journaHst was important because he 
 served and expressed a pubHc need and had 
 the precise abihty, aptitude, and opportun- 
 ity to do so. The book that is worth read- 
 ing, independent of its author and his day, 
 exists apart. The newspaper article exists 
 as a part of a social system. Shortly after 
 Aristotle died, those to whom the whole 
 body of his work came, buried it. It was 
 lost to the world for 187 years. When these 
 works were discovered, bought by a wealthy 
 book collector, and taken to Rome, Aristotle 
 was none the less "the master of all who 
 know." We are scarcely aware to-day that 
 there was in his amazing influence an inter- 
 ruption of nigh 200 years, in which a soli- 
 tary tomb in Pergamos held what was to 
 change the currents of thought for all the 
 world as streams of water over the irrigated 
 field are turned by the husbandman's foot. 
 A newspaper buried 187 years, immediately 
 after publication, would be worthless even 
 as a curiosity, if the edition were great 
 enough to make the number surviving large.
 
 24 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Aristotle could wait; the newspaper can- 
 not. It must speak. It must speak at 
 dawn or at eventide, or it is wasted. This 
 is because its value rests not merely upon 
 what it contains, but upon the relation which 
 that value bears to the society of which it 
 is a part. It serves that society and is 
 served by it. The instant it is detached 
 from that society, it ceases to live. Its life 
 is large in exact proportion as its contact 
 and interpenetration of the social structure 
 is complete. Its news has its importance, 
 not because of the thing that has happened, 
 though this is or should be indispensable to 
 publication, but because it is read by half 
 a million people. The awing fact in a news- 
 paper head -line is not simply the news that 
 it tells, but the consciousness that every one 
 else is learning the same thing at the same 
 time. It is this organized, constant, iter- 
 ant and continuous publicity that makes 
 the difference between the publicity of a 
 newspaper, even though its circulation be 
 small, and the publicity of a private letter, 
 a difference in kind, not only in degree. The 
 reason why the publication of any wrong- 
 doing in a newspaper is dreaded is not be-
 
 THEORY 25 
 
 cause the wrong-doing has happened and is 
 told — every wrong-doing is told to some one 
 the instant it is done and told to more and 
 more as circumstances regulate — but the 
 newspaper, by making the fact a part of the 
 common consciousness of society, has in- 
 stantly changed the character of the pub- 
 licity, given it weight, importance and con- 
 sequence, as one of the factors that must de- 
 cide the public will and often, in fact, does 
 set in motion the wheels of justice. Many 
 may have known what the newspaper pub- 
 lishes, but the instant it is published the 
 whole machinery of justice is forced to 
 move, and a reluctant district attorney, an 
 inert grand jury, a hesitating judge, and a 
 petit jury, each of whose members, indi- 
 vidually, would be willing to let this matter 
 pass, are forced to action. 
 
 It is the character of this responsibility 
 that settles the attitude and utterance of 
 the man who writes on the newspaper, 
 whether he is writing news or opinion or 
 that large share of the newspaper which is 
 a blend of both, fact used to create opinion 
 and opinion used to interpret fact. The 
 great and original genius is not attracted to
 
 26 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 the newspaper, shuns it rather, because he 
 feels that the Hnks that unite the newspaper 
 to the structure of society are also chains 
 that bind. 
 
 Knowing that I was to meet Robert 
 Browning on a trip to England, the pub- 
 lisher of a prominent magazine, Mr. S. S. 
 McClure, charged me with a commission to 
 obtain a poem from him for publication and 
 left the price open up to a thousand dollars, 
 even if the poem were only four or eight 
 lines long, and even if it were a poem not 
 recently written, so that it had never been 
 published. Robert Browning, I learned 
 then for the first time, had never appeared 
 in a periodical during all of his life as a man 
 of letters. I met him in London in the 
 year that had just passed, the fifty-sixth 
 anniversary of ' Pauline.' Meeting the poet 
 as I did, it was out of the question to 
 do anything either so impertinent or so 
 banal as to make any offer to him. But 
 conversation and the continuous talk of 
 two hours eddies in many channels, and if 
 one has long been an interviewer, familiar 
 with the task of securing the interview, it 
 is easy to guide almost any man to any 
 subject on which you desire to secure an
 
 THEORY 27 
 
 opinion. In this the interviewer is like a 
 cross-examiner and exercises an art whose 
 highest art is the concealment of its purpose. 
 
 At last, the poet was saying, " I have 
 never appeared in the pages of a maga- 
 zine. I have never contributed an article. 
 I could not. A man who takes in" — using 
 the English phrase which in America we 
 call "subscribe" — "anything, newspaper, 
 weekly, monthly, does it under the tacit 
 agreement that it will follow a certain 
 course. This monthly," and Browning took 
 up a magazine which lay on the table and 
 held it in his hand, poised, "enters a man's 
 house once a month. It is understood that 
 certain things shall not appea^ in it and that 
 certain things shall. Every editor knows 
 this. He would break this tacit promise if 
 he did not meet the expectation of his sub- 
 scribers. As for me," and the poet settled 
 back in his chair, with the magazine still 
 in his hand, "I cannot write that way. I 
 say what I have to say. I have it printed 
 in a book. Take it or leave it." And the 
 magazine was impulsively flung upon the 
 table. "It is no concern of mine." 
 
 So far was this true, he went on to say, 
 that down to 'The Ring and the Book'
 
 28 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 everything that he had pubHshed had cost 
 him a printer's bill. He had printed it at 
 his own expense because he wanted it 
 printed and not enough people wanted to 
 read it to pay the printer's bills. "I have 
 been fortunate," he said, "in being able to 
 do this. I have always had the means to 
 print. I feel humble when I remember 
 men like Lamb who have gone on writing in 
 illness and without means." 
 
 There spoke the poet and genius, certainly 
 one of the foremost if not the foremost of 
 the men of the nineteenth century, that age 
 of an amazing expansion of the newspaper. 
 But if you will turn to its higher literature, 
 from Coleridge and Wordsworth at its open- 
 ing to Tennyson so near its close, you will 
 find through the whole round scarcely a ref- 
 erence to the newspaper, no discussion of it 
 save an occasional scoff or protest, no rec- 
 ognition of its value, of its work, nor of its 
 importance — genius uttering its own voice, 
 finding for its own work no proper place 
 in a power which has wrought marvellous 
 things in the past hundred years.* George 
 
 * Tennyson has five references to the "press," Browning 
 two to the "newspaper," Wordsworth none. Coleridge, a 
 leader writer, has as little.
 
 THEORY 29 
 
 Crabbe is almost alone among poets in 
 making it the subject of a poem. 
 
 This is because of the necessary limi- 
 tations of a newspaper. It began in the 
 pamphlet and the news letter, individual 
 enterprises for which the individual alone 
 was responsible, though the luckless printer 
 — generally the one of the two with re- 
 sponsible means — and not the author, was 
 usually sued for libel. This grew into the 
 essay, of which The Spectator is the familiar 
 example, for which there was a regular sub- 
 scription. Instantly there began that sense 
 of responsibility to the recurrent reader. 
 This increased with every step of the past 
 two centuries. As circulation has increased, 
 as advertising has grown, as the Interlocking 
 of the newspaper with the vast machine of 
 society grew more close, it steadily moved 
 away from the mere individual utterance to 
 its organic and necessary duty of serving the 
 public as it gradually recorded its facts and 
 reverberated its opinions, by uttering them, 
 sometimes creating what it anticipates, and 
 sometimes anticipating what It creates. 
 
 This circumstance profoundly changes the 
 work, the position, the responsibility, and 
 the ethics both of the newspaper and of the
 
 30 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 journalist. At no one point will it ever be 
 completely true that there is no individual 
 initiative in the newspaper, and at no one 
 point will it ever be true, however anxious 
 the newspaper is to subordinate individual 
 initiative, that the newspaper manages either 
 to record with perfect precision the facts 
 with which it deals, or to express with cer- 
 tainty the opinion of those who, to use 
 Browning's phrase, "take it in." But there 
 will always be a steadily increasing approxi- 
 mation to this end and idea, an approxima- 
 tion partly conscious and pecuniary on the 
 part of the business half of the newspaper, 
 partly unconscious and professional on the 
 part of the writing side. The newspaper 
 which began as a voice crying in the wilder- 
 ness and finding in the meagre satisfaction 
 of that day very little but locusts and wild 
 honey on which to live, the coarsest gar- 
 ments to wear, the garret for a habitation, 
 and the pillory for a reward, has inevitably 
 passed into a fiduciary relation, such as 
 Robert Browning, so far as I know, was the 
 first accurately to see and describe and to 
 refuse to accept, so far as his own work was 
 concerned.
 
 THEORY 31 
 
 This fiduciary relation carries with it the 
 obligation of service and the consciousness 
 of a great public duty on the part of the 
 journalist. It is never true of him, as is 
 sometimes unkindly said, that, like the 
 drum-major, he leads the procession along a 
 predetermined route, from which he cannot 
 vary, and that the apparently spontaneous 
 twirls of his baton and surprising gyrations 
 of his wand of ofifice really follow a pre- 
 scribed tune which is already written, as he 
 walks before those who pipe and drum it, 
 from the thundering bass of the great news- 
 paper to the flageolet of the country weekly 
 piping on its rural reed. But it is true that 
 the instant the journalist turns into a side 
 street and the procession leaves him and 
 goes its own way, as has happened to many 
 an independent journalist, he ceases to be a 
 journalist and becomes that admirable but 
 costly person, to himself and to his pub- 
 lisher, the pamphleteer, who, as Robert 
 Browning admirably preferred to do, pays 
 the price of printing, careless whether men 
 take it or leave it. A journalist cannot be 
 careless at this point. If men leave his 
 newspaper he may be publishing a most ad-
 
 32 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 mirable history of the world for a day 
 freighted with the wisest opinion ever ut- 
 tered, but the publication is not a newspaper. 
 It is, instead, a book published daily by its 
 author and creator at an extravagant cost, 
 in a form which renders its preservation im- 
 possible, its present penally costly, and its 
 future a safe oblivion. 
 
 The whole struggle and contest over the 
 office and function of a newspaper is all ulti- 
 mately based on the circumstance already 
 carefully noted, that this whole change, 
 alteration, and evolution — in a sense of all 
 periodicals, but particularly of the daily 
 paper — from being the work of one man to 
 becoming the expression of society is always 
 in process of being carried on. It is never 
 complete. The work of the newspaper is 
 never exclusively one thing or the other. 
 It is a blend of both. There will always 
 remain the personal and moral responsi- 
 bility of the journalist. He can no more 
 divest himself of it than can the judge of 
 responsibility for an execution. His very 
 fiduciary capacity and his service of the 
 people only increase this responsibility. 
 Says Ezekiel (33:1-9), on the whole, I
 
 THEORY 33 
 
 think, the most original thinker that social 
 morals have known, so large a share of new 
 truth is contained in him: 
 
 1. Again the word of the Lord came unto 
 me, saying, 
 
 2. Son of man, speak to the children of thy 
 people, and say unto them. When I bring the 
 sword upon a land, if the people of the land 
 take a man of their coasts, and set him for 
 their watchman: 
 
 3. If when he seeth the sword come upon the 
 land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people; 
 
 4. Then whosoever heareth the sound of the 
 trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the sword 
 come, and take him away, his blood shall be 
 upon his own head. 
 
 5. He heard the sound of the trumpet, and 
 took not warning; his blood shall be upon him. 
 But he that taketh warning shall deliver his 
 soul. 
 
 6. But if the watchman see the sword come, 
 and blow not the trumpet, and the people be 
 not warned; if the sword come, and take any 
 person from among them, he is taken away in 
 his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the 
 watchman's hand. 
 
 7. So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a 
 watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore
 
 34 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and 
 warn them from me. 
 
 8. When I say unto the wicked, O wicked 
 man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not 
 speak to warn the wicked from his way, that 
 wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his 
 blood will I require at thine hand. 
 
 9. Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of 
 his way to turn from it; if he do not turn from 
 his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou 
 hast delivered thy soul. 
 
 These are the marching orders of the 
 journalist. I am fain to admit that when I 
 once sent them to an extremely clever and 
 penetrating woman who had scoffed at my 
 calling, she responded that they might be 
 the marching orders of a journalist, as I 
 claimed, but that her acquaintance with 
 American journalism led her to feel that 
 they were strictly what are known as sealed 
 orders. None the less, they are the orders 
 of the journalist. It is because of his fidu- 
 ciary capacity ; it is because he has succeeded 
 in drawing together a great procession which 
 looks to see him take a prescribed route; it 
 is because he works within these narrow and 
 strictly representative conditions that his
 
 THEORY 35 
 
 moral responsibility becomes deep, potent, 
 and would be overwhelming if he were not 
 aware that no man — I care not how ill the 
 effects of his skill may be — has this call and 
 work, but there has been implanted in him 
 that singular, separate, and individual ca- 
 pacity to express and to lead the multitude, 
 whose very possession is itself a responsibil- 
 ity. Still more if one be called to many 
 walks in journalism, to the meeting of many 
 men and the reading of many newspapers, 
 and to acquaintance with newspaper files 
 over a span of time longer than his own life, 
 he gradually comes to see that the dye mas- 
 ters the dyer's hand, that no man ever exer- 
 cises this great power, however flagrant may 
 have been his sins, however far ambition and 
 desire have grown, and the still subtler temp- 
 tation of enjoying the broad bruit of the 
 many at any cost, but gradually, as he 
 comes to attract them and, having at- 
 tracted, to represent them, he himself is 
 trained by his work, elevated by it, and in- 
 variably ends by editing a better newspaper 
 than he began to do.* 
 
 What has happened historically is simple. 
 
 * The lecture ceases here.
 
 36 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 With the psychology of a crowd we have 
 all grown familiar. In the Hellenic city- 
 state, this held the soul of a people in the 
 throng drawn together in the market-place 
 before the bema, the rostrum. The com- 
 mon consciousness of the gathered citizenry, 
 itself the state, awoke under the speaker's 
 voice. Consciousness, knowledge, argu- 
 ment, intellection succeeded each other and 
 in the end there came the will and act of 
 the state. 
 
 As the city-state grew, this organism of 
 the citizen crowd ceased to express the 
 state. It acted through the many organ- 
 isms whose growth is recorded in the history 
 of political institutions. Imperator, prin- 
 ceps, king, representative bodies, these all 
 succeeded each other, but no one of them 
 gave the state, in all its transformations, a 
 common consciousness acting through all 
 its mass. The printing-press diffused opin- 
 ion and fact, but as long as only ten to 
 twenty per cent of the adult population 
 could read, only class government could 
 exist, be conscious, know, feel, will, act. 
 Protestantism did not begin general educa- 
 tion. This existed long before. The foun-
 
 THEORY 37 
 
 dation of Protestantism rested on the con- 
 ception that all must read so that the open 
 Bible could be read by all. This created a 
 religious conviction and a political demand 
 that all must read that God's will may be 
 known to all and political freedom was won 
 by the sword to protect religious choice. 
 
 As literacy grew and illiteracy diminished, 
 the roots of the newspaper spread through a 
 new and fertile soil, taking root downward 
 and bearing fruit upward. The circula- 
 tion of the newspaper grows and spreads as 
 literacy in one tongue becomes universal. 
 When the newspaper became so organized 
 through the telegraph that news, public 
 utterance, party opinion, and action fol- 
 lowed the advancing morning of a conti- 
 nent, a nation of 100,000,000 began to have 
 a common consciousness, closely akin to 
 that of the throng of citizens in the agora 
 of the Hellenic city-state. Democracy again 
 became possible. 
 
 All dailies, in a sense all periodicals, dis- 
 charge the office, task and working of a com- 
 mon national consciousness. This is done 
 independently of the opinion of the news- 
 paper and its editorial expression.
 
 38 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 This function becomes inherent in every 
 daily and this task gives platform, publicity, 
 point, and potency to utterance. The more 
 complete and universal the discharge of 
 this task, the more general in the newspaper 
 office becomes a sense of the direct responsi- 
 bility of a newspaper to the whole of society. 
 The man who enters newspaper work has, 
 at the beginning, a passion for personal ex- 
 pression and prominence. Some keep this 
 to the end. Some appear in periodicals, 
 daily, weekly, or monthly, individually or 
 anonymously. The w^eightier newspapers 
 in their impact and effect on the opinion of 
 the public are those in which a small group 
 of able journalists have worked together 
 anonymously. The journalist who has 
 worked both anonymously, day in and day 
 out, and individually, by articles, finds that 
 in the long run the former is the more ef- 
 fective. 
 
 Whatever path a man may take, however 
 personal may be his ambition, the universal 
 and general responsibility to the many 
 sways, educates, and recasts. In our own 
 day, in the English-speaking world, there 
 are great creators of newspapers whose
 
 THEORY 39 
 
 methods for the first twenty or twenty-five 
 years of their careers have been felt by 
 sound journahsts to be evil and only evil, 
 and that continually. But the task to which 
 they addressed themselves educated and 
 inspired the sense of public responsibility to 
 moral standards. This grew until their 
 newspapers have done more, and more cour- 
 ageously, to support certain moral issues 
 than any other, though there remained per- 
 sonal ambition, much preachment, and 
 methods harmful to the stability, the sanity, 
 and the just action of the state and of so- 
 ciety. 
 
 The man or the woman who turns to the 
 newspaper will be wise if they consider 
 these things, ponder well the theory and 
 necessary action and office of the newspaper, 
 and understand that to minister and not to 
 be ministered unto will be their calling, and 
 their best and highest work will be through 
 the sacrifice of self and of personal notoriety. 
 Every journalist knows men whose names 
 are scarcely known to the profession, much 
 less to the public, but who are the moving 
 springs of the best in a great newspaper, 
 for of such is the kingdom of journalism.
 
 40 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 This task and this career, these opportun- 
 ities and this wide-spread influence, have 
 their detriments, drawbacks, and disabil- 
 ities which no man and no woman entering 
 the work of journalism should overlook or 
 fail to weigh and consider. A salaried posi- 
 tion, removable at brief notice, will be the 
 lot of the overwhelming majority of those 
 who work in large cities and on dailies. The 
 country weekly and the small daily, to- 
 gether with technical journals, offer oppor- 
 tunities for securing a share In ownership 
 even for those of small means or savings. I 
 have dealt in a succeeding chapter* with the 
 size of these salaries and incomes. I touch 
 now only upon the circumstance that a sal- 
 aried position is before most newspaper men 
 and women, and the law throws around the 
 position fewer safeguards in our States than 
 do court decisions, usage, and statutes in the 
 United Kingdom and most European lands. 
 Contracts for a term of years for the more 
 important positions and the abler men are 
 frequent, but these exist for but few posts 
 and few journalists. 
 
 This new calling, however important it 
 
 * Chapter VIII, "Pay and Pecuniary Reward."
 
 THEORY 41 
 
 may be in fact, cannot in the nature of 
 things, recent as it is, have the prescriptive 
 position and conventional respect, both of- 
 ten empty, which attach to law, medicine, 
 and divinity. Men and women leak into 
 journalism in all sorts of ways and under 
 pressure of a manifold order. The three 
 callings I have named have for generations 
 been creating their training, their traditions, 
 and their position in society. They are 
 sought by the advantaged ; journalism, often 
 by the disadvantaged. The faculty of medi- 
 cine and the clerg>^ are assumed to represent 
 certain standards of behavior and to act in 
 accordance with certain canons of their call- 
 ing. These are assumed in their members 
 by society as a whole and they are enforced 
 by serious penalties. The newspaperman 
 at present, has to prove himself worthy, 
 though membership on the stafif of certain 
 carefully conducted newspapers and gradu- 
 ates of widely known Schools of Journalism 
 begin to enjoy an accepted position. 
 
 More serious still, the three callings cited 
 are not only drawn, as to much of their mem- 
 bership, from the advantaged; these profes- 
 sions are approved by the advantaged.
 
 42 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Journalism is not so approved. Its chief 
 achievement in the past and its chief task 
 in the future is to reduce the advantages of 
 the advantaged. For this, it came into the 
 world. It is the chief weapon created by 
 the many to this end. Publicity destroys 
 the advantages of the few. The accounts, 
 the expenditures, and the revenues of gov- 
 ernments were for generations kept secret 
 and unpublished because it was profitable 
 for those who ruled to do so. The proceed- 
 ings of Parliaments and even of our Amer- 
 ican legislatures were once secret as were the 
 policy, the purposes, the diplomacy, and 
 even the agreements and treaties of nations, 
 and still are at many points. It was the 
 newspaper that made public the affairs of 
 political parties, whose conventions once sat 
 in secret as did the Federalist Convention 
 at Hartford in 1814. The expenditure of 
 parties has been made public by newspapers 
 in our current day. Banks, railroads, busi- 
 ness in all its forms, and corporations in 
 general, all fought for secrecy and enjoyed 
 it down to a half century or so ago. The 
 newspaper has not yet completed the task 
 of making these as open as the day. 
 
 This is true of the newspaper in all its
 
 THEORY 43 
 
 work and in all the walks of life. It is al- 
 ways turning over stones in the world's 
 fields, large and small, and all manner of 
 creeping things wriggle and run away, often 
 to their ending. No one who experiences 
 this likes the experience or enjoys it. At 
 one time and another those who possess 
 privilege suffer from these disclosures. The 
 man who turns to journalism needs to re- 
 member these duties, demands, and disad- 
 vantages. They exist. They cannot be 
 changed. As the community grows better, 
 its legislation wiser, its administration more 
 efficient and both less touched by self-in- 
 terest, there will be less to expose; but so- 
 ciety as a whole and individually always 
 needs improvement and always will. The 
 professional improver never will be popular. 
 Mr. Set-it-right is pretty sure not to be 
 wanted in many clubs and is apt to be re- 
 garded as was Paul, a pestilent fellow, who 
 has come to turn the world upside down. 
 
 The newspaper and the newspaperman 
 share this attitude and suffer this penalty. 
 His pay is not large and was once precari- 
 ous, his work is not popular, and his habit 
 and frame of mind are apt to be an annoy- 
 ance to society and to individuals. The
 
 44 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 frame of mind which challenges the day's 
 working round is always a personal handi- 
 cap. These have their compensations, their 
 rewards, and their hid joys, but those who 
 are considering the calling should ask them- 
 selves if they have the tough stuff which 
 fears not, knows the delights of sheer op- 
 pugnacity, and welcomes the choice of Ish- 
 mael and all his tribe to whom every desert 
 is a home and whose hand is against every 
 man's hand. 
 
 The newspapermen with desk places dodge 
 most of this. Some newspaper work is 
 little exposed to it, but most of it is, and 
 the men at the top who have done great 
 work, if they are protected from personal 
 smarts, find from time to time that their 
 families suffer and their sons may find that 
 the social privileges of college are closed to 
 them. But if you are really made for a 
 newspaperman you will rejoice in these 
 things, count them for righteousness and 
 treat them as naught by the work the news- 
 paper accomplishes in revealing society to 
 itself and convicting it of sin that it may 
 mend its ways.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE APPOINTED TASK, PRACTICE 
 
 The sum of the whole matter, therefore, 
 is that the newspaper as an organization 
 and organism carries out that creation of 
 the consciousness of the many which is the 
 necessary foundation of free government. 
 Doing this work, all connected with it as- 
 sume great responsibilities. These respon- 
 sibilities are the responsibilities of the state. 
 They may be distorted and degraded to a 
 devil's doctrine as they are by Macchiavelli 
 in The Prince; they may be treated as 
 the most sacred of all ofificial stations, sum- 
 ming all those various ofBces devised by the 
 one race, the Roman, which has given les- 
 sons in government to all the world after, 
 as the Jew gave lessons in morals and the 
 Hellene lessons in beauty. The newspaper, 
 not as mere metaphor, is the tribune of the 
 people, who protects its rights and can, with 
 the uplifted hand of publicity stop any man ; 
 the censor, who values and estimates each 
 of his fellow citizens and in the long run 
 
 45
 
 46 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 unerringly assigns to him the place which 
 he shall finally occupy; the pontifex maxi- 
 mus, to whom is committed the secret power 
 of the commonwealth, in whose custody 
 are its ultimate decisions and in whose 
 penetralia there lie hidden the spear and 
 shield which, at moments of peril to the 
 state, move of themselves and sound a call 
 that embodies its armed powers. 
 
 But the ofificer of the state, as we all 
 realize, can never be a free-lance. He can 
 never speak solely for himself. If he be- 
 long even to the group from whom must be 
 selected those who exercise power, he is 
 bound by something of the same loyalty 
 to the continuity of the state which is im- 
 posed upon those who are actually in power. 
 When Wellington was asked why he as- 
 sumed office under conditions, circumstances, 
 and a policy at variance with all his pre- 
 vious career, his just and sufficient answer 
 to the taunt and sneer of Brougham was, 
 "Sir, the King's Government must be car- 
 ried on." There come, of course, times of 
 revolution when the king's government 
 must not be carried on, and those men are 
 best in the state who, instead of serving it,
 
 PRACTICE 47 
 
 overturn It and risk, in the fine phrase 
 of the Declaration of Independence, "our 
 lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." 
 But a habit of overturning governments 
 leads straight to the Spanish-American re- 
 public. For the most part, men must take 
 things as they are in public life, improve 
 them at every point, ready always to sup- 
 port reform in a minority, determined al- 
 ways to secure such advances as are pos- 
 sible without parting from the great forces 
 of, and the parties in, society, and speaking, 
 whenever they are in authority or ofitice, 
 with the restraint, the responsibility, the 
 reserve, and the consciousness of what must 
 not be said, as well as with the conviction 
 of what must, necessarily, be said under 
 free institutions. 
 
 These conditions, the journalist shares in 
 all his relations to his work, because in all 
 of them he is himself representative, fidu- 
 ciary, and responsible for a larger whole. 
 Exactly as the man in public life is careful 
 to associate himself in politics with some 
 one of the great parties, in local govern- 
 ment with efforts for improvement in so- 
 cial movements, with the broad creed to
 
 48 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 which he subscribes, individualistic or not, 
 as the case may be, and then remembers 
 in all his acts and words the various respon- 
 sibilities which attach to organized life, so 
 the newspaper and the journalist, both un- 
 der a similar responsibility, are guided and 
 controlled by similar limitations. These 
 are the limitations of the judge who decides 
 each case according to the law and prece- 
 dent which he finds, modifying, adapting, 
 adjusting the law to new needs, but never 
 carrying this farther than liberties, secured 
 through law, broadening down from prece- 
 dent to precedent, show Is wise alike for 
 the rights of the individual and the security 
 of the state. Through all the hierarchy of 
 ofifice the same conditions subsist. If any- 
 one has talked with one American Presi- 
 dent after another during the last thirty 
 years about questions of public policy. In 
 that individual confidence which the trusted 
 correspondent and editor enjoys, he has 
 again and again heard the chief magistrate 
 of the United States say, "I believe thus 
 and so, but it is not possible to do more 
 than thus and so, and in my approaching 
 message I shall — " and so on.
 
 PRACTICE 49 
 
 No man can permit these various condi- 
 tioning conditions to lead into a departure 
 from the truth, the use of an unsound argu- 
 ment, the advocacy of a poHcy which he be- 
 lieves harmful to the state, or the acquies- 
 cence in known evil or secret wrong, but in 
 dealing with all these he is acting, not alone 
 for himself but for others. The journalist, 
 like a public prosecutor, can only bring 
 charges when he has the evidence to sustain 
 them, and not a mere moral conviction of 
 guilt. He can urge the advance no further 
 and no faster than will enable a newspaper 
 to keep in touch with the advance. He 
 must consider what will be done in the fu- 
 ture as well as what has been done in the 
 past. Since he has a continuous audience, 
 he cannot take the liberties of a pamphleteer. 
 Since he represents a settled body of opin- 
 ion, he cannot make the sharp and, it may 
 be, the witty thrusts of the critic, who seeks 
 only to express a personal opinion. He will 
 prepare the public for reforms in countless 
 ways that are open to him, but their open 
 advocacy will come like the decision of a 
 judge, not on a moot case or on possibilities, 
 but on the actual presence of a public issue
 
 50 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 by which the reform can be directly ad- 
 vanced. 
 
 There will doubtless come times of up- 
 heaval, of sweeping and sudden change, 
 when for a season periodicals that are asso- 
 ciated with some far-reaching reform, work 
 with great initiative and headlong onset. 
 Some great leader may detach himself and 
 act individually. But the instant the battle 
 line is set, a party organized, a platform 
 adopted, a general policy under way, and 
 the touch of the elbow felt through all the 
 marching column, the old conditions reas- 
 sert themselves. Such a leader will then be 
 charged with issuing some peremptory com- 
 mands which he has condemned in others. 
 He will adjust the policy of his party to one 
 thing in one stage and to another thing in 
 another stage. The periodicals that are 
 working with him will begin to defend acts 
 in the service of the cause they now advocate 
 which they have condemned in the opposi- 
 tion, and all concerned will pass under the 
 law which increases the service of the indi- 
 vidual in exact proportion as the individual 
 becomes merged in the general service. 
 
 This view of the responsibilities and of the
 
 PRACTICE 51 
 
 moral obligations, both of the newspaper 
 and of the journalist, while not often clearly 
 conceived or accurately stated, suffuses the 
 whole atmosphere of the newspaper ofBce. 
 Every man in it is in the constant habit of 
 discriminating and differencing between his 
 own personal opinion and the general policy 
 of the paper. The newspaper itself, through 
 all its departments, will be colored by its 
 own past. It has a vitality and life of its 
 own, and this embraces and controls the 
 vitality and the lives of those who work 
 on it. 
 
 There is also the action and the reaction 
 which comes from personal initiative. The 
 man whose training has given him clear-cut 
 principles In regard to public life, who under- 
 stands the intricate mechanism of society, 
 who first sees through earth's mists the 
 coming of the dawn, who knows months, 
 and it may be years in advance, the future 
 issue, and on every occasion prepares the 
 public mind by advocacy, who never misses 
 the opportunity to be instant in reproof, in 
 correction, in exposition in regard to those 
 questions about which the public mind is 
 still clouded, gradually learns, if he have the
 
 52 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 instincts of a journalist, to lead, without los- 
 ing all the advantages of organized action, 
 not only a newspaper but a community 
 toward reforms, which finally come without 
 shock because for years he has been by 
 every agency urging the principle and prac- 
 tice from whose teaching they must inevita- 
 bly come. 
 
 As social life becomes more complex, the 
 problems of administration, of Federal, of 
 state, and of local government become more 
 technical, the journalist who is trained is 
 able to do all this without shock or depar- 
 ture, because he knows and can constantly 
 show what should be done. 
 
 In the Federal purview questions of taxa- 
 tion, whether of internal revenue, of cus- 
 toms, of income tax, of inheritance taxes, of 
 the regulation of corporations, the control 
 and regulation of interstate commerce, of the 
 currency, of banking, of foreign policy, and 
 of Federal action, will be most influenced by 
 the man who knows most about them. As 
 the country grows larger, its resources 
 greater, the responsibilities of the central 
 government more exacting, and the risk of 
 a blunder in legislation more serious, mere
 
 PRACTICE 53 
 
 politics, once enough for the journalist when 
 the United States was a mere enlarged 
 frontier stretching West, ceases to be ade- 
 quate for a journalist in a great world power, 
 with half the banking of the world within 
 its limits, nearly half its railroads and tele- 
 graphs, island possessions in the East and 
 in the West, a world-changing work like the 
 Panama Canal, and a navy equal to any in 
 the world. These need trained knowledge 
 far wider than the politics of party. 
 
 Time was, nor long ago, when the chief 
 state institutions in most commonwealths 
 were its state prisons. It is less than a cen- 
 tury since any state began the care on a great 
 scale of the defective and the dependent. 
 Hammond's History of New York, through 
 the close of the eighteenth and half of the 
 nineteenth century, deals mostly with the 
 strife of parties and the cabals and conflicts 
 of leaders. New York State to-day is a 
 commonwealth whose activities lie not only 
 in electing governors or the legislature, but 
 in managing aright the great population of 
 the insane, the epileptic, the goitrous, the 
 poverty-stricken and crime-tainted within 
 its limits.
 
 54 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 I am myself old enough to have known 
 many men who knew New York when it 
 had nothing but night-watchmen in its 
 streets, and the constables and deputy 
 sheriffs of its police courts and its shrievalty 
 to enforce order. 
 
 This great city now has problems infinitely 
 more complex than those of any other great 
 centre of population the world has known 
 since Rome was officina gentium. This calls 
 for a corresponding knowledge of civic prob- 
 lems, administrative, sanitary, in public 
 works, in police, in pauperism, and in child- 
 hood, normal, retarded, and abnormal. The 
 whole field of individual sociological work 
 has been added to the newspaper within the 
 last forty years, almost within the last 
 twenty-five. Private charity steadily grows, 
 organization to provide for the many has 
 steadily increased, including hospitals as 
 well as those ordinarily called charities. 
 Individual initiative is constantly adding to 
 both. 
 
 The newspaper is the one channel through 
 which all these seek to reach their public, to 
 make themselves known, and to gather the 
 public support which renders their success
 
 PRACTICE 55 
 
 possible. This entire task of guiding the 
 charitable energies of the community, mak- 
 ing its wants known to itself, and saving it 
 from its own freakish impulses falls to the 
 newspaper because it alone is read by both 
 rich and poor, those who are professionally 
 and those who are not professionally inter- 
 ested in this task. This can only be carried 
 out if a journalist is willing to give himself 
 thorough training in this field and keeps up 
 a close familiarity with its literature. If he 
 does this he will not be misled by mere sym- 
 pathy into doing grave evil to the charities 
 of the community, and he will be able to do 
 an amount of popular education which, if he 
 carries it on for years together in the un- 
 known but efficient fashion in which the edi- 
 torial writer or special reporter can do his 
 work, will prepare the way for an advance 
 in every possible direction. 
 
 Religious news scarcely appeared in the 
 daily paper of even forty years ago, and the 
 utmost that was done was to follow any ab- 
 normal occurrence, such as a scandal affect- 
 ing a clergyman or a division in a great de- 
 nomination ; but the regular run of news was 
 little regarded. To-day every newspaper is
 
 56 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 constantly dealing with the current news of 
 religious bodies. Ex-president Patton, of 
 Princeton, said to me some twenty-five years 
 ago that when he became a clergyman he 
 took The Presbyterian because he was in 
 grave doubt whether Saint Peter would pass 
 a Presbyterian clergyman who did not ap- 
 pear with it in his pocket, and he read no 
 daily paper. "To-day," he said, "I read 
 more news about church afifairs in genersJ 
 in my daily paper than any religious weekly 
 can afford to print. I find that I follow 
 religious afifairs in the daily papers." This 
 is another field which calls for technical 
 knowledge and training, and in which the 
 daily newspaper constitutes the only uni- 
 versal platform on which all sects and de- 
 nominations meet. 
 
 The practical result of this is that pre- 
 cisely as the newspaper man finds before 
 him many diverging paths along which, if 
 will, ability, and principle be his, he can in- 
 fluence the political and the administrative 
 life of society, its reforms, its coming laws, 
 its philanthropy, its letters, its drama, its 
 art, so he can both express and affect the 
 religious life of the day. The American
 
 PRACTICE 57 
 
 newspaper not only gives more news about 
 churches and reports more sermons than 
 the press of other countries, but it pays 
 more attention to the Christian and to the 
 Jewish year. It notes fasts and festivals. 
 In many newspapers these days are annu- 
 ally noticed on the editorial page. Sunday- 
 school lessons are widely printed. Doctor 
 William T. Ellis has the largest Sunday- 
 school class conducted by any one an3rvvhere 
 in his syndicated lessons. The trend of re- 
 ligious thought, the training of the clergy, 
 their work and influence, the position and 
 prosperity of the church and of its various 
 communions, these all are discussed in the 
 press of the United States more than in any 
 other secular press, the United Kingdom not 
 excepted. This is natural. The United 
 States is the only nation which has an annual 
 Thanksgiving. Our census records religious 
 statistics as does no other national enumera- 
 tion. Our financial outlay and investment 
 is far greater. 
 
 But the Christian man who enters jour- 
 nalism needs to remember that he can exert 
 an Influence commensurate with his oppor- 
 tunity only as he gives to the Bible, Chris-
 
 58 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 tian history, the tenets, life, and character of 
 the various divisions of the religious life of 
 the land the same study which the financial 
 editor gives to finance, or the political editor 
 to politics. Such a man must practise what 
 he preaches. His daily life must reflect his 
 faith, and unless he goes to church regularly, 
 at whatever sacrifice, his newspaper articles 
 will be regarded. In his own office, as "bunk." 
 With this increase in the topics of the 
 newspaper, which has so greatly extended 
 both its own task and the opportunity which 
 it offers, there has also come, and almost 
 wholly through the policy and energetic work 
 of Joseph Pulitzer, the habit in American 
 newspapers of giving steadily the utterances, 
 the acts, and the declarations of all sides. 
 When Mr. Pulitzer acquired the New York 
 World In 1883 there was no New York paper 
 which freely printed the news in regard to 
 its opponents. All did much more of this 
 between 1875 and 1885 than they had be- 
 tween 1855 and 1865, when none of them 
 did it. The stress and Interest arising from 
 the Civil War between 1865 and 1875 and 
 the repeated breaking up of parties at that 
 time led newspapers to begin this task. It
 
 PRACTICE 59 
 
 continued under the impulse of the reform 
 movements which nearly seated President 
 Tilden in the presidential chair and both 
 elected and seated Grover Cleveland. But 
 it was the rule that papers gave scant space 
 to the views with which they did not agree, 
 and colored all accounts of everything which 
 related, not only in politics but in other 
 affairs, to the views of organizations to which 
 they were opposed. 
 
 Joseph Pulitzer changed all this by print- 
 ing one side as fully as the other, and the 
 effect of his policy, and still more its success, 
 led to a profound change in American news- 
 papers, which are to-day at this point in ad- 
 vance of those of any other country. In 
 1896 it came about in addition that nearly 
 the whole Democratic press on the silver 
 question took a hard money position, and 
 opposed the silver craze, partly because of 
 the convictions of its editors and partly be- 
 cause the newspaper had become a great 
 business, with a special stake in a sound 
 currency, which did not exist in the earlier 
 currency periods when the newspaper was a 
 small business. These two causes greatly 
 limbered up the American newspaper, both
 
 6o THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 in what it printed and in its editorial and 
 news policy. The millennium has not come 
 at this point, and pretty much every news- 
 paper has its definite drift in regard to 
 news, partly because selection is inevitable 
 with the widening field of news, and selec- 
 tion requires system, and, partly, because 
 newspapers are edited by human beings, 
 with like passions and predilections as other 
 men and women. The newspaper platform, 
 taken as a whole, is much more a platform 
 free to all aspects of the community — again 
 a proof of the growth of the unconscious 
 discharge of service — than it was in the 
 past, and it promises to grow in this direc- 
 tion more and more. The criticism that 
 newspapers still print only one side is prin- 
 cipally, and nearly always, due to the fact 
 that for every man the space given to his 
 own side always seems short and inadequate, 
 and any space whatever given to what he 
 opposes, seems unduly long and partial. 
 
 This widening field of the newspaper exists 
 nowhere except in the United States. Even 
 the London Times still weekly culls its reli- 
 gious news from the leading religious papers, 
 and on various topics it gives the news as pre-
 
 PRACTICE 6i 
 
 sented in technical publications. Wherever 
 a matter is of general interest the newspaper 
 here steadily seeks to anticipate it, often 
 with inaccuracy, with lack of knowledge, 
 with want of perspective, but still so as to 
 diffuse an interest and acquaintance through 
 great masses such as exists nowhere else. 
 
 This has enormously added to the inten- 
 sity of the technical training of the news- 
 paperman. The newspaper is no longer, as 
 it was when its present development began 
 with the great increase of circulation which 
 took place between 1880 and 1895, composed 
 of city and night desk news, editorial, and 
 criticism; it takes up in one way and 
 another every possible phase of human ac- 
 tivity, and it often does this better and with 
 a clearer vision in the papers which are 
 looked upon as "yellow" than is the case in 
 papers which keep to the old lines. But this 
 kind of work does harm and not good, dif- 
 fuses evil and not benefit, unless it is carried 
 on by those who are trained. This demand 
 for technical news on railroads, bond issues, 
 manufactures, engineering projects, the great 
 staples, metals, cereals, cotton, wool, silk, 
 the retail trade, has in the past twenty
 
 62 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 years developed a new type of newspaper- 
 man, well paid, who is daily dealing with 
 the great economic issues of society. The 
 college man who has journalism in mind 
 needs economic courses and technical study. 
 Writing and literature are well, but a man 
 who desires to do serious work and get good 
 pay, should take, besides plenty of history 
 in college, at least two courses in chemistry 
 and economics, and one each in physics, in 
 biology, in geology, and on the great staples, 
 though few colleges give this last. 
 
 The newspaper that recognizes this and 
 the man who had this training have widened 
 therefore the channels of public service in a 
 degree never before known. In politics and 
 on specific issues the great mass may be less 
 led by the newspaper than it once was, 
 though no one familiar with the past history 
 of journalism will be certain about this, but 
 the great mass is unquestionably far more 
 educated, informed, and influenced by the 
 newspaper than it was once in regard to 
 home affairs. In foreign affairs the Ameri- 
 can newspaper gives relatively less than it 
 once did, has surrendered its place, and one 
 of the objects of every School of Journalism
 
 PRACTICE 63 
 
 must be to send out those who are familiar 
 with affairs outside of the boundaries of the 
 United States, who understand the way in 
 which this news should be presented, the 
 tone and temper in which foreign relations 
 should be discussed, and who can have in- 
 telligent opinions as to the policy of a nation 
 which, within twenty-five years, has become 
 one of the five ruling powers. 
 
 Service for the many, regardless of whether 
 the many know or do not know the individ- 
 ual who gives it, permeates this whole field 
 of the newspaper, new and old. The work 
 can only be done fully by iteration, through 
 the constant policy of a newspaper, through 
 the manifold opportunities which it presents 
 of enforcing a certain view and illuminating 
 the forming factors of issues before the fac- 
 tors themselves appear upon the scene. But 
 with the growth of these conditions, which 
 tend constantly to sink the individual in the 
 newspaper, to blend many lives in a single 
 changing organism, there has come also a 
 great increase in the use of the newspaper as 
 a platform through which the whole nation 
 can be addressed. Ex-President Roosevelt 
 was the first man in our history who has
 
 64 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 made full use of this opportunity and set an 
 example which will be followed by every 
 man spurred by personal ambition or devo- 
 tion to reform, or both, consciously or un- 
 consciously, with desire to serve or deter- 
 mination to rule, as the case may be, in each 
 individual instance. 
 
 The special writer has taken a new promi- 
 nence through this. The salaried place 
 was once the only secure work for a news- 
 paperman. To-day there is a group, not 
 large but both prominent and significant, 
 of men who, while their capacity to furnish 
 just what the public wants lasts, receive 
 always an adequate and often an ample 
 support while their precise aptitude grows. 
 They find in the supplements of the Sunday 
 newspaper, in the special articles of the 
 daily newspaper, in the weeklies and in the 
 magazines a market for their wares, which 
 completes the evolution which I have been 
 sketching, which began with the pamphle- 
 teer. This cycle ends in the free publication 
 by the newspaper of what is essentially a 
 pamphlet, whether it be in the daily or 
 weekly, an utterance by a great public 
 figure, a vivid article on some current issue,
 
 PRACTICE 65 
 
 or a discussion of some evil or administra- 
 tive abuse, in which both fact and opinion 
 are so woven together that each supple- 
 ments the effect of the other. The very 
 size of a newspaper, the great increase in 
 the circulation of weeklies and of certain 
 monthlies, has created a space for these 
 things in the one instance and a national 
 audience in the other. The individual 
 writer has here what is essentially a new 
 opportunity, but, as is always the case with 
 the individual writer, the opportunity never 
 lasts very long, and at the end of five, ten, 
 or fifteen years the special writer finds him- 
 self succeeded by another group of men in 
 this field, like the priest 
 
 "who slew the slayer 
 And shall himself be slain." 
 
 It is also true that this opinion, while 
 striking, important, useful, and spectacular, 
 which it ought to be, has not the steady, con- 
 tinuous, cumulative effect of the daily news- 
 paper steadily potting away at the same 
 mark. These special articles remain pamph- 
 lets. They are not part of that unbroken 
 continuum which constitutes the daily news-
 
 66 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 paper, whose force and efficiency, whose 
 value, responsibility, and peril lies in the 
 fact, to which one cannot return too often, 
 that its Importance rests on the circum- 
 stance that day after day a great many 
 people want it and that a great many peo- 
 ple want it because it wants them and ad- 
 justs itself to the task, first, of getting them, 
 and then of keeping them, under the con- 
 ditions and limitations which have already 
 been sketched. 
 
 In all these classifications lines have been 
 drawn and differences have been noted be- 
 cause discussion of the newspaperman is 
 impossible without them, but It is idle to 
 suppose that any of these things can be 
 divided up In the actual course of society, 
 to represent classes, families, genera, species, 
 and varieties which you can label when you 
 see them, which you can comfortably docket 
 in your mental machinery and answer ques- 
 tions about them In an examination paper. 
 The tasks I have sketched are not ready- 
 made, awaiting the man they fit. The 
 world is not made that way; neither the 
 world of man nor, though laboratories hate 
 to believe It, the world of nature. This out-
 
 PRACTICE 67 
 
 line is purely general and suggestive. The 
 exceptions are almost as numerous as the 
 rules. Rules are principally known, not be- 
 cause one has seen them clearly, but because 
 an exception has drawn attention to the 
 fact by making an impression upon the mind 
 of being an exception, which is thus a proof 
 that somehow or other one had gotten an- 
 other impression of a rule. In nothing is 
 it more necessary not to dogmatize, to have 
 the open mind, to understand that every- 
 thing changes, that all things are in a per- 
 petual flux and flow than in the newspaper. 
 You can no more, in discussing the news- 
 paper, set your course, tie your sheet, and 
 fasten your rudder in the perpetual moving 
 alterations of the sea of journalism than 
 you can on a flawy day off a coast strewn 
 with reefs and spit and boulder, with the 
 tide running and the wind veering. But 
 the broad general facts, even on a day such 
 as I have sketched, the channel marked on 
 the chart and the course that must be laid 
 and taken, remain unchanged and constant. 
 The daily newspaper as a daily newspaper 
 is representative and not for personal ex- 
 ploitation. It may be exploited. It may
 
 68 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 exploit. All the exceptions in the world 
 may be urged, but still the broad fact re- 
 mains upon which I have been insisting, 
 which grows upon one through all the years 
 of work and remains the cheer and inspira- 
 tion of a weary hour, that as a man works, 
 his real masters are a silent multitude sleep- 
 ing while he labors. For them he is ac- 
 curate. For them he endeavors to give 
 accuracy the flame and fire of original ex- 
 pression. For them he is peering out into 
 the unknown vast into which the great ship 
 of state steadily drives, seeking, hoping, and 
 sometimes visibly achieving the task of so 
 expressing opinion through the years that 
 when the hour strikes the audience he has 
 addressed responds aright. 
 
 Other views there are. "The newspaper 
 is a private enterprise," said Charles Dudley 
 Warner, in 1881. "Its object is to make 
 money for its owner." The Common Law 
 has never accepted this view even of mere 
 material enterprises which trench on public 
 need and service. Much less is it true of 
 the newspaper, which our Constitutions 
 protect and our laws charge with public 
 duty.
 
 IV 
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 
 
 Personal equipment for the newspaper 
 varies through all the human gamut. Cer- 
 tain things are more necessary. Men can 
 succeed without any of them. In a day 
 when prowess in war turned on the physi- 
 cal equipment demanded by spear, mace, 
 sword, and bow, the greatest soldier of a 
 thousand years was Genghiz Khan, blind 
 in one eye, lame in his left leg, short in his 
 right arm. He had probably had a very 
 severe case of infantile paralysis; but he is 
 the only man that ever lived who drove 
 the red ploughshare of war from the Medi- 
 terranean to the Yellow Sea. So in all 
 callings. I can but take up and present 
 the average demand and the general chance. 
 
 Early in newspaper work, personal access 
 or address is important, though able, well- 
 equipped men win without this. Any physi- 
 cal lack, lameness, hard hearing, deficient 
 eyesight, imperfect enunciation count in 
 
 69
 
 70 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 all callings. All have been surmounted, 
 but I judge from experience and observa- 
 tion that they are more of a handicap for 
 the newspaperman than for other callings 
 which demand education. There are places 
 in the law ofifice for the man who can col- 
 late cases, in medicine for the laboratory 
 worker, in engineering for desk work, in 
 the clergy for social service. The news- 
 paper ofhce is more exacting. "There are 
 no fans in Hell," runs an Arab proverb. 
 
 A man needs to be physically sound all 
 through for the newspaper. I am, through- 
 out in this volume, working with the daily 
 in mind for two reasons. The dye masters 
 the dyer's hand. My life is all newspaper. 
 Its resounding audience makes all else in the 
 periodical or book tame. The newspaper 
 has the future. It has sapped the religious 
 weekly, the literary and political weekly, 
 many magazines and literary monthlies. 
 The only weeklies and monthlies that last 
 and have an adequate circulation to-day are 
 those that draw nearest to the newspaper 
 and its Sunday supplement. This has slain 
 much dear in the past, dear to men of letters. 
 The quarterly that began for the English-
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 71 
 
 speaking world with the Edinburgh Review, 
 the old Quarterly, and our North American 
 Review at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century, the weekly which opened between 
 1830 and i860 in the AthencBum, the Spec- 
 tator, the Saturday Review in England, and 
 the Independent, the Nation, and the Out- 
 look in this country, the magazine which 
 had its best exemplar in Blackwood' s in 
 Great Britain and here in Harper's, are all 
 still published, but their own public weight 
 and general demand are not what they were. 
 The daily has gradually invaded each of 
 their fields and presents what they once did 
 to larger and larger areas of circulation. 
 This is the rising tide of Democracy. As 
 yet, it shows no ebb and those who read this 
 page in adolescence, when they have had the 
 years and experience of the writer will see 
 dailies as much improved in their scope, 
 method, events, and illustration as the daily 
 of to-day outdoes the little four or eight page 
 daily on which I "worked with Dana" as 
 one of the Washington correspondents of 
 the New York Sun. But what good report- 
 ing it had ! 
 
 Newspaper life is necessarily a strain on
 
 72 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 health. The morning newspaperman for 
 years of his active Hfe will be in his office 
 until one A. M. always, and often until two. 
 He works under pressure. He is in his 
 opening years, as a reporter, necessarily ir- 
 regular in his meals. This irregularity hits 
 the evening newspaperman who has as 
 well to meet the pernicious habit of early 
 rising in a community whose hours of rest 
 and relaxation run to midnight. News- 
 paper life is much more irregular than it 
 needs to be, but I am not giving advice for 
 the few perfect and generally dull souls who 
 are orderly in their twenties, but for those 
 who, in the ginger years, bite off all they 
 can chew and sometimes more. No man 
 and no woman ought to turn to the news- 
 paper who is not all sound and well, with a 
 strong constitution, having enough self- 
 control not to eat twice what has disagreed 
 once. The habit of care for the minor pro- 
 tection of health needs to be cultivated. 
 All the higher callings have their nervous 
 strain, but the newspaperman rivals the 
 doctor and the engineer in sudden physical 
 strains and demands which tax all a man's 
 strength.
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 73 
 
 When I entered the city room of the New 
 York World in September, 1873, nothing 
 startled me more than the appalHng youth 
 of those about me, of my superiors in par- 
 ticular. The appalling youth of the Ameri- 
 can newspaper ofifiice comes home to me 
 even more in 1921 than in 1873 and its 
 abiding presence is adequate evidence of 
 the strain of the newspaper. Insurance 
 occupation tables as yet throw little light 
 on the mortality of the calling, but with 
 the conspicuous exceptions of Franklin and 
 Bryant, the notable members of the call- 
 ing have reached no great age, an additional 
 proof that the vocation requires sound 
 health for success. 
 
 Address is the foremost quality the news- 
 paperman needs in his work. It is a griev- 
 ous handicap for him if he does not easily 
 remember faces and names. To have this 
 gift is a perpetually recurring advantage. 
 By careful inquiry, checking off successive 
 experiences, I found that Hiram Calkins, 
 conspicuous in New York State for his 
 newspaper knowledge of men and parties 
 from 1855 to 1890, knew by name and 
 countenance at least 50,000 individuals. He
 
 74 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 could scarcely stir in thronged ways with- 
 out meeting some one he knew who could 
 give him useful information in his field. 
 Through a large part of the work of a news- 
 paperman success in acquiring news turns 
 on a capacity to awake immediate confi- 
 dence. The "good mixer," the man or wo- 
 man who can lead a complete stranger to 
 talk freely, profits by the capacity. 
 
 Mere joy in writing, mere desire to write, 
 by itself, plays a relatively small share as 
 an indication of fitness for newspaper work. 
 Such a bent is usually subjective. It looks 
 to self-expression. It is a turn toward 
 authorship and not an enthusiasm for news. 
 The man who has this passion to write 
 only too often makes a nuisance of himself 
 in the newspaper.* 
 
 Facility and rapidity in turning out good 
 clean copy is of the utmost value in the news- 
 paper office. The typewriter has turned 
 pen and pencil out of the newspaper. All 
 copy has to be typewritten. A boy look- 
 ing toward the newspaper ought to be using 
 
 * Journalism as a training and preparation for literature 
 is discussed in a succeeding chapter: "To Literature 
 Through Journalism."
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 75 
 
 the typewriter before he is ten years of age, 
 the earher the better. Composition on the 
 typewriter should be as easy, as exact, and 
 as feHcitous as with the pen, more so. The 
 prime deficiency in the whole teaching of 
 children in our schools is that they are al- 
 lowed to use the pen when they ought to 
 begin with the typewriter. Mastery of the 
 typewriter should be secured at the earliest 
 moment. Its operation becomes as uncon- 
 scious as the pen. In training for the news- 
 paper and in the newspaper itself, this is a 
 continuing asset. A man ought to be able 
 to turn out 1,000 words of clean copy in an 
 hour. The expert can reach twice that. 
 A thousand words an hour is close to the 
 limit of speed with the pen. 
 
 The habit and use of rapid reading is as 
 important in the newspaper calling as the 
 swift production of clean copy. A skilled 
 man ought to be able to give a good ab- 
 stract of a newspaper column of leaded 
 nonpareil in ninety seconds. He should be 
 able to give a fair outline of a sixteen-page 
 newspaper, foreign and local news, the mar- 
 ket, editorial page, special stories, and criti- 
 cism in twenty minutes. Ten minutes more
 
 76 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 should give him all the small stuff and the 
 run of the advertising. No beginner can do 
 this, but he can begin training himself. 
 There is no better specific preparation for 
 service on a particular paper than reading 
 its issues thoroughly for three months before. 
 The neophyte will miss much; but he will 
 also gain much. Ability to read fast, accur- 
 ately, and retentiously is not a widely dif- 
 fused gift. Some never gain it. Richard 
 Watson Gilder, editor of the Century for 
 many years, with ideal qualification, said 
 that Theodore Roosevelt and a newspaper 
 worker were the two swiftest readers he had 
 ever known, in the double test of covering 
 ground and giving an adequate summary. 
 For Roosevelt his amazing acquirement of 
 knowledge very largely turned on his patient 
 effort, from early in life, to read rapidly. 
 
 Any boy who has a real ambition for the 
 newspaper cannot do better than begin train- 
 ing himself in swift, attentive reading. A 
 large part of the human race puts its brains 
 to bed when it begins to read a book, and 
 those of this mindless group think of every- 
 thing but the news in a newspaper when 
 they are reading it. This is waste, folly, and
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT -]-] 
 
 abuse of all the blessings of Cadmus, Guten- 
 berg, Richard Hoe, and Merganthaler, bene- 
 factors all. 
 
 A swift, sound eye is needed, but not nec- 
 essary, to swift, intelligent, adhesive reading. 
 Henry Watterson, blessings on him, had but 
 one eye, it had a focal reach of about an inch, 
 and yet he would shuck the news and sense 
 out of a newspaper as quick as any journalist 
 living. Joseph Pulitzer, whose eyes, alas, 
 finally failed him, passed newspapers In four 
 tongues through his mind, as the unbound 
 sheaves are drawn through the great giant 
 thresher, leaving the wheat behind. 
 
 By amazing resolution and the use of 
 highly trained assistance he continued his 
 newspaper reading and knowledge after sight 
 was gone. A journalist lives by his eyes. 
 Weakness there is sure to appear. No man 
 ought to think of entering on newspaper 
 work without having his eyes thoroughly ex- 
 amined by a competent ophthalmologist. A 
 failure to do this often brings on nervous de- 
 pression, serious neurasthenia, indigestion, 
 premature breakdown and, in some cases, 
 permanently Impaired eyesight. 
 
 The studies of the journalist are dealt with
 
 78 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 in the chapter on Preparation, but before 
 formal preparation, aside from the careful 
 husbanding of physical powers and the sug- 
 gestions already made, the personal ability 
 and equipment of the journalist needs to be 
 supplemented by the assiduous reading of 
 books. The great journalists have been con- 
 suming readers. They read the newspaper 
 in and out of season, and they read the 
 solid informing books ; not the single-volume 
 things. The boy that yearns for the news- 
 paper will read six or seven volume books 
 that have the wide horizon and multifarious 
 knowledge which gives perspective to the 
 mind through life. This reading will be of 
 no use, however, unless a man has a nose 
 for news and the sensing mind which uses 
 knowledge but never displays it. 
 
 The reference habit needs to be begun 
 early. Pass no word, name, place, or event 
 without getting it into its particular place. 
 Do this with a Century Dictionary, steadily, 
 habitually, continually, and you will pour 
 the fertilizing stream over your mind like 
 the waters of Old Nile, to furnish harvests 
 for the future and the many. 
 
 Sustained attention which sees all, watches
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUIPMENT 79 
 
 each, and notes every incident as it comes 
 some have by nature, all can acquire, as 
 equipment. Once acquired, there is no part 
 of the multifarious work of the newspaper 
 which is not enriched by it in years to come. 
 The final supreme gift of the journalist is 
 vision. The greater gods of the calling have 
 all had this gift. They saw the battle from 
 afar and caught victory with the eye of 
 assured faith. James Gordon Bennett, the 
 elder, deserved the severe condemnation of 
 his own day, but even he had the vision of 
 the many knowing what only the few had 
 before possessed. Men of a wider range and 
 a loftier prospect saw an ampler vision, and 
 by the vision splendid were on their way 
 attended, nor let it fade to the light of com- 
 mon day. So Franklin saw the triumph of 
 democracy, and Cobbett the fall of privilege. 
 The vision cometh not with observation. It 
 rests on supreme faith in the great tide of 
 events, in the infallibility of the advance, in 
 the certain triumph of the greater good, 
 though all the power of hell be arrayed 
 against it. This has supported newspaper- 
 men in the pillory and given strength to face 
 death as they fought in the gates of the peo-
 
 8o THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 pie with the aHen enemies of the light, 
 through long years to serve a gainsaying 
 generation and see triumph at last. 
 
 This cometh only as men have early 
 sought the vision, waited for it through years 
 and never doubted the larger hope and the 
 overarching Providence which builds the 
 shrine of the diviner future. With this all 
 things are possible. Without this the jour- 
 nalist but wanders in a changing show, chaf- 
 fers in the market-place, and finds things new 
 and old to no purpose and no result. Not in 
 this spirit did He speak who saw afar the 
 newspaper day when all things secret should 
 be revealed and the housetop should pro- 
 claim what had been said as the jealous 
 secret of the inner chambers of privilege.
 
 V 
 
 LETTERS AND THE NEWSPAPER 
 
 As author and newspaperman are or may 
 be both paid for what they write and pub- 
 lish, by a natural confusion of thought and 
 experience many men and women come to 
 the market gate of the newspaper with the 
 wares of the author. 
 
 They rarely sell them. Many books have 
 been made from the columns of the news- 
 paper. Arnold's Friendship' s Garland, Rob- 
 inson Crusoe, and Kipling's sketches are not 
 alone as veritable literature dug out of the 
 newspaper. Most newspaper stuff when it 
 appears in a book reads rather thin. The 
 test is different; the values differ. The 
 newspaper was wanted that day and no 
 other. Literature is for all time. 
 
 The newspaper at the same time has been 
 sought by many men of letters, who after a 
 season went to their own place, and a large 
 number of men, who seek the daily, in their 
 utmost souls want to write books. They 
 
 8i
 
 82 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 are usually disappointed. Nothing is so 
 fatal to the selected arts as the companion- 
 ship of their democratic substitutes. The 
 jealous muse might brook a rival, but she 
 will not accept a mere substitute. Hugh 
 Miller points out in his Schools and School 
 Masters nothing is worse for the possible 
 painter than to take to sign painting, the 
 aspiring sculptor to take to stone-cutting, or 
 the poet to write newspaper verse. If a 
 man is called to verse, he had better write 
 it and starve instead of going half-way and 
 getting nowhere. Lowell said to me that 
 the mistake of his life was to compromise 
 on teaching literature instead of writing 
 verse. "If I had only kept to that," said 
 he, with a look of infinite sorrow and dis- 
 appointment, "I might have done some- 
 thing." Richard Watson Gilder was in the 
 habit of saying that English poets were wiser 
 than American in keeping at all costs to their 
 one task, instead of tilling many fields. I 
 am not myself quite persuaded that this 
 was the only difference between English and 
 American poets. Walt Whitman told me 
 that he was unable to write until he left the 
 newspaper and all its works, daily, weekly,
 
 LETTERS AND NEWSPAPER 83 
 
 and monthly. Even then he said, "the best 
 thing that happened to me was that all my 
 articles were rejected. If anybody had ac- 
 cepted any articles, even one'' (with great 
 emphasis) "I would have been lost. I 
 would have begun to write like that, for I 
 needed the money cruelly. But as they re- 
 jected all and I could not sell anything. I 
 wrote to satisfy myself alone." And so 
 Leaves of Grass became meadow and pasture 
 of a distant future. 
 
 Crome, "old Crome," is at least one ex- 
 ample of a painter who took to coach- 
 painting and became a great painter. Now 
 in the centennial of his death he looms high 
 and afar, if not the greatest of English land- 
 scape-painters, certainly one of the greatest. 
 Every square inch of his canvas tells the 
 story of the artificer who had learned to 
 spread paint with amazing, even skill before 
 he became a painter; but, after all, but too 
 many painters never do anything but spread 
 paint. So in letters there are those whom 
 the apprenticeship of the newspaper made 
 craftsmen before the inspiration of letters 
 lifted them into literature. George Bernard 
 Shaw is a case in point.
 
 84 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 But in the main the newspaper kills letters 
 in a man. My uniform advice to those 
 whose work shows some distant touch of the 
 divine has been that it was better to starve 
 oneself than one's muse. Nobody has ac- 
 cepted this advice, but some tried to do both 
 and never proved either good newspapermen 
 or good men of letters. The magazine is 
 sometimes a sort of cold frame in which the 
 sprigs of genius can be started, potted out, 
 and kept safe from frost. At least the poet 
 himself can be ; his poems are apt to be a bit 
 frost-bitten. Magazine editors are always 
 saying that they receive a great deal of 
 poetry, but they print am.azingly little. 
 The market for verse, however, is rising. 
 Some poets pay an income tax in this coun- 
 try and many in England, but the bottom 
 notch, the point where the poet's income 
 escapes a tax is in England under $750 a 
 year for bachelors. 
 
 In two fields the newspaper is of value to 
 the author. Newspaper labor and life, its 
 limitless contact with the moving show, its 
 new knowledge of men, women, and the 
 haps and hazards of their contact, its experi- 
 ence of the actual is of unquestionable value
 
 LETTERS AND NEWSPAPER 85 
 
 to the writer of fiction. In my heart of 
 hearts I have always believed that two or 
 three years as a reporter would have made 
 a man of Henry James. A very wide range 
 of novelists have been newspapermen — 
 Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Howells, 
 Kipling, Davis, Poole, Sinclair, Dreiser, and 
 Fanny Hurst all sat in to the newspaper 
 game. There are many more, and the man 
 who has himself been a reporter, handled 
 copy, and smelled both manifold and proofs 
 is perpetually catching the scent of both in 
 modern fiction. There was truth in Zola's 
 declaration — he also lived in our Arcadia — 
 that there is no place in which to form style 
 as on the unyielding anvil of the newspaper 
 under the inexorable hammer of events. 
 The newspaper gives something to fiction 
 nothing else does. Reality, crass fact, the 
 sense of exact length, words written to mea- 
 sure, concinnity, the very accent of the dia- 
 lect of callings, places, characters, and catas- 
 trophes. 
 
 For fiction and fiction first, therefore, the 
 newspaper has its value. The poet, like the 
 silkworm, must spin his own silken cord. 
 Naught can give him local color or inspira-
 
 86 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 tion but his own personal experience. In 
 history-writing journahsm Is a good school. 
 Gibbon's brief experience In the Hampshire 
 militia helped him to catch the tread of the 
 Roman legion across the span of a thousand 
 years. No one but a newspaperman, Justin 
 McCarthy, could have written the History 
 of Our Own Time. Only a man trained in 
 writing about people could have drawn 
 Strachey's marvellous and misleading por- 
 trait of Queen Victoria. Much of Matthew 
 Arnold's first criticism was written for a 
 daily, the Pall Mall Gazette, but most of It 
 for the more leisurely atmosphere of a maga- 
 zine. When he came to this country In 1885, 
 he had never received over £20 for a maga- 
 zine article. 
 
 No sharp dividing line can be drawn In 
 these matters. Isolated examples count for 
 little. The radical difiference lies not in form 
 but in purpose, means, and end. By nature 
 and by choice, to repeat, this man prefers 
 100,000 readers In a day and that man 1,000 
 readers each year for a hundred years and 
 then oblivion, save in the history of litera- 
 ture. This is particularly true of minor 
 poets, who are dug up like mummies for ex-
 
 LETTERS AND NEWSPAPER 87 
 
 hibltion and a label. Each man gets what 
 he wants. Each is using the tool of writing 
 (his means) for a different end and purpose. 
 It is foolish to try to make comparisons and 
 establish a standard of relation. You can- 
 not add bushels and pounds, pints and 
 ounces. 
 
 The wise and only plan is to understand 
 clearly this gap and gulf between the two, 
 and make a choice accordingly. Many 
 books are as ephemeral as the newspaper. 
 Poor Richard is none the less a classic be- 
 cause it first appeared in periodical form. 
 But those who stand at the threshold need 
 to be open-eyed. There is a chance, though 
 a minutely small chance, that the newspaper 
 will make known an author whose name the 
 world will not willingly let die. O. Henry 
 is an example. I know no one whose work 
 was appearing in The Sun at the same time 
 that his stories appeared who saw they were 
 fiction of a high and final order. Full well, 
 I know I did not. "Good stufT" I thought 
 it; but if its worth was known and seen, its 
 height was taken by none. Like instances 
 are so few, taking the entire range of the 
 newspaper and measuring its vast torrent of
 
 88 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 print, that the judicious course for the be- 
 ginner is to dredge your soul until you reach 
 rock bottom. The newspaper fight is on all 
 the time. There are blows to give and take ; 
 causes to support, to see go to victory or to 
 defeat, no share of newspaper work but 
 touches the quick of the current day. For 
 some this call is irresistible; but such need 
 to see also that their work will be buried in 
 the files, irrecoverable there. It will have 
 no hereafter. It will pass with the using. 
 The single solitary poem, if it be verse and 
 not mere versification, will last, as has the 
 anonymous Greek epigram scrawled by a 
 passing traveller on the statue of Memnon 
 at Thebes, which has outlived God, priest, 
 and king. 
 
 Choose ye therefore this day whom ye 
 will serve. Serve two masters ye cannot. 
 Either turn to the service of the great mul- 
 titude and, also, deceive not yourself, the 
 immediate pay and pelf which yields the 
 larger support; or work alone and apart, 
 careless of the present and careful only of 
 a future, no line you write may even see. 
 Nor is it an easy life to pay your bills in 
 this century and wait for your fame in
 
 LETTERS AND NEWSPAPER 89 
 
 another. But let there be no repining. 
 See the end from the beginning. One more 
 forgotten book is really little more than 
 unread files. 
 
 Ignorance renders this decision difficult 
 for serious youth, and nothing is more seri- 
 ous than youth. Age is trivial and light- 
 headed by the solemn awakening of the con- 
 scious mind. The sound of the battle from 
 afar, the voice of the captains, and the shout- 
 ing seen and heard not from the towers of 
 the Elders of Troy but from the open 
 porches of study trod between the years of 
 fifteen and twenty-five, give the solemnest 
 hours- of life. In this hour, aid and direction 
 will be gained by patiently finding out what 
 the current gods and near gods of current 
 youth have themselves done in the early 
 years. For some, if not all of those of the 
 last one hundred years, it is possible to find 
 out what work was done by them in the 
 early years, their first essays, from, let us 
 say, eighteen to twenty-five or thirty. This 
 is a steadying experience. In my day one 
 asked, Wliat was Macaulay doing at college ? 
 What had Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson 
 written before twenty-five ? What was the
 
 90 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge verse of those in the 
 mid-heaven of fame in the 'seventies ? What 
 was the early market-seeking work of Car- 
 lyle, Dickens, and George EHot ? The Amer- 
 ican names were few and far to seek, but 
 Bryant's first work, Longfellow's, Whittier's, 
 and Lowell's could be had, and the early 
 pages of the North American Review had 
 their lesson of work early done. The prize 
 poems of Oxford and Cambridge are all 
 accessible in print and most useful for the 
 young writer in order to measure his youth- 
 ful work against the early output of those 
 who later attained. College periodicals fur- 
 nish similar comparisons in this countr>^; 
 but, save in fugitive verse, the work of the 
 college future great has not been collated 
 and published here as in England. 
 
 Such search is a steadying experience. It 
 has its illusions In the reflected glory shed 
 on early work by later achievement, but it Is 
 better than nothing. Better much than the 
 vague advice of seniors, for between Dives 
 Senior and the youth In Abraham's bosom 
 a great gulf is fixed. Any writing boy or 
 girl (pretty much every one nowadays gets 
 into print in high school and college) who
 
 LETTERS AND NEWSPAPER 91 
 
 enters on this sober and disillusioning com- 
 parison will find that it clears the prospect. 
 It gives standards of comparison. You 
 learn what real ability was like when caught 
 young and immature. You learn, too, that 
 there are still lower deeps of callow compo- 
 sition and a rawer green immaturity in 
 your own work and that of your fellows. 
 At one point, one hates to make the confes- 
 sion, the comparison is misleading because 
 the task of teaching youth to write was and 
 Is done so much better in the English univer- 
 sities than in our colleges. I still carry the 
 smart of the discovery that in an inter- 
 change of letters between Oxford and Har- 
 vard rowing men, the former did ten lines 
 of print — the letters were in the newspapers 
 — so much better than the American oars- 
 men. This is still true and has to be re- 
 membered. 
 
 I say all this because I have seen such 
 grievous and needless waste in the precious 
 years of the twenties and sometimes in the 
 thirties by those who tried to force literary 
 wares on a reluctant market. Many great 
 have had their work rejected, but all re- 
 jected are not great. The waste of which I
 
 92 
 
 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 speak is not merely of time. The man hunt- 
 ing a market leads an irregular life. His 
 time is not ordered and in demand. With 
 few are habits of steady work maintained. 
 Eating your heart is not a healthy diet. 
 Fortunately the small magazine, the vogue 
 of the short story, and the market demand 
 for verse give longer commons to the muses 
 than in the past, but their sheets are as 
 scant as ever on their restless beds.
 
 VI 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH* 
 
 Bergdoll "got what was coming to 
 him," said the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 
 an editorial and straightway apologized for 
 the phrase. Unnecessary ! The phrase was 
 good English, good newspaper English. 
 John Dewey is a philosopher foremost in 
 our day. Few living, I think none, have 
 more affected teaching for the better. The 
 world of thought is his debtor; not the 
 world of action. In his last article he says 
 of the war: "Most of the talk about jus- 
 tice and self-determination was bunk." He 
 would not and should not apologize over 
 the last word; though the future may chal- 
 lenge his utterance. A prophet is not with- 
 out wisdom, save on his own time. 
 
 Over the use of "bunk" in an editorial 
 many a good leader-writer would have a 
 creepy distrust. We shun crisp diction, 
 fresh from the people. So all speech began. 
 
 * Reprinted by courtesy of the North American Review, 
 October, 1920. 
 
 93
 
 94 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 When a tongue ceases to spawn new words, 
 fresh phrases, novel images; thought and 
 progress stop also. Keats added over one 
 hundred and fifty new words to the vocabu- 
 lary of verse. In Alice's Adventures in 
 Wonderland and its sequel Lewis Carroll 
 (Charles L. Dodgson) added at least two- 
 score. These are of imagination all com- 
 pact. New thought ; new words. The closer 
 to daily life and speech is the writer's pen 
 or the click of the typewriter keys, the more 
 active, the more efficient, the more effective 
 is the utterance of the writer and the life of 
 the people. So long as accepted and ac- 
 ceptable writing accepts and shares the daily 
 changes of the vocabulary of the market- 
 place, so long as both live and move and 
 have their being in the sun of passion, action, 
 and achievement, the more lasting, pungent, 
 and penetrating is the literature of the 
 period. 
 
 The reverse has been but too often tried. 
 We know through human experience long 
 and wide what comes to land and people 
 when the writer's pen separates from the 
 speech of the soil and of the current day. 
 These fossils of literature are built into the
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 95 
 
 dead annals of the history of many lands and 
 letters also. They exist at the present time 
 in the mummied tongues of to-day. 
 
 Invasion or Isolation, new contacts with 
 foreign trade or internal development, bring 
 into being at some spot a new language. 
 Shock or struggle within or without, the in- 
 spiration of a new faith or a new civilization, 
 straightway add one more to the world's 
 literature. Happy he who writes in a 
 tongue untouched, with diction unused and 
 words unsullied, with the bloom and sharp 
 edge of fresh-minted coin. Out of these 
 conditions came Mohammed's Koran, fount 
 and foundation of a new faith and a new 
 literature In a new tongue, In which before 
 few had said aught of note save seven short 
 poems, as long as " Lycidas " or " Venus and 
 Adonis." The best of the Koran matches any 
 creative work in the same field, the field of 
 Job, Hebrew prophecy, and Psalms at their 
 best. This one book, two-thirds as large as 
 the New Testament, created a new religion, 
 a new code, a new philosophy of thought 
 and action, a new empire, new history, unto 
 this present hour. 
 
 "God gave the book to those who love
 
 96 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Him," said Mohammed. So of all great 
 letters and so of the newspaper daily, dear 
 in making and reading to those who desire 
 morning and evening to know the day's di- 
 vine event, newly made. But all the varied 
 melange of the Koran, lofty verse, philoso- 
 phy, legislation, folk-lore, tales of the mar- 
 ket, legends, Rabbinical and Christian, half 
 understood, these for all the centuries to 
 come were made the sole, sufhcient, and final 
 guide in Arabic on words, meanings, phras- 
 ing, sentencing, locutions, paradigms, syn- 
 tax, and rhetoric. All writers, save the 
 happy "large few stars" that create a new 
 literature, are oppressed with authority as 
 to words, sentences, subjects, and method. 
 We are always looking back instead of for- 
 ward to see how the man who is dead did it. 
 Writers carry through life the uneasy con- 
 sciousness that somewhere, somewhen, some- 
 how, there is a formula. Authority and 
 precedent have their value to society. Even 
 there, they do harm. To the writer they 
 are fatal. A school of journalism swarms 
 with young men and women who expect to 
 be shown how to write. It is the business of 
 the school to fill them with knowledge, to
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 97 
 
 inspire them with principle, to force them to 
 read the great in letters and then put 
 the young cubs on the trail of news and 
 opinion with technical knowledge of "edit- 
 ing" broadly considered. The only thing 
 certain about the best "newspaper story" of 
 yesterday is that it is not the best way for 
 to-morrow. It is easy in teaching writing 
 to correct grammar, point out solecisms, 
 misused words, an awkward construction, 
 an ill arrangement; but how to write well 
 and effectively, a man must learn for him- 
 self by endless toil, with now and then a 
 hint as to a happy phrase by one who writes 
 better. Style is half imitation, half crea- 
 tion. 
 
 The open proof of this is the gigantic ex- 
 periment of the Arab and Moslem world in 
 taking a work, great In the higher arts of 
 expression In prose and verse, which remade 
 half the old Roman world and created anew 
 In religion, In philosophy, in rule, in archi- 
 tecture, in all the decorative arts, and in 
 twelve centuries of history, and making the 
 usage of this book the rule of the writer for 
 all time in Arabic and in associated tongues, 
 like Persian and Turkish. Those who ad-
 
 98 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 venture on prose or in verse In any of these 
 tongues, but most of all in Arabic, are pro- 
 foundly influenced and controlled by the in- 
 exorable tradition and standard of the Koran 
 and the seven poems I have mentioned, the 
 Moallakat, and in general by the words and 
 usage of the Prophet and the first century 
 after him. 
 
 The spoken tongue of Arabic went the 
 way of all the languages of the earth. It 
 developed racy and idiomatic dialects. They 
 differed in pronunciation, but less than most 
 offshoots from a central tongue. They are 
 often cited as mutually incomprehensible to 
 each other. This is an error. I have talked 
 with men speaking these dialects from the 
 Tigris to the Atlantic, from the flank of the 
 South slope of the Taurus to Yemen in 
 South Arabia. 
 
 These Arab dialects have a seductive folk- 
 lore and folk-song. They have their verse 
 and their prose. They have absorbed for- 
 eign words. They have modified paradigm 
 and syntax. They meet all the needs of the 
 common day. But no one accepts these 
 tongues for literature. If one Is to write 
 verse that commands attention and gives
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 99 
 
 him a place In letters, he turns to the Arabic 
 of thirteen centuries ago. If he writes prose 
 he must turn to the ancient vocabulary of 
 the past. All that has come to the tongue 
 since that period must be excluded. Even 
 an editorial in a daily Arabic paper is apt 
 to use the diction of the past. 
 
 So our Hellenic friends have deprived the 
 plain man and woman in Greece of the read- 
 ing of the New Testament in a tongue under- 
 standed of the people by making it a penal 
 offense to sell or give away a copy of the 
 New Testament in Romaic or modern 
 Greek, because ancient Greek is the tongue 
 of Greece. Nothing must be done to break 
 this fiction. Greek editors and Greek au- 
 thors painfully use in its old form a tongue 
 that has gone through a thousand years of 
 change. More ancient Greek words are used 
 now, more ancient forms; but the practical 
 result is that Greece has two tongues, one 
 used by the educated, modelled on a dead 
 language, and the tongue used by the great 
 mass as their day-by-day speech. 
 
 In a reverse effort Spanish literature has 
 tried to impose on Catalonia the classic Cas- 
 tilian, the tongue of Cervantes and Ibanez,
 
 100 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 with a similar dislocation between the lan- 
 guage of books and the speech of daily life. 
 In Greece a strong party fights for Romaic, 
 modern Greek, and are held traitors to Hel- 
 lenic tradition just as the Catalans, who 
 have revived the use in letters of an ancient 
 and effective tongue, are stigmatized as se- 
 cessionists, false to the unity of Spain, 
 though in Catalonia the familiar speech is 
 older than Castilian Spanish. 
 
 Because China is older the problem there 
 is more complex. Confucius and the earlier 
 classics wrote in the tongue they used daily. 
 This became the tongue of letters. The lan- 
 guage of the mass in nearly three thousand 
 years has changed to a local patois, unintelli- 
 gible from province to province. While the 
 words have changed, the characters that rep- 
 resent them are unchanged. Letters and 
 official life keep the tongue of the past, un- 
 intelligible to the many. This thin film 
 stretches over the great empire, the only 
 means of communication. Below are the 
 vast millions with no common medium. 
 This palsies progress and creates impenetra- 
 ble social non-conductors between the masses 
 of each of the provinces. One more old
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH loi 
 
 tongue which prevents any common move- 
 ment, and must for years to come make a 
 real union of the Chinese people as a whole 
 impossible while current "revolutions" are 
 the work of the very few literate. 
 
 Always in these cases and many similar 
 among ancient tongues that began litera- 
 ture, written or unwritten, these phenomena 
 occur and recur and the same results follow 
 — unchanged and ancient tongues used by 
 the learned few, while the speech of the 
 many divides and changes until the speech 
 of the past and of the priestly and scholared 
 few stands apart. Why have the English- 
 speaking peoples kept together, while other 
 races are divided by dialects? To-day we 
 are 160,000,000 strong, and we can under- 
 stand each other from the pines and oaks of 
 the Orkneys, across America to the pines and 
 palms of New Zealand. 
 
 In all the tongues I have marshalled there 
 came a period of the greater letters. Such 
 periods are few. We complain of current 
 literary mediocrity. This is the rule. A 
 literary period which inspires and commands 
 a tongue and a race is of the rarest. The 
 English-speaking race has had but one, from
 
 102 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 the first play of Shakespeare in 1591 to the 
 close of " Paradise Lost " in 1665. Take out 
 King James's version of the Bible, Shake- 
 speare, Milton, and Bacon — what is left of 
 leadership in the prose and verse of the Eng- 
 lishry in world letters? Yet the race has 
 had its writers for a thousand years and fif- 
 teen, from the defeat of the Danes to the 
 defeat of the Germans. A span of eighty 
 years takes us from ^Eschylus to Plato, from 
 Catullus to Virgil. Take these periods, 
 Dante and Homer, out of European letters 
 and what is left ? Drum and fife, tinkling 
 brass and sounding cymbal, for the march 
 of lesser men in the pageant of letters. 
 
 These periods of inspiration come with 
 some one of the mightier literatures or of the 
 world religions. No great faith has won its 
 place without the gift of expression and of 
 utterance. Even Christianity has only pros- 
 pered as some great translation gave its 
 message. Now that at last we know out of 
 what manner of substance the members of 
 the New Testament were fashioned together, 
 we see with what simple but surpassing effect 
 its brief annals are presented in the Greek of 
 the many and not of the few, as was meet
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 103 
 
 with a message heard gladly by the common 
 people. When these fruitful and teeming 
 moments come, big with the future of a new 
 tongue, a new literature, and a new faith, all 
 men, all races have desired to build three 
 tabernacles on this Mount of Transfigura- 
 tion and abide in them, hearing these voices 
 forever. Every successive writer yearns to 
 write in this dialect with this vocabulary, 
 and the foolish learned desire and command 
 that he shall. 
 
 But while the books of the iew, be they 
 literature or only just writing, change not, 
 the tongue of the mass can be held in no 
 such silken leading-strings. No one can put 
 a hook into the nose of that leviathan of 
 language, the utterance of the many. Every 
 generation it changes. New words come in. 
 Old words go out. Events bear new words. 
 A great war is as good as the publication of 
 a new glossary. Conquerors or slaves come 
 in, it matters not which. They bring their 
 words with them. Accents move forward 
 or backward, under some subtle law not 
 deciphered. Complicated paradigms, elabo- 
 rate declensions, and conjugations are worn 
 smooth, clipped, dropped, or elided. Affixes
 
 104 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 and suffixes and pestilent little syllables 
 dropped in the middle of verbs and nouns 
 are swallowed like Korah's children. 
 
 The written tongue of letters keeps them. 
 The spoken word sheds them in the tides of 
 time like a swimmer in a one-piece bathing- 
 suit. A circumflex will remain in French, 
 the touchstone of a missing 5" which hissed 
 through Latin centuries and grew soft and 
 disappeared in the liquid note of the Midi. 
 The trick of the triple Vs in Arabic will be 
 lost and, as a little manual of pronunciation 
 I picked up in Morocco tells of an ancient 
 leader of the prayers of the Faithful that he 
 spoke the three Vs as none had since the 
 days of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, 
 and none will until Gabriel calls the tribes 
 of men to judgment. Chinese becomes a 
 question of tones incredibly difficult to learn. 
 English drops its h's in its 'ome and hell 
 retains the absent letter among a people 
 schooled by the Puritan schoolmaster. 
 Broader and more impassable becomes the 
 gap between daily gab and the measured 
 "regular" speech of the learned and lettered. 
 Jerome's masculine version of the Bible, an 
 amazing translation, the unsurpassed monu-
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 105 
 
 ment of the later Latin, will give priests, 
 clerks, and statesmen a common tongue over 
 all Europe, while the unlearned and unlet- 
 tered scatter in two great sundered flocks, 
 wandering like sheep without a shepherd in 
 the branching tracks of the two great pas- 
 tures of European tongues, Teuton and Ro- 
 mance, with an hybrid offspring fringing the 
 border-lands of each. 
 
 Our 160,000,000, spread over the isles of 
 the oceans and throned on a continent, show 
 less differences in the tongue of highways 
 and the hedges, of the mart and the acad- 
 emy, in factory and fashion, than exists in 
 peoples of a fourth our number. Why ? 
 
 First, because your Protestant insisted 
 that every man must hear the Pentecostal 
 message and read it as well in the tongue in 
 which he was born. In general literacy, in 
 the determination that the whole population 
 shall read and write, the English folk lead all 
 the world but the Protestant lands of Europe 
 and of Bohemia, so early Protestant in 
 spirit. 
 
 Second, because the American newspaper, 
 the English colonial press, and, in a measure, 
 the press of the United Kingdom have been
 
 io6 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 hospitable and ready to accept the illegiti- 
 mate verbal offspring of the street, born on 
 the "wrong side of the blanket" of scholar- 
 ship and of the printing-press. 
 
 We of the craft of the newspaper have 
 treated these words as Shakespeare treated 
 Faulconridge, who gave him, when needs 
 were, the centre of the stage. Samuel John- 
 son wanted us all to go on writing like Addi- 
 son, Steele, and himself. If he had won out 
 we should have had, as in French, a phrasing 
 of the Academy for leader and chronique and 
 another for the street and the provinces. It 
 is one of the advantages of reading Willy 
 that you find in her pages what French peo- 
 ple really use. I am emboldened also to 
 introduce her to these pages because she is 
 the favorite novelist of a great French 
 philosopher. 
 
 But English, unlike French, Spanish, and 
 Italian, or even German, is essentially one. 
 Our vocabulary is prodigious, even in the 
 newspaper. I have met, without ever really 
 knowing, a journalist who after forty years 
 of work counted the words he knew he had 
 used in every twentieth page of Webster's 
 Unabridged. The result showed that he
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 107 
 
 had employed in all about 30,000 to 35,000 
 words. Try the test, if you are a writer, and 
 you will be startled how a word you have 
 once used springs to memory as you march 
 up and down Webster's broad thoroughfare 
 of words. W^hat a range the newspaper has 1 
 Through its catholic use of language English 
 has been kept like a marching regiment in 
 close formation. Shibboleths excite in news- 
 paper English, but not dialects. We have 
 at least sixty per cent of the newspaper 
 circulation of the world. Our consumption 
 of news print points to that. In the old, old 
 days, when the exchange desk had not lost 
 its high place in the newspaper office, I read 
 exchanges for some months. The list cov- 
 ered the world of newspapers in English. 
 There Lanigan was told of the Akhoond of 
 Swat, whose death had come to The World 
 office in a single A. P. "flash," and later, too, 
 in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette I 
 read the "City of Dreadful Night," which 
 swept me with the seething memory of an 
 August night in Mosul. The English of the 
 newspapers on that exchange list in all the 
 homes of our brotherhood of the imposing 
 stone, was careless and promiscuous, but it
 
 io8 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 never merits the other accusation. The 
 newspaper has done world-wide work in 
 leadership by keeping us all reading and 
 therefore speaking the same English. 
 
 If Samuel Johnson had had his way we 
 should have become like the "Doktoren" of 
 the German leader writers, men who write 
 in a literary tongue. The greatest of them, 
 Harden, does not. Wilkes and Junius, 
 particularly Junius, misled us for a while. 
 Even over here, until Hale made over the 
 American editorial in the Boston Advertiser, 
 we were wandering in a desert of polyglottic 
 dignity. 
 
 One, Benjamin Franklin, saved us. He 
 and Johnson lived parallel lives. Johnson 
 was born three years later and he died six 
 years earlier than Franklin. Both wrote 
 early and they wrote to the last. Each 
 turned to the periodical. They knew men, 
 letters, and affairs. On opposing sides, they 
 fought the issues and the battle of our Revo- 
 lution. Johnson died just as Franklin signed 
 the treaty of peace and of independence. In 
 the lists of public opinion, the style of Frank- 
 lin was pitted against the style of Johnson. 
 He was the inventor of newspaper English,
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 109 
 
 direct, immediate, knowing humor as well 
 as argument, using the speech of the people. 
 The Hterary world in England and here ac- 
 cepted the style of Johnson; the world of 
 men and of events the style of Franklin. 
 
 The world is unconsciously ruled by it 
 to-day. We all walk in Franklin's path for 
 ill or well. Samuel Johnson is a back num- 
 ber. His resonance, his even and easy flow, 
 his antithetic sentence, his sense of the past, 
 his vast vision of the long march of European 
 tongues from the stylus to the printing-press, 
 these are gone. He is with the other Pha- 
 raohs of the captivity and isolation of litera- 
 ture. Franklin was not altogether alone. 
 Defoe was before him. Cobbett came after. 
 But more than any other one man, Franklin, 
 the newspaper man, saved us from a separa- 
 tion and divorce of the English of the people 
 and the English of the writer. The tempta- 
 tion was to make the prose of the eighteenth 
 century a standard. Instead, the current of 
 the talk of the many and the diction of the 
 writer merged. The new words and phrases, 
 the changes in the details of speech, slang, 
 and the imagery of our American speech, all 
 these, through the newspapers, found their
 
 no THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 way into print and acceptance in the Ameri- 
 can newspaper. The "column" is a sort of 
 bedding bench where the new phrases and 
 words of the hour are set out as the gardener 
 beds and pots young plants before they go 
 to live in the garden-beds with an older 
 bloom. The sporting page diffuses the ar- 
 got of the hour in every athletic field. What 
 use a genius like O. Henry made of all this 
 in what we all admit is literature; but how 
 few of us, alumni of a morning daily now 
 gone, saw this when our Washington de- 
 spatches and city reports jostled his work 
 in the New York Sun ! 
 
 If any one desires to know how slang 
 should be and can be introduced to better 
 company, study O. Henry. He uses it for 
 atmosphere and flavor and does not make it 
 the warp and woof of his fabric, as the base- 
 ball reporter does too often. Even in this 
 difficult and cryptic field, how easily does a 
 master-hand like Mr. Grantland Rice, of 
 the New York Tribune, combine the pic- 
 turesque technic of the bleachers with dig- 
 nity, precision, and strokes of illuminating 
 humor worthy any field ! Charles A. Dana 
 had no hesitation in the use by his staff of
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH in 
 
 any two-fisted phrase of the streets, so It did 
 its work. He himself was keenly awake to 
 every change In a living tongue like English, 
 and no style could be purer and more Impec- 
 cable than his, born of study, of an amazing 
 capacity for language, a scholar In that 
 practical philology which aids a man to use 
 his own tongue the better and more effec- 
 tively. 
 
 The daily risk of newspapers and the indi- 
 vidual newspaper is that it will have an edi- 
 torial dialect of its own, that reporting will 
 become reportese, that criticism will be noth- 
 ing more than shaking a kaleidoscope of ad- 
 jectives, usually laudatory, and that each 
 department will obscure its message to the 
 average man by using terms known on Wall 
 Street, in trade, in the court-room or 
 "sports" and "theatrical" columns, but 
 fully understood nowhere else. The one 
 sure and only way to avoid this and, in- 
 stead, to keep newspaper English a living 
 link between the letters of the past and the 
 speech of the present. Is to know both, to 
 live in great letters as well as to live by the 
 last news. Unless this be done, newspaper 
 English will become but a dialect, and news«
 
 112 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 paper readers be separated from the diction 
 of the past. If any young writer ask how 
 best to do this, let him not only Hve with the 
 great, but train his sense of words by freely 
 using the Concordance of Shakespeare, the 
 Bible, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, 
 Browning, and Wordsworth. These are the 
 true guide and dictionary of the writer in the 
 use and meaning of words. 
 
 The ofifice of newspaper English is to be 
 the interpreter of the ways and works of all 
 men and all women to each and all. For 
 this it needs to draw freely from all sources 
 and to share the beatitude of Isaiah : " Bless- 
 ed are ye who sow beside all waters." Noth- 
 ing is too recent in slang for its columns, and 
 nothing too old in classic letters. 
 
 Occasions there are and subjects, or 
 weighty or solemn or both, which every 
 trained newspaperman knows call for the 
 English of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the 
 loftiest prose. Lincoln's "Gettysburg Ad- 
 dress" has but three words not in the Bible 
 — "continent," "proposition," and "civil" 
 — and these are all in Shakespeare. This is 
 the diction in which a man should soak him- 
 self, if he wishes to have weight with those
 
 NEWSPAPER ENGLISH 113 
 
 who read. He will know then when wisely 
 to add the word of the hour. 
 
 Taken as a whole the newspaper was 
 never better written and never did its work 
 better in any of its fields. If you doubt 
 this, read the files ! They will dispel the 
 myth of a past when all wrote well on some 
 one daily; but the highest success of news- 
 paper English and the most important office 
 and duty has been discharged in keeping the 
 great march of English abreast and pre- 
 venting a great tongue from being divided 
 into a language of the past for letters and 
 a language of the present for common and 
 daily use, neither sharing the life of the 
 other.
 
 VII 
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 
 
 The training of the journalist has run 
 through the same course and followed the 
 same social curve as have all the callings 
 known to men, and in these latter days to 
 men and women. Every calling began as 
 a "mystery," a mingling of knowledge, of 
 appropriate technic needed, and ministry 
 with those who had acquired the "art and 
 mystery" of the vocation. This is the 
 phrase used in old indentures of the appren- 
 tice, but which in a mediaeval city finally 
 brought one to membership, let us say, in 
 the "Worshipful Company of Carpenters." 
 This guild was not only worshipful because 
 it commanded respect, but because it had its 
 own worship, its gods, its worthies, its ritual 
 and its secret rites of initiation, and its cov- 
 enant of mutual loyalty and common action, 
 particularly as to wages received and charges 
 for service. 
 
 Personal contact with those who worked 
 
 114
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 115 
 
 in the trade or calling was the indispensa- 
 ble beginning. Exactly as a family had its 
 household gods, its ritual, and its traditional 
 conduct, so had the trade. In every work 
 and calling there has been a long struggle be- 
 fore anything else was created. The special 
 isolated school for a profession is in its gen- 
 eral acceptance a little over a century old. 
 Subjects needed in law, medicine, and di\'in- 
 ity were taught and made the subject of lec- 
 tures in universities very early, as witness 
 Greek and Roman institutions of learning, 
 but the final admission to the calling re- 
 quired personal work in the office and home 
 of lawyer, physician, and clergyman. When 
 the separate school was proposed, it was al- 
 ways hard fought. For a longer or shorter 
 time, the fact that it was a separate school 
 was disguised. Lectures were given in law, 
 but only to students "entered" in lawyers' 
 offices, their work there running from sweep- 
 ing out the office to reading law. Even 
 after it was clear that the training of the 
 school was successful in one calling, it was 
 fought for the next profession on the ground, 
 always repeated and always wrong, that 
 while schools were good for other pursuits,
 
 ii6 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 this particular calling, like Hires' Root Beer, 
 was "unlike any other." Whether the beer 
 is or is not, I do not know ; I never tasted it. 
 But callings, I know, are not "unHke any 
 other." They are all alike in needing spe- 
 cial professional schools and prospering un- 
 der them. I reported in 1875 the first grad- 
 uating exercises of a school for nurses in the 
 United States, and an old nurse in Bellevue 
 (such a nurse!) told me that a school for 
 nurses was all wrong. An eminent physician 
 in those distant days asserted the trained 
 nurse would neither obey nor be respectful. 
 In my editorial work I have shared the fight 
 for the business college and trade-schools. 
 These callings, too, "could not be taught." 
 The list is a long one. It includes the State 
 regulation of the practice of medicine, and 
 the removal of the power to admit to the bar 
 from the courts to a State examination. 
 
 These fights all follow the same course. 
 First, all callings must be learned by prac- 
 tice, and this particular calling has special 
 reasons which make it quite impossible and 
 undesirable to teach its "art and mystery." 
 When this has been triumphantly done for 
 successive crops of students who forge ahead,
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 117 
 
 then it is urged that the old path must be 
 kept open. This lasts until the school- 
 trained men in the calling are in a majority, 
 and, in general, doing better than the office- 
 trained men. The bars go up and the State 
 prescribes the standards of the schools, and 
 superintends the examination for entrance to 
 practice. At this stage it is agreed that 
 every other calling save the one in dispute 
 has improved under State examinations, but 
 in this particular calling the Hires' Root Beer 
 precedent holds, and the State cannot wisely 
 regulate examinations admitting to prac- 
 tice. This is the position in which schools 
 of journalism now stand. They exist all 
 over the country. Their students are suc- 
 cessful. In time all the universities in cities 
 will be training journalists, the oldest and 
 most dignified, not always, last; but the 
 "freedom of the press," for some mysterious 
 reason, makes it necessary for ignorant men 
 to be permitted to botch skilled tasks, 
 though in the end journalism is certain to 
 pass through the same familiar and inevita- 
 ble social law, as all the other callings. 
 
 The experience of the newspaper office, 
 personally acquired knowledge and acquain-
 
 ii8 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 tance with the ruling fraction of society were 
 the one path for journaHsts, as long as social 
 forces and society itself, political process and 
 event had no systematic record. Then the 
 gathering of neighborhood news, the picking 
 up of the more or less unconsidered trifles 
 of government, and the knowledge of the 
 world's greater happenings were accidental 
 and dependent on the arrival of a clipper ship 
 or of a steamship, a personal letter, a pack- 
 age of newspapers from another place, the 
 slow movement of the mails and the irregular 
 leakage of government action and adminis- 
 tration in reports, speeches, and despatches. 
 This made newspaper work a thing to be 
 learned only in the newspaper office. No- 
 body could teach it. The dye not only mas- 
 tered the dyer's hand, but the man had to 
 stand neck-deep in the vat and be soaked 
 with the dye himself, or he could not acquire 
 the knowledge which enabled him to record 
 facts and spread ideas through the commu- 
 nity. There existed no body of recorded 
 fact as to sociological structure, as to politi- 
 cal science, as to the organization and ad- 
 ministration of government, as to the rela- 
 tion of lands and nations, and as to the facts
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 119 
 
 which sometimes create and are sometimes 
 created by the forces of society, whose laws, 
 whose curve, and whose effects we are now 
 only dimly perceiving and conceiving. 
 
 All this makes the task of teaching jour- 
 nalism more difficult and more subject to ex- 
 periment, though this is still in progress in 
 law, medicine, and engineering. Nor would 
 the divinity schools be injured by some ex- 
 periments. 
 
 The training for a bachelor of science (in 
 chemistry) is, in its nature, definite, precise, 
 and capable of being reduced to rule and 
 expressed with accuracy in terms of study 
 hours and the laboratory. But the profes- 
 sional problem in such a case is very different 
 from that offered by the social callings usu- 
 ally associated w^ith professional training. 
 When knowledge comes, there teaching be- 
 gins, and personal contact with the work of 
 a vocation is of lessening educational value. 
 The training of all callings goes through this 
 evolution. The development of the law 
 school came with the development of the 
 law book, the code, the digest, and the in- 
 creasing publication of decisions. As the 
 part played by the two factors of personal
 
 120 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 knowledge and mere acquaintance with pro- 
 cedure diminished and the recorded share of 
 law increased, the law school grew until, 
 within the memory of men now living and 
 still in the active work of life, the school 
 superseded the office, and a costly education 
 was acquired even by those who, in common 
 practice, cannot hope to have an annual in- 
 come of any great size. There are a very 
 large number of lawyers who do not receive 
 in a year much more than half of the sum 
 spent on their education, and often only one- 
 fourth, yet the investment is sound, because 
 without it even this income could not have 
 been earned. In all these callings the real 
 reward is not the personal wage, but oppor- 
 tunity, outlook, and a share in the govern- 
 ment and direction of social forces in opera- 
 tion, so that a man constitutes part of the 
 brain of the community instead of being part 
 of the dumb mechanical process through 
 which the material world Is digested for the 
 nutrition of society. Better the least cell in 
 the brain of society, however poorly nour- 
 ished, than yards of flourishing, smooth- 
 rolling, well-fed Intestine. 
 
 The education of the newspaper writer
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 121 
 
 and the growth of the circulation of the 
 newspaper have both risen with the educa- 
 tion of the community. When EngHsh jour- 
 nalism began in the seventeenth century not 
 over a tenth of male adults read freely, and 
 the circulation of a news sheet ran to a few 
 hundreds. By the opening of the eighteenth 
 century, reading England had grown suffi- 
 ciently to furnish a weekly like The Specta- 
 tor with a circulation of 1 1 ,000. Even in a 
 century the London daily had not reached 
 this circulation, and the New York dailies of 
 a century ago had reached but 1,000 to 
 2,000, the latter by The Commercial Adver- 
 tiser. The total circulation of New York 
 dailies in 1820 was 10,800; in 191 5 it was 
 4,515,000. The population of Greater New 
 York in this span had grown fortyfold; the 
 newspaper daily circulation over 410-fold. 
 The different ratios are an approximate 
 ratio of the increase of the diffusion of news- 
 papers in a given population and of the 
 increased importance, not always increased 
 influence, of the daily. As a population in- 
 creases in intelligence and its horizon be- 
 comes more extended, the more it thinks for 
 itself and needs for those who influence it
 
 122 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 through the newspaper a more efficient 
 training. 
 
 In the century we are considering general 
 public education has risen from the primary 
 school to grammar grades, from grammar 
 grades to the high school, and now from the 
 high school to the college. The training of 
 the newspaperman has gone through the 
 same cycle. The American editors of the 
 eighteenth century, led by Franklin, were 
 nearly all printers. They remained so 
 through the first half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury for many dailies. Of the conspicuous 
 editors from 1830 to the Civil War, Bennett, 
 Raymond, Webb, and Bryant were college 
 trained, and Greeley was a printer. His 
 education came from country schools and 
 the printing office, a school in itself. When 
 Charles A. Dana organized The Sun in 1869, 
 a college man, though not a college graduate, 
 he selected printers for his leading posts — 
 managing editor, news editor, and city edi- 
 tor. Before five years had passed The Sun 
 was officered by college graduates, though a 
 large part of its staff had only a common 
 school education. The high school began 
 to force its graduates into the newspapers
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 123 
 
 from 1870 on. In Philadelphia for the past 
 forty years the working force of the news- 
 papers has come in great measure from the 
 high schools. College men began to grow 
 frequent in Philadelphia newspapers in the 
 'eighties; but they are still considerably 
 fewer in number there than are college men 
 on the dailies of New York and Boston. 
 The same changes have taken place in the 
 West and South, but less rapidly. In the 
 last decade the graduates of schools of jour- 
 nalism have begun to appear. Elementary 
 schools, high schools, colleges, and schools 
 of journalism have followed in regular suc- 
 cession in furnishing men for work "up- 
 stairs," in the writing end of the newspaper, 
 and the newspaper office of thirty and forty 
 years hence will be manned by men who 
 have shared all these successive steps in 
 American education. Sixty years hence the 
 State will require a specific training for the 
 newspaperman; first, as in the other call- 
 ings, some minimum of education; second, 
 certain years of professional training, and 
 at length a specific examination. 
 
 These are the conditions under which the 
 young man or woman who enters the news-
 
 124 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 paper office now will pass the riper and more 
 useful years of their calling. The college 
 man who became a reporter fifty years ago 
 was lonely. Few of his companions had this 
 training. To-day he finds the leading posts 
 in most metropolitan dailies manned by col- 
 lege graduates. He is glad of every bit and 
 sign of higher education he has, and if he 
 happens to have more than the usual com- 
 plement of degrees he finds that newspaper 
 offices all over the United States look on 
 them as an asset and not a liability. 
 
 The young journalist of to-day cannot 
 take too much training for newspaper work, 
 and the promotion of the thoroughly edu- 
 cated cub reporter brings rapid advance, 
 though, as in a law or engineering office, he 
 begins with mechanical work. There are 
 many newspaper offices in the United States 
 which will not take a new man unless he has 
 at least a high school training. This is 
 looked on as a minimum requirement, and 
 more education is desired. The graduates 
 of schools of journalism find their training 
 accepted as a qualification which greatly 
 adds to the chances of getting a place. In 
 the case of the Columbia School of Journal-
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 125 
 
 ism, year by year the men who are gradu- 
 ated, if they wish to begin work at once, have 
 a place waiting for them when they receive 
 their diplomas, and some have begun work 
 in a newspaper office before the end of the 
 last semester. The School of Journalism 
 in the University of Missouri, organized by 
 Doctor Walter Williams in 1908, the first 
 in date of all such schools, has had a like 
 success. In every school, as the number 
 of classes grows and more alumni are in 
 newspaper offices, graduates are more and 
 more certain to find places. Women grad- 
 uates have more difficulty in finding news- 
 paper places than men. The reverse of this 
 is true in the West. There women are more 
 welcome in the newspaper office than in the 
 East. It is seventy years since women first 
 found places in New York offices, and men 
 still shy at them. Race prejudices also 
 exist, which interfere with the best man get- 
 ting the best job. This is still more true of 
 color. While these three forms of prejudices 
 exist, of sex, race, and color, this country 
 cannot be considered either Christian or 
 civilized. 
 
 In newspaper work, as in all the callings
 
 126 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 for which systematic training exists, the eco- 
 nomic value of a professional school in se- 
 curing a place for its graduates is at least 
 as important as its education, if both 
 employment and schooling are administered 
 with impartial integrity. Fraternities of 
 great value and use In college become the 
 source of possible peril where a school opens 
 the door to a place where a man begins train- 
 ing for wage-earning. 
 
 The growth of population and the like 
 growth of students, the happy absence of 
 privilege, except as noted above, the fortu- 
 nate lack of a class to which people look up 
 (there are plenty of people who look down, 
 which is but dull work when no one looks 
 up), give a great indiscriminate swarm, num- 
 bered by the hundred thousand, every year 
 leaving high schools — the end of education 
 to nine-tenths of those who attend these 
 schools — who are seeking places. Neither 
 these nor their parents know places, and 
 the places do not know them. No waste 
 is so fatal as delay in getting the young 
 man or woman of ability into the place 
 that demands ability. This achievement 
 IS, for the professional school, a most im-
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 127 
 
 portant task. Parentage and pelf often 
 find places, but this is worth little unless 
 the child who gets a place delivers ability 
 as well as a pedigree. This often occurs, but 
 it is not invariable. The school knows the 
 student better than the parent, and is gener- 
 ally far wiser as regards the child. The more 
 highly civilized a community is and the more 
 intelligent its parents are, the earlier they 
 understand this highly important fact. But 
 the larger the population the more bewilder- 
 ing becomes the blindman's buff of place and 
 worker. When I went to work in the New 
 York World in 1873 there were about 6,000 
 journalists in the United States. Now there 
 are from 50,000 to 60,000. I got a place 
 through a college friend now distinguished, 
 Mr. William C. Brownell, who in two years 
 had become city editor, to whom I cherish 
 a constant gratitude through all the years. 
 These personal relations decide most news- 
 paper selections of new men. This is bad 
 for the calling, and a cruel injustice to un- 
 known ability. The trained and informed 
 judgment of the professional school re- 
 dresses this injustice, particularly in law. 
 This is a democratic service. Yearly it
 
 128 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 opens careers to the able unknown. This 
 stiffens the work done by students and gives 
 the teacher a grip on the work done nothing 
 else can fashion. Every man familiar with 
 law firms, with selections for hospital posts, 
 and the employment of engineers, knows 
 that parental and class influence have grown 
 less in the last forty years, though the well- 
 bred trustees of some private hospitals keep 
 alive the old evils by personal selections. 
 Tax-supported hospitals in nearly all our 
 cities select internes only by competitive ex- 
 aminations. Year by year, more and more 
 newspapers turn to the schools of journalism 
 for new men. The Chicago Tribune has rec- 
 ognized this by starting a School of Journal- 
 ism in Northwestern University, under a 
 most able, competent, and successful head, 
 Mr. H. F. Harrington. 
 
 Writing and "English" studies were, per- 
 haps, not unnaturally, looked upon in the 
 early organization of courses in journalism 
 as forming the bulk of their instruction. No 
 newspaperman has ever believed in this. 
 If a journalist has not some Instinct and fa- 
 cility for writing, he is foolish to go into a 
 writing trade. Most men and women who
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 129 
 
 enter a school of journalism take all the 
 writing courses they can. This is demoral- 
 izing. Not over a third of the time should 
 be given to strictly professional courses. In 
 a day when all American education tends to 
 speedy and facile results without labor, the 
 journalism student moves in the same direc- 
 tion. He is nearly always trying to get writ- 
 ing and professional courses which enable 
 him to write without thinking or studying. 
 This is the curse of the American newspaper. 
 Beware of schools of journalism which di- 
 vide up the work of the newspaper into 
 many departments, many of which simply 
 add to the writing. This alone is worthless. 
 Knowledge is needed. If a course in dra- 
 matic criticism runs to lectures and writing 
 about plays as they come, the student fails of 
 adequate training. Hard and copious read- 
 ing on, and in, criticism is demanded; the 
 student, as far as possible, should be required 
 to familiarize himself with history, record, 
 and place of play, playwright, and actor. 
 No one can criticise adequately without 
 special preparation. This is equally true of 
 current criticism on painting, sculpture, and 
 music. Previous preparation must go hand
 
 130 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 in hand with a general discussion of the gen- 
 eral field before the critic is adequately pre- 
 pared to write criticism. The urge of the 
 student is to rest satisfied with the individual 
 reaction before a particular article; but this 
 is the criticism of which M. de Goncourt 
 wrote "that It Is a way of saying more or 
 less politely : ' My taste is better than your 
 taste.'" Book reviews, most of all, require 
 an adequate bibliographical equipment, per- 
 sonal acquaintance with the subject, and a 
 careful consideration and knowledge of the 
 authors. Criticism less carefully considered 
 is a mere haphazard opinion joined to a sum- 
 mary. This runs through the entire field 
 of the newspaper. 
 
 The writing courses must cover reporting, 
 editing, criticism and opinion, or editorial. 
 Editing, the word is used technically, deals 
 with planning and executing the city editor's 
 day's work, the news and night editors' 
 tasks, the preparation of copy and the 
 "make-up," for the press. The Sunday 
 supplement and its demands must be met, 
 work which trains for the routine of the 
 magazine. The practical work of writing 
 on acting, music, financial affairs, sports and
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 131 
 
 political events, police headquarters, and a 
 wide succession of events can only be fully 
 gained in a great city. The history of 
 journalism opens the ethics, the evolution, 
 the growth, and the theory and tradition of 
 the calling. In a small town, a small news- 
 paper can be published; but the news is 
 small-town news. It is better for the stu- 
 dent to see and describe the wide round of 
 life than to see himself in print on small 
 events, if this choice must be made. 
 
 Professional training must be supple- 
 mented by American and European history, 
 economics, political science at college, two 
 years at least being required, before two 
 years of professional work. Before long 
 three years of college and three of technical 
 work will be seen to be needed. Even now, 
 recent American political history, the causes 
 and the current consequences of the Great 
 War, economics and finance, a share of 
 modern geography which acquaints the stu- 
 dent with the world's larger products, the 
 principles of political law, and the frame- 
 work of judicature, and a constant reading 
 of the newspaper under dissection which 
 tests the students' familiarity with current
 
 132 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 news, and the ability to translate at sight 
 at least one modern language, joined with 
 the knowledge of current European letters 
 as expressed by its leading figures, measure 
 the indispensable task of a school of journal- 
 ism. Reporting should be continued through 
 all the professional course. This is not 
 agreeable work done from a newspaper 
 office. It is still harder done from a school. 
 Exactly as in a newspaper office every one 
 knows the advantage of keeping out of the 
 office, and yet almost ever>' one grasps the 
 first opportunity for a desk place, so the 
 student in journalism too often avoids as- 
 signments, outside the classroom, if he pos- 
 sibly can. Editorial WTiting in particular 
 must be steadied by study and the daily 
 reading of current opinion, or mere callow 
 expression of youthful views is offered on 
 the subject of the hour, with no conception 
 of the close knowledge of issues and of the 
 political situation needed for the editorials 
 of a campaign, and too often, also, without 
 training in the information editorial, critical 
 subjects, and the wide range of social topics. 
 Here again study only can equip. 
 
 This long struggle between the student 
 
 I
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 133 
 
 who wants to enter early on the practice of 
 writing instead of mastering the fundamen- 
 tals of his subject before writing, has ap- 
 peared in all professional courses. Sixty 
 and more years ago a man could get as good 
 a degree in medicine as was offered, in from 
 eighteen months to twenty. He entered the 
 medical school in late October, and in a year 
 from the following April he had his degree. 
 Lectures were given without demonstration. 
 Laboratories were almost unknown. There 
 was no body of bacteriological and other 
 knowledge to be used in teaching through 
 the laboratory. The student wasted a good 
 deal of time on dissection, to no very direct 
 purpose, he memorized answers to his ex- 
 aminations drawn by a quiz master, and he 
 learned how to write prescriptions of medi- 
 cine used with little exact knowledge as to 
 their effects. Many were useless. Many 
 "doctors" were practising who had never 
 attended a medical school and whose oppo- 
 sition prevented improvement. Any prog- 
 ress in the lawyer's training was halted 
 by schools which delivered courses of lec- 
 tures and were easy in their examinations. 
 A few schools began better work in law and
 
 134 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 medicine, but their work was under competi- 
 tion from schools whose occasional able 
 graduate, able to succeed against any odds, 
 was perpetually cited as a proof that no 
 improvement was needed. Fortunately, the 
 tradition of the guild, its art and mystery 
 and its privileges closed to those who could 
 not meet its standards, lingered in the sub- 
 liminal social consciousness of the English- 
 speaking folk, and for half a century past a 
 reform in the training for these callings came 
 into vigorous being in most of the States. 
 
 It became possible to do for the welfare 
 and advance of the law and medical stu- 
 dent what needs now to be done in training 
 men and women for the newspaper, for 
 business, for engineering, and also for the 
 teacher, whose qualifications should be na- 
 tion-wide, as with all other callings. The 
 standards in chemistry, physics, and biology 
 in our colleges are now unsymmetrically bi- 
 lateral. There is one standard for the young 
 student who is going to enter a medical 
 school of the first rank. He has to submit 
 his lecture and laboratory work, not to the 
 fostering college shepherd who is desirous of 
 getting as many sheep to market as possible,
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 135 
 
 but to the impersonal verdict of a medical 
 school which expects to keep its number 
 down and its efficiency up. Schools of jour- 
 nalism accept, as the case may be, two or 
 three years of college work, a part or all of 
 which is prescribed, but the school has no 
 such grip on the standard of their work as 
 has the medical school for its requirement, 
 owing to the lack of a State examination. 
 
 Yet adequate work of the first order in 
 history, political economy, and political sci- 
 ence is as necessary to the journalist as like 
 work in chemistry, physics, and biology are 
 to the medical student. Until this standard 
 can be secured by setting up State standards 
 and State examinations, the work in all the 
 studies of the callings cited, not to say the 
 teaching, will also be slack. There are insti- 
 tutions which hide under the mantle of a 
 B. S. from teachers, parents, and the public 
 the actual fact that engineering and busi- 
 ness courses are offered to which the means, 
 equipment, and teaching are not equal. 
 Conditions are still worse where stray 
 courses in journalism are embedded as 
 branches of training in " English," which are 
 nothing but an attempt, not always success-
 
 136 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 ful, to teach the EngHsh of the newspaper. 
 Weakness exists in permitting students to 
 substitute bric-a-brac courses in Hterature 
 and various brands of the whipped-cream 
 syllabus of learning, falsely so called, which 
 bear the same relation to the studies the 
 journalist needs that an ice-cream soda does 
 to a meal. It may stay the pang of hunger, 
 but is ill food for a man in training. 
 
 The conscientious teacher and the consci- 
 entious student will refuse to be deceived by 
 these attempts to give the forms and not the 
 substance of training. Too much college 
 training in the United States is sapped and 
 mined by these various desires to keep the 
 ancient label and substitute a two and 
 three quarter per cent fluid which never 
 satisfies. The conscientious student needs 
 to understand and appreciate that the great 
 task before him requires solid foundations 
 and accurate knowledge. In the United 
 States, beyond other lands, the economics 
 and taxation of the commonwealth, federal 
 and State, the preservation of the ancient 
 landmarks of constitutional law, the jealous 
 defense of those far-reaching principles of 
 practice, on which rest the safety of the
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 137 
 
 family, the protection of the property, and 
 the security of the many, above all the in- 
 dispensable privilege and right that all 
 these issues shall freely be brought before 
 the bar and in the forum of political discus- 
 sion require for the very life of the republic 
 studies enabling the newspaperman to come 
 to exposition and decision on these issues 
 with knowledge of principles. 
 
 He must have a familiarity with their ap- 
 plication in the past, and he should also pos- 
 sess the trained capacity to meet the soph- 
 ism, the false premises, and the lying his- 
 tory of those who seek to undermine the 
 security of law and liberty in the name of 
 a freedom cloaking robbery. The decisions 
 of a newspaper on all these issues are con- 
 stant and manifold. A head may impeach 
 the foundations of order in a phrase written 
 at the night desk by a man untrained. The 
 way in which news is edited may deceive 
 a multitude as to either fact or policy. The 
 tone of an editorial may be more poisonous 
 than frank utterance. The publisher and 
 owner may shake the foundations of the con- 
 fidence of the many in the good faith and 
 logic of the newspaper by his effort to pre-
 
 138 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 serve what he deems to be the rights of prop- 
 erty, but are really only specious attempts 
 to use these rights to bind heavy burdens on 
 the many from which the shoulders of the 
 few escape because some distant decision 
 confused law and justice, and in the face of 
 the perils of one generation weakened the 
 safeguards of the next. Not only past law, 
 but future progress in law must be the task 
 of the journalist when conditions are changed 
 and the work of great cyclic forces has 
 raised to new light and to education whole 
 strata of the population, while higher wages 
 have given new relations and rights in the 
 general scheme of the State. This scheme 
 or Constitution is always liable to cramp 
 the growth of society as ancient cities are 
 strangled in their growth by fortifications 
 which once were the glories of their defense, 
 the indispensable protection from sack and 
 slaughter. Party, prejudice, the shibboleths 
 of ancient law may be distorted to vicious 
 use by the shrill screams of those who make 
 their living not by saving the State or pop- 
 ular rights from peril as they profess, but by 
 playing on the misconception of the multi- 
 tude. These may be conservative or radical
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 139 
 
 — white, black, yellow, or red. These perils 
 grow more constant and more dangerous as 
 population grows, property is diffused, and 
 all men desire the comforts and privileges 
 enjoyed by any. 
 
 Newspapers do not make events and 
 issues. Events and issues make newspapers. 
 
 A pervasive ** culture" which leaves a man 
 unable to express himself in English both un- 
 derstood by the people and approved by the 
 scholar is of no use to a journalist, however 
 useful and accepted it may be in a record of 
 research. English which has these twin 
 qualities, spurred by a desire and purpose 
 to reach the reader under the term of "jour- 
 nalistic writing" — a vile phrase — is spread- 
 ing to the high schools, as divergent from 
 "literary" English. This phrase represents 
 a valid difference and distinction between 
 writing which is self-expression, as in litera- 
 ture, and the use of language as a weapon, 
 tool, or medium for informing, persuading, 
 inspiring, directing, or leading. This dis- 
 tinction lay hid in De Quincey's mind when 
 he said that, in literature, style was an end 
 and in journalism a means. These courses 
 in "journalistic English" seek in this phrase
 
 140 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 an end and an object whose name and nature 
 are still vague in the minds of those who, in 
 offering such studies, take as a model the 
 newspaper written in a hurry, when there 
 is at hand an inspired revelation of a better 
 and more admirable way in literature, writ- 
 ten for all time, Shakespeare and the Bible. 
 During our past history we passed through 
 elections, periods, and conflicts in which sin- 
 gle definite issues came successively before 
 the public. Most of them had a strong mor- 
 al bearing. Their solution and advocacy 
 by the newspaper was simple, direct, and 
 immediate. Even on an issue like slavery, 
 simple, direct, moral, sincere men like Gree- 
 ley and Lincoln, diametrically differed, and 
 one-idead men, of whom Garrison was chief, 
 with the noblest purposes and the highest 
 ends in view, did far-reaching harm by sow- 
 ing bitterness where there might have been 
 planted the seeds of reconciliation, evolu- 
 tion, and bloodless advance. Aside from 
 economic causes which gave new value to 
 tobacco and cotton, strengthening slavery, 
 and differences as to the structure of fed- 
 eral government, these attacks from the 
 North, where gradual emancipation had
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 141 
 
 come peacefully and without imputing moral 
 guilt to the slaveholder, personally, de- 
 stroyed the Southern movement for gradual 
 and paid emancipation, strong enough, when 
 Greeley, Garrison, and other like Northern 
 journalists first came on the field, twice to 
 carry, for the gradual extinction of slavery, 
 the popular branch of the legislature of 
 Virginia, the leading State of the South. 
 These Northern journalists were matched 
 by Southern journalists, like Rhett and 
 Yancey, with others earlier. Between them 
 any hope of peaceful adjustment and eman- 
 cipation was destroyed ; not wholly by these, 
 but on both sides, journalists were the ar- 
 ticulate forces which bred violence from 
 which, at the eleventh hour, Greeley shrank. 
 The political leaders, on the other hand, who 
 were trained In law were for the most part 
 seeking constitutional compromise and ad- 
 justment which would end slavery. What 
 might not adequate training have done for 
 these great journalists who. In ignorance, 
 sowed hate whose bitter fruits we still reap ? 
 These men argued, differed, and tore one 
 another when the financial, economic, consti- 
 tutional, property-owning, employment rela-
 
 142 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 tions of our social system were relatively 
 simple. As it was, mistakes were made on 
 both sides. Our future is infinitely more 
 complex. Property and human rights are in- 
 extricably mixed. The mere phrase "wage- 
 slavery" may do Infinite evil and bring con- 
 flict instead of solution. Issues are to arise 
 of which no one dreams. About one-tenth of 
 the capital of the railroads of the United 
 States, as represented by shares and bonds, 
 is owned by life-insurance companies. Rail- 
 road securities figure also in the assets of 
 savings-banks. The life-insurance policies 
 ^gg'*sg3-te $35,000,000,000 and this sum is 
 held for at least 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 in- 
 dividuals and families. Savings-banks are 
 the trustees of an even larger number. 
 Railroad workers, for the most part, be- 
 lieve they were never fairly paid until the 
 United States Government raised their 
 wages. These wages have been reduced, 
 with public approval, by the railroad man- 
 agers, who represent the owners of these 
 shares and bonds. The farmers, all told some 
 11,000,000, believe the charges for freight 
 are too high. With the rates, as they are, 
 the railroads are in grave difhculties. As
 
 PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 143 
 
 one issue after another arises in this complex 
 situation, the daily, the technical weekly, 
 the farm journal, the country weekly, by 
 news, head-lines, and editorials, will be mak- 
 ing and expressing opinion. The journals of 
 labor unions are already seeking the gradu- 
 ates of schools of journalism. This is only 
 one of many similar issues. As these issues 
 arise and are tried before the jur>' of the 
 public, training is needed by the newspaper- 
 man as much as by the lawyer in the court- 
 room. Unless the newspaperman is trained 
 to this work by the mastery of fundamental 
 social and economic principles, he sounds 
 the trumpet of the watchman in vain on 
 the ramparts of the future, because no cer- 
 tain sound will be his. 
 
 The newspaper man cannot be too much 
 educated for tasks like these, approaching, 
 advancing, imminent. If he is wise he will 
 take, not the two or three years of college 
 which schools of journalism prescribe; but 
 he will crowd a full college course with solid 
 work. He will know neither surcease nor 
 pause through his professional career in his 
 effort to see changes as they come and scent 
 the battle from afar. He will find that the
 
 144 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 means of reaching the public are constantly 
 widening, and special articles reaching mil- 
 lions give opportunities unknown to the edi- 
 torial pages of the past. He will refuse to 
 be bound by the teaching of his college days 
 and the years of professional learning. He 
 will meet new issues with new knowledge, 
 and the intricacy of our social system by a 
 constant and unremitting search of public 
 records, of the census, of financial statistics, 
 of all the wealth of information poured out, 
 now that shareholders and bondholders are 
 numbered by millions and over one-half of 
 the families of the United States own realty 
 directly or indirectly. 
 
 The education of the American journalist 
 is never finished. He who watcheth over 
 the Israel of democracy can neither slumber 
 nor sleep.
 
 VIII 
 
 PAY AND PECUNIARY REWARD 
 
 When Sir Henry Irving said of the theatre 
 that it must succeed as a business or it could 
 not exist as an art, he aptly expressed the 
 condition of the newspaper. This came 
 with its beginning. Through the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries the news- 
 paper was poverty-stricken. Some news- 
 papers made money, FrankHn's, for instance, 
 but he had to eke out its returns by acting 
 as postmaster, running a job office, publish- 
 ing books — most of them a loss to him — and 
 getting every salary and stipend that came 
 his way. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century John Walter, a printer and pub- 
 lisher, put the London Times on a solvent 
 basis. Other periodicals made money for a 
 season. This is the only one which had a 
 century of steady profit, until it, too, ceased 
 to be attractive to its family of owners who 
 had lived on it through four generations of 
 its long gain. No newspaper in the United 
 
 145
 
 146 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 States has had this continuous success. The 
 Chicago Tribune comes nearer to this record 
 by pubHc report, but it is not the only enter- 
 prise of its owners. Of the daihes in the 
 other cities of the United States, there are 
 few, if any, which have not gone on the 
 "red" in the past fifty years, so far as their 
 yearly profit-and-loss account is concerned. 
 This was true through all the last century. 
 A socio-political economist speaks in a book 
 of a happy past when editors owned their 
 newspapers and made them their "avatars." 
 He instanced Greeley, Raymond, Halsted, no 
 one of whom owned their own papers. In 
 the list he gave there was only one that did. 
 Greeley, himself, after The Tribune was ten 
 years old, declared that a solvent newspaper 
 could not be run in New York unless it had 
 official advertising and the favor of a politi- 
 cal party. This is no longer true in New York. 
 It was very nearly true of the first James 
 Gordon Bennett that he won, independent 
 of these aids; but The Herald in time ceased, 
 with other dailies, to have the margin of 
 profit needed for a solvent paper. A news- 
 paper, like a theatre, when profitable, is a 
 gold-mine, but, like a theatre, when public
 
 PAY AND REWARD 147 
 
 support departs, the loss on a daily is sudden 
 and paralyzing. This is true of the whole 
 range of periodicals. The monthly has not 
 had any long business success in the United 
 States. Few have survived the first editor 
 in steady profits. The weekly has been 
 more profitable than the monthly, on the 
 average, taking the capital involved, but no 
 American weekly has yet outlasted two lives 
 except among country weeklies. Some of 
 these admirable papers, which I sometimes 
 think the best product of our America, re- 
 flecting and recording the sound life of our 
 American countryside, have been profitable 
 for three lives, but there are not many of 
 these, possibly only four or five. 
 
 National weeklies, by which is meant a 
 weekly with a general circulation over the 
 country, have so far had a precarious career. 
 Several of such weeklies in New York, radi- 
 cal or conservative, are subsidized, the an- 
 nual loss being met by wealthy sympathizers. 
 A paying public they do not represent. 
 Robert Bonner, from 1844 to 1887, made the 
 New York Ledger highly profitable, but the 
 secret of its success died with him. This 
 span of years, let us say, from 1840 to 1890,
 
 148 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 was the period of the weekly. In it the reli- 
 gious weekly rose, flourished, made fortunes 
 for some of its owners comparable to those 
 bequeathed by English bishops a century 
 ago. Their editors often ran their sheets 
 like militant mediaeval bishops. The week- 
 lies remain; their old profits and power are 
 gone. This success, for one life only, has 
 attended literary weeklies in this country. 
 
 The United States has never produced a 
 critical weekly, like the London AthencBiim, 
 whose profits and success ran on for eighty 
 years, or The Spectator, whose profits have 
 varied, but whose position has been main- 
 tained approaching a century. A place on 
 such weeklies is always agreeable and often 
 profitable ; but in this country such weeklies 
 have furnished a very precarious livelihood. 
 The two classes of weeklies here offering per- 
 manent careers are country weeklies, already 
 cited, and technical journals. These last 
 furnish permanent posts, the pay is as high 
 for many tasks as any daily, and the work is 
 absorbing to those who have the imagination 
 to feel the throb and thrill of finance, of pro- 
 duction by field and mine, of great industries, 
 of agencies for transportation or wide-spread
 
 PAY AND REWARD 149 
 
 distribution. The men successful in these 
 weekHes are almost unknown to the general 
 public; they play a relatively small part in 
 affairs, save in farming weeklies, but when 
 they have ability, prophetic accuracy — a 
 very rare gift — and vision, they exercise a 
 pontifical influence and authority for vari- 
 ous trades and industries in creating stand- 
 ards and policies within the fruitful but 
 specialized field they till. 
 
 Mr. Bradford Merrill, a journalist of the 
 first rank, a master of the business of the 
 newspaper and an untiring student of the his- 
 tory of journalism, writes me of the daily: 
 
 When the New York Herald was founded, 
 only eighty-odd years ago, there were six morn- 
 ing newspapers in New York, every one of 
 which has since died, although one of them, The 
 Sun, still shines as an evening paper. In the 
 past fifty years fifteen or sixteen new morning 
 papers have been born in New York City, but 
 all have died except six. Of these papers of 
 general circulation (except one born in the last 
 two years) every one has been bankrupt or on 
 the verge of bankruptcy, and living on private 
 loans at some time in the past twenty-five 
 years.
 
 150 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 This experience can be matched in every 
 large American city. Abundant evidence 
 exists and has been presented in court that 
 where an ordinary sound and successful 
 business or manufactory is worth ten or fif- 
 teen years' purchase on its profits, a news- 
 paper is not worth over five. 
 
 The alternations of the daily from profit 
 to loss and back again are familiar to every 
 newspaperman. This adds to the precari- 
 ous conditions of the work of the journalist, 
 always under greater risks than other call- 
 ings of the mind, because journalism is inter- 
 linked with business. There is a wide gap 
 between the steady, continuous impress on 
 the public made by a man holding any staff 
 position on a great daily and the most bril- 
 liant writer, even though in constant de- 
 mand. The essence of the work of the 
 newspaper, as has already been pointed out, 
 is that it furnishes a continuous audience on 
 a scale large enough to be a sensible and 
 effective factor in the society of which it is 
 a part. Unless a man acts through this, he 
 is without the greater weight and influence 
 of the journalist. He is a pamphleteer, even 
 if his organ of expression is a weekly of 40,-
 
 PAY AND REWARD 151 
 
 000 circulation or so. He writes for and Is 
 read by a selected, non-political group and 
 not by a general audience. 
 
 This, however, Is changing. A new phase 
 of journalist has appeared, who practises ap- 
 plied journalism as he might law, medicine, 
 or engineering. Such a man wins vogue for 
 his name. He is known to a wide congrega- 
 tion of readers. He refuses to associate him- 
 self with one periodical, daily or other. He 
 places his matter as he writes it, and he gets 
 orders for articles as lawyers are retained. 
 Any expert man who makes his place before 
 the public early finds that he does not have 
 to send his articles in for approval. They 
 are ordered and paid for In advance of pub- 
 lication, a far more agreeable proceeding. 
 Such men are few. For some reason, not 
 easily explained, they wear out their wel- 
 come. Their originality becomes exhausted. 
 Most of them finally gravitate to a perma- 
 nent job. Many have this from the begin- 
 ning. In various forms. It Is a necessary 
 part of a journalist's continuous work, that 
 he gear Into a permanent relation to weekly 
 or daily. Unless he has this, however alive 
 he may be and however successful, he is not
 
 152 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 in real touch with the current situation. He 
 misses that large area of news which does 
 not get printed. As Mr. Dana was fond of 
 saying: "We only get half the news and we 
 do not get the best half." 
 
 This remains true. The type of journal- 
 ist I have been describing, in the past 
 thirty-five years began with "syndicating" 
 by Allen Thorndike Rice and S. S. McClure 
 in the middle of the 'eighties. The increase 
 of this type makes it at least possible that 
 the periodical world of a generation hence, 
 let us say of i960, will be made up of two 
 sets of newspaper workers — the men who 
 hold regular continuous permanent posts on 
 some newspaper, changing from one to an- 
 other, and the men and women who have 
 their contracts with some papers and their 
 contributions to and orders from others, who 
 carry on an independent existence. One 
 such man in 1918 made $23,000, though still 
 only a dozen years or so out of college. A 
 pretty large number make from $5,000 to 
 $10,000, and the number grows. Women 
 have, on the whole, succeeded better in this 
 task than in staff positions on daily papers. 
 This is in part because the world is not ac-
 
 PAY AND REWARD 153 
 
 customed yet to women in command, outside 
 of domestic life. This is, of course, non- 
 sense. No end of examples exist to show 
 the executive powers of women. It is an 
 outw^orn superstition which leads an ofifice 
 to hesitate to make the best reporter in the 
 room — every news man knows cases in which 
 this is a woman — city editor, or select the 
 keenest executive in a newspaper organiza- 
 tion for managing editor. Few women edit 
 news, but from the work done in schools of 
 journalism I have no manner of doubt that, 
 ability being equal, a woman would hold 
 down a sheet of manifold on a news desk just 
 as well as any man. This belated restriction 
 on the careers of women and the circum- 
 stance that a major share of woman-stuff, 
 always widely salable, is done by women, 
 leads many of them, sooner or later, to the 
 ranks of the unattached. Fashion, "sob- 
 lets," manners, cooking, and advice on how 
 to make over an old dress or a new hus- 
 band, these subjects know not politics, cities, 
 or various types of newspaper — like the 
 "comic" daily strip, plain or colored, these 
 have an universal appeal. Very possibly, as 
 the differentiation of the daily goes on, the
 
 154 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 newspaper will be more and more a forum 
 for many voices and pens, supplying opinion 
 and information on all topics and issues, as 
 each attracts. Selection and direction will 
 be made by a strong selected permanent 
 staff. The general news will be standard- 
 ized and be the same, substantially alike, in 
 all newspapers, the business office watching 
 circulation and advertising. There is, at 
 present, a tendency in this direction. Just 
 as this is the first American war which has 
 not furnished a general who became Presi- 
 dent, so it is the first war which has not 
 thrown up a conspicuous American corre- 
 spondent whom the public of newspapermen 
 recognized as the war correspondent of the 
 day. The war news was more standardized 
 than ever before. City news associations do 
 what individual reporters once did and the 
 reliance on association news of various kinds 
 grows in all the various fields. Syndicates 
 which furnish articles to many newspapers, 
 reaching an audience numbered by millions, 
 pay high prices for articles by well-known 
 writers and to the well known who cannot 
 write. 
 
 The newspaperman in his training has,
 
 PAY AND REWARD 155 
 
 therefore, two types of careers before him, 
 though for seven men out of ten fate de- 
 cides. Choice is not within their power or 
 powers. Those who have Hberty and the 
 personal abihty to choose vary temperamen- 
 tally. There are those who prefer to cross 
 the ocean in a liner with everything found, 
 than to address themselves to a voyage on 
 a single-hander. The gap is not as wide as 
 this, but this comparison illustrates it. On 
 one side there are the daily risks, a sense of 
 personal independence and reputation, and 
 the freer hand; on the other, organization, a 
 wider horizon, and a more constant income 
 and the anonymous life. Large prizes are 
 won in both. Forty years ago a red-headed 
 and hopeful, slender, nervous, and much-be- 
 freckled young man told me in Washington 
 that he was tired of the news game and pro- 
 posed to see all the world at the expense of 
 the American newspaper. He found that by 
 economy, many stops, and that cheerful 
 readiness to take anything that is coming, 
 which goes with red hair, he could keep mov- 
 ing on fifty dollars a week. He began with 
 an absurdly small grub-stake and started, 
 selling his "stories," as a newspaperman
 
 156 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 would call his travel-letters, at five dollars 
 apiece. Pretty nearly half this was eaten 
 up by the "overhead." He kept on. You 
 could not open the Sunday papers of any 
 city, large or small, without finding that one 
 of them had his account of strange lands. 
 He worked hard. He read. He carried a 
 weighty load of books and reports on each 
 trip, and he knew his land before he visited 
 it. In time he had a competence. His let- 
 ters gave him public repute as a geographer, 
 and he issued school geographies that sold 
 and out of which he is said to have received 
 $120,000. A woman of unusual aptitude 
 for advice to women has had for a number 
 of years an annual income of $i 8,000. Rich- 
 ard Harding Davis went to the Boer War 
 with contracts for $22,000 a year from Eng- 
 lish and American papers. He would get 
 more now. As the war wore on he was con- 
 vinced the Boer cause was just, and he threw 
 up his contracts and, at considerable risk of 
 being shot as a spy, crossed over to the Boer 
 lines, and his work there brought him a bare 
 fraction of what he was receiving from the 
 sheets of the more powerful antagonist whose 
 cause he had abandoned. 
 
 Victrix causa placuit Diis, sed victa Catoni.
 
 PAY AND REWARD 157 
 
 The American newspaper was never able 
 to pay living salaries to its staff until adver- 
 tising began on a large scale, half a century 
 ago. In 1 85 1 the New York Tribune divided 
 the morning-paper field w^ith Bennett's Her- 
 ald, which had two or three times its circula- 
 tion and business. It had become in ten 
 years, since it was founded, the leading anti- 
 slavery daily and weekly in the country. 
 The first paid nothing, the weekly, before 
 long with 250,000 circulation, was profit- 
 able. Horace Greeley was the foremost fig- 
 ure in the newspaper fight with slavery. 
 He received $50 a week in 1851, when The 
 Tribune was ten years old and he a journal- 
 ist twenty years. Snow, the advertising 
 man, had $30; Charles A. Dana, the manag- 
 ing editor, $25; Bayard Taylor, correspon- 
 dence, editorial, and special articles, $20; 
 and George Ripley, easily one of the five best 
 book reviewers the American press has pro- 
 duced, $15. Greeley received, in addition 
 from dividends on his shares, $7,500 in 1850, 
 and in 1851 about $10,000. His total return 
 was, therefore, at the cost of living, as large 
 as any writing man for twenty years after. 
 He owned only a quarter of the shares, and 
 until he died, in 1872, held his place only
 
 158 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 through the support of other shareholders. 
 A reporter was then receiving from $5 to $8 
 a week. By 1875 a reporter just beginning 
 in New York on a daily was paid $15 a week; 
 in two or three years he might expect $25. 
 A city editor had from $40 to $50 a week, a 
 managing editor $75 upward or downward, 
 and an editorial writer of the first rank was 
 paid $100 a week. A dramatic critic re- 
 ceived from $40 to $50, but many of the 
 notices were written by men paid from $15 
 to $20 a week. The notices in the New 
 York World in 1876 of Booth's return to the 
 New York stage, when he performed for the 
 first and only time " Richard II," were writ- 
 ten by a young man three years out of col- 
 lege, who was paid $20 a week. When Ivory 
 Chamberlain, an editorial writer of the first 
 rank in his calling, went on the New York 
 Herald in 1876 to do six editorial articles a 
 week, column and turn — the younger Ben- 
 nett desiring to set up an editorial page — his 
 pay of $15,000 a year was commented on as 
 phenomenal. The pay of writing men in 
 other American cities ran 20 to 30 per cent 
 below those in New York. There was prob- 
 ably no editorial writer anywhere who re-
 
 PAY AND REWARD 159 
 
 ceived over a third of Mr. Chamberlain's 
 pay. John Hay did not. The largest pay 
 of an editorial writer at present, 1921, is on 
 weekly pay and a sliding contract, run- 
 ning from $200,000 to $300,000 a year, all 
 told. 
 
 Through the 'eighties the range of salaries 
 over the United States remained little 
 changed, though an advance took place 
 in Boston and Philadelphia. At the close of 
 the last century an advance came slowly. 
 Mr. Arthur Brisbane, March 26, 1912, pub- 
 lished an article, contributed to the Cornell 
 Era, in which he said : 
 
 Young men start, as a rule, on a salary vary- 
 ing from $10 to $15 a week — on newspapers in 
 large cities. The salaries that are paid now in 
 newspaper work are very much bigger than 
 they were a few years ago. They run as high 
 as twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars a year 
 for employees. Owners of newspapers some- 
 times make as much as a million a year and 
 more from one single paper. 
 
 Salaries and profits are still higher to-day. 
 The reporter begins in New York at from 
 $20 to $25 a week, if he comes from a school
 
 i6o THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 of journalism. An experienced reporter has 
 $75 to $100 a week, often more. A city edi- 
 tor who received $7,500 a year in 191 2 when 
 Mr. Brisbane wrote, receives twice as much 
 now. At least five receive this sum in New 
 York. The managing editor who was paid 
 from $10,000 to $12,500 then, receives now 
 from $20,000 to $30,000. There are eight 
 managing editors, three in New York City, 
 nearer $30,000 than $20,000. The income 
 of one managing editor ran recently to 
 $40,000. Three managing editors in New 
 York receive from $40,000 to $50,000 a year. 
 Forty years ago there were some twenty men 
 on New York papers who were paid $100 a 
 week and over. To-day a club of upward 
 of 200 members could be gathered of men 
 on the daily and technical press of New 
 York who receive $10,000 a year and more. 
 Among the rank and file, salaries of $60 to 
 $80 a week are frequent. 
 
 Salaries like these are paid nowhere else. 
 In Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia re- 
 porters are still beginning at $12, $15, and 
 $20 a week. Men editing news receive $40 
 a week. A city editor twice or three times 
 this. Editorial writers have not gone much
 
 PAY AND REWARD i6i 
 
 above $ioo, which were paid in these cities 
 twenty years ago. Managing editors re- 
 ceive $150 to $300 a week. The salaries in 
 lesser cities are small. They are not much 
 above the salaries of thirty years ago in New 
 York. In other cities, like Buffalo, Minne- 
 apolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, Kansas City, and 
 San Francisco, the men at the top are paid 
 as much as in larger cities, and the beginner 
 and the men at the bottom less. The poor- 
 est return to newspapermen are in cities 
 under 100,000 population. Papers are few. 
 There is no bid for men between the dailies, 
 but much competition between the men. 
 The narrow horizon must be met by courage, 
 thrift, study. Reporters' salaries are deplor- 
 ably small. Some improvement has been 
 secured in Boston, Rochester, Scranton, and 
 other cities after organizing unions affiliated 
 with the American Federation of Labor. 
 This gave the writing force the support 
 of the mechanical departments in their 
 demands, a very effective alliance. In 
 Rochester after the pay of writers was 
 brought to a level with wages in the me- 
 chanical field, the union dissolved. In Aus- 
 tralia and New Zealand, newspaper writers
 
 1 62 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 have been organized for a decade. Salaries 
 have been advanced, security of tenure 
 gained, and hours reduced. The general 
 standard of work has not suffered. In a 
 number of newspaper offices In this country 
 the average salary of the composing-room 
 and the pressroom Is larger than the average 
 In the writing force. These things ought 
 not so to be. ^ 
 
 Relative incomes in other callings and in 
 journalism In our larger cities range about 
 as follows, taking the leading men. The 
 successful lawyer gathers the largest pro- 
 fessional Income. The specialist in medi- 
 cine comes next. The large corporation 
 manager will rank with these men, but there 
 are fewer large returns of $150,000 and up- 
 ward, and more managers on $30,000 to 
 $50,000. The architect varies much be- 
 tween different years, but a run of $30,000 
 to $50,000 a year Is gained only by leading 
 men. At this place the journalist comes 
 with a few above $20,000, with executive 
 men at $30,000 to $50,000 a year, and very, 
 very few higher. In cities of 500,000 or 
 more there are cases of clergymen whose sal- 
 aries and fees together run close to and some-
 
 PAY AND REWARD 163 
 
 times exceed the best-paid salaried news- 
 papermen in the place. 
 
 In considering the pecuniary rewards of 
 the new^spaperman there must be considered 
 both the relatively low return for equal abili- 
 ties and the hazards of financial risks in the 
 newspaper. The foundering of a newspaper 
 in any city or its consolidation with a rival 
 is like a wreck. The younger men, under 
 thirty-five, acquire new posts with little 
 difficulty, but older men, holding specialized 
 posts after many years of service on one 
 newspaper, often find themselves in very 
 serious straits. There is no calling in which 
 it is more necessary for the young man to 
 insure his life early, at the very start, and to 
 save systematically, steadily, and inexora- 
 bly. If he does, he can, judging from the 
 number of cases I have known, find himself 
 at the end from $30,000 to $50,000 ahead 
 of the game. This is no large sum, but it is 
 a mighty comfortable proposition when the 
 years begin to slope. There are instances of 
 larger estates left by working journalists, 
 reaching $250,000, but these are rare with 
 men not owmers. 
 
 If pay be low, hours are long in a journal-
 
 i64 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 ist's day. The morning newspaperman will 
 have many years in which he does not leave 
 his office until from 12 to 2 A. m. These 
 hours were once even later. A day of ten 
 or twelve hours will be no unusual thing for 
 him, often the rule for weeks together. The 
 evening newspaperman has to begin earlier 
 and bear the heavy burden of the early riser. 
 The afternoon daily has, too, that awful 
 task, the "lobster watch," which begins at 
 midnight, is occupied in diligently conning 
 and collating the morning papers until its 
 luckless holder leaves the office between 8 
 or 10 A. M., as the rest of the staff arrive. 
 
 These hours entail much self-denial. They 
 render any social life very difficult, but 
 this troubles few working newspapermen. 
 There is the terrible legend of the luckless 
 night editor who, going home at gray dawn, 
 was never seen by his children except when 
 they awoke and he was in his pajamas, ready 
 to go to bed. While they were asleep he 
 went to his work. They wholly refused to 
 recognize him when they met him in the ordi- 
 nary garb of a citizen by day. Unless a 
 journalist marries a woman who adopts his 
 newspaper hours, as the writer is glad and 
 grateful to record has been his supreme good
 
 PAY AND REWARD 165 
 
 fortune, there will be an inevitable conflict 
 between the household and the professional 
 day. The strain on health in the hours, 
 the exigencies, and the nervous wear and 
 tear of a calling which has its daily crisis in 
 "going to press," calls for physical strength, 
 a sound constitution, and constant care for 
 health, and here again the newspaperman's 
 future will depend on the skill with which 
 he is fed and protected from interruption in 
 his sleep at his home. 
 
 These various causes bring it about that 
 those who drop out in journalism are very 
 numerous. Perhaps no larger than in law, 
 but far more, I think, than in the ministry, 
 in medicine, or architecture. It is true of all 
 our professional schools that a very much 
 larger share cease to practise the calling 
 for which they are trained than the public 
 realizes. Possibly professional schools do 
 not sufficiently exclude men unfit for the 
 calling. The "mortality" in the course of 
 preparation is largest in medicine, and it has 
 the most rigorous schooling. All profes- 
 sional schools pass men about whose profes- 
 sional future they are in doubt. Nor are 
 these always the men who fail. 
 
 The wraith which stands in the way for all
 
 i66 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 who practise the arts of expression is the 
 short period in which men are at their best. 
 In medicine the end comes first for the sur- 
 geon. Wise lawyers avoid this fate by 
 drawing young men into their firms. Unless 
 this is done, as Richard H. Dana's biography 
 shows, clients begin to dry up as sixty is 
 passed. Architects cease as years go to meet 
 immediate and current taste. Landscape- 
 painters are in an art revolutionized every 
 thirty years. The portrait-painter and the 
 statuary last longer. The "dead-line of 50" 
 is familiar in the clergy. The journalist 
 loses his capacity in like fashion and for a 
 like reason. The speaker, the actor, the 
 painter, the writer, the journalist enter ac- 
 tive life with a larger number abreast of 
 their way of seeing and depicting, on the 
 onward march, than will keep step with 
 them again. As this host diminishes and 
 new ranks appear in the rear, the message of 
 those older finds fewer who know its mean- 
 ing. But Mr. Arthur Brisbane has put this 
 conditioning fact better than any one else. 
 He at least has escaped this peril. I first 
 saw him thirty-nine years ago in the New 
 York Sun office, a slender youth with a face
 
 PAY AND REWARD 167 
 
 of high power and pallor, and Mr. Chester 
 G. Lord, the best judge of the young writer 
 I have ever known, pointed him out to me 
 as the ablest young man that had ever en- 
 tered The Sun office. In the years since, 
 those of his craft know how he has kept 
 up his reading, worked at every new subject, 
 multiplied his contact with men, and seen 
 each new cause from afar. His style is a 
 m-odel of the way to reach the vast mass. 
 In the article from which I have already 
 quoted he says: 
 
 And in the newspaper business there exist a 
 condition and a danger unknown in other work. 
 That should be thought of carefully by young 
 men that contemplate newspaper work. 
 
 The newspaperman becomes less valuable nine 
 times out of ten as he becomes more familiar 
 with his work — and for this reason. 
 
 The value of a newspaper writer — reporter, 
 editorial writer, or whatever — depends upon the 
 strong impression that events make upon him, 
 and upon his ability to express that impression 
 in what he writes. 
 
 The longer the ordinary man continues to see 
 the less he feels. 
 
 In the ordinary lines of work diminished emo- 
 tion is not a detriment, but rather a help.
 
 i68 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 A young doctor for the first time amputates 
 a leg and suffers torments — his impressions are 
 vivid. 
 
 Ten years later he cuts off a leg with no emo- 
 tion, doing his work carefully and perhaps 
 thinking of the golf game in the afternoon. 
 He cuts the leg off or opens up the human body 
 with no emotion at all — and he is a better 
 
 DOCTOR THAN IN THE DAYS WHEN HE FELT 
 EMOTION. 
 
 The young reporter sees his first "electrocu- 
 tion," describes his first great labor strike or 
 fire, is deeply impressed, feels strongly, and 
 writes "a good story." 
 
 Ten years later, in nine cases out of ten, he 
 is like the doctor cutting off the leg. He feels 
 nothing — and then he is no longer a good news- 
 paperman. For no man can really pretend to 
 feel when he doesn't. He may not see the dif- 
 ference, and his editor may not see the differ- 
 ence — but the man who reads the newspaper 
 will see the difference at once. 
 
 Another difference with the newspaper writer 
 is this: 
 
 He must make his reputation fresh every 
 day. The lawyer of fifty lives perhaps on 
 work that he did at thirty; the work that 
 brought him clients whom he still keeps. 
 
 And the doctor at fifty lives on patients
 
 PAY AND REWARD 169 
 
 whom he gathered about him in his youth and 
 vigor. 
 
 Not so the newspaperman. If he cannot do 
 TO-DAY what he did ten years ago or twenty 
 years ago he is not wanted to-day. 
 
 The newspaperman in that respect is even 
 more unfortunate than the actor. For if the 
 actor loses his power, if the singer loses his 
 voice, the public will still hear with pleasure 
 an old favorite, and the advertising of the 
 name has value. Not so with the newspaper- 
 man. When he can no longer act or sing — in 
 his line of work — his day is done. 
 
 • ••••• •• 
 
 However, newspaper work is the best work — 
 since the greatest thing that a man can do is to 
 deal with millions of others. Newspaper power 
 is the greatest power, for it is the power that 
 shapes and directs the thoughts of men. And 
 there is no power but thought. 
 
 Newspaper work, though it may not lead to 
 great newspaper success or great financial re- 
 ward, is a most useful school of experience. 
 
 The young man who goes to work as a re- 
 porter — and that is the only way to begin — 
 who observes, takes care of himself, keeps out 
 of temptation and all fonns of nonsense, is 
 attending a real life college of the highest pos- 
 sible value.
 
 I70 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Those who best escape this peril are men 
 who possess the unusual but still not infre- 
 quent combination of business capacity and 
 the gift of journalism: the shrewd ability of 
 the profit maker and the penetration of the 
 newspaperman as to the news that is wanted 
 and the opinion which expresses current 
 needs and the demand and duty of the hour. 
 Journalism offers to such opportunities both 
 for fortune and for influence as long as a 
 man keeps himself from holding any politi- 
 cal office or entering "politics," the constant 
 temptation and snare spread before such 
 men. Joseph Pulitzer was a crowning ex- 
 ample of this combination. As Rodin said, 
 when he modelled the bust of Joseph Pulit- 
 zer, a replica of which stands in the School 
 of Journalism of Columbia University, which 
 he endowed, he found himself modelling a 
 man with two sides to his face, one a busi- 
 ness American and the other the prophet 
 and poet. When Joseph Pulitzer bought 
 the New York World, May lo, 1883, it had 
 made no profits for nine years. In six years 
 it returned a "profit -and -loss -account" 
 profit of $1,018,000. Meanwhile meeting 
 out of the profits the sum required for its
 
 PAY AND REWARD 171 
 
 purchase, $400,000. To an amazing power 
 of creating circulation and putting a business 
 on a profitable basis within a year, Mr. 
 Pulitzer added the political sagacity which 
 led him to print a platform of ten planks, all 
 of which have been adopted and none of 
 which seemed then likely to command a 
 majority in the United States. What was 
 then both a new declaration, a political prin- 
 ciple, or a prophecy has now come to be 
 accepted by every one in substance, if not 
 in detail. Such instances are rare and, least 
 of all, in a metropolitan newspaper. James 
 Gordon Bennett had this specific combina- 
 tion of business and journalism. It is pos- 
 sessed in an eminent degree by Mr. Adolph 
 S. Ochs, of the New York Times, and has 
 been exercised by him w^ith constant refer- 
 ence to public duty. 
 
 The country weekly furnishes many men 
 who have this unusual combination, because 
 the business problems, while much harder 
 than they seem, are less difificult than the 
 financial responsibilities of a great newspa- 
 per. Every State in the Union has a little 
 group of men, not much known to the gen- 
 eral public, who edit its country newspapers
 
 172 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 and make out of the work a fair income, and 
 exert a political influence in the town and 
 county in which they live, and often over 
 their own State, far greater than is usually 
 held by the publisher or editor of a daily, 
 large or small, in a city. Very few forms of 
 success are more tangible and more agree- 
 able than that of an editor of a country 
 weekly who has these twin abilities, and has 
 achieved the success just outlined. The 
 possible profits of a man who has this com- 
 bination of powers, in a greater or less de- 
 gree, increases and increases with great 
 rapidity as the circulation of the paper is 
 large and its business issues correspondingly 
 weighty. 
 
 As has already been pointed out, a metro- 
 politan daily in a large city generally suffers 
 in circulation, advertising, and influence if 
 its head takes a political post, whether elec- 
 tive or appointed. There are exceptions, 
 but they are few. The editor or proprietor 
 of a daily in a smaller city, let us say of 
 250,000 population or less, on the other 
 hand, often improves his position before the 
 public and the influence of his paper by 
 taking public office. Senator Gilbert M.
 
 PAY AND REWARD 173 
 
 Hitchcock, of the Omaha World-IIerald, is 
 one of the most useful members of the Senate 
 to which he has been elected by a Repub- 
 lican State, though himself a Democrat. 
 His newspaper has steadily gained in cir- 
 culation and profit during his successful 
 political career. President Harding is a 
 still more notable instance of an editor at 
 the head of a daily in a city of 28,000 reach- 
 ing the highest position open to an Ameri- 
 can. Nor was any journalist who knew 
 the Marion, O., Star unaware of his ability. 
 The Democratic candidate in 1920, Gov- 
 ernor Cox, was also a newspaperman. The 
 country-weekly editor is pretty constantly 
 in politics. Editors in elective and public 
 posts are more numerous now than a gen- 
 eration ago. 
 
 The newspaperman who wants a political 
 career should early turn to the weekly or 
 small daily. He may not succeed, but he is 
 almost certain to fail if he seeks political 
 preferment on the big daily of our great 
 cities. The best public service of a news- 
 paperman comes by keeping out of politics 
 in all the fields of journalism. If he does, 
 be his field large or small, he will suggest
 
 174 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 legislation and see it pass, expose abuses and 
 force their reform, modify public policy, 
 prevent poor nominations, defeat unfit men, 
 and promote sound selections. No news- 
 paper can always accomplish these ends. 
 Elections do not follow circulation. News- 
 paper influence is not like the registry of a 
 pressure gauge, moving with every change. 
 It is a constant, continuous work whose 
 harvest may be delayed, but which in time 
 changes the public current. Public men are 
 constantly expressing their disregard of the 
 newspaper in public, but every newspaper- 
 man knows their anxiety to be reported, 
 their apprehension at newspaper attack, 
 their fear of opposition to a candidate, and 
 their dread of exposures. 
 
 The complete control of a newspaper by 
 one man is only possible where the man him- 
 self is able both to manage the newspaper 
 as a business and to write himself upon its 
 editorial page, or has the still more unusual 
 gift of outlining an editorial policy, and per- 
 suading other men to express it successfully, 
 without any sense of loss of individual power 
 on their part. Where the publisher cannot 
 write or the editor cannot publish there is
 
 PAY AND REWARD 175 
 
 certain to be a divided field of authority, 
 and relations between the two men are ex- 
 tremely likely to be the mutual decision of 
 two partners, strong on one side of the busi- 
 ness, but quite unequipped on the other. 
 
 Another combination of various talents, 
 new and almost as profitable, is presented by 
 the newspaper artist with a gift for humor 
 and the capacity to dramatize picture and 
 text in the old familiar channel of folk-lore. 
 "Mutt and Jeff" are our old friends Don 
 Quixote and Sancho Panza. "Foxy Grand- 
 pa" is the "myth of the old man" which has 
 so long ruled society, and to which Mr. 
 H. G. Wells so strongly objects. Various in- 
 fant prodigies who make game of age, au- 
 thority, and an array of elderly enemies are 
 but "Jack the Giant-Killer." Nell Brinkley 
 is a newspaper Watteau. The capacity to 
 do this in effective caricature and catchy 
 phrases, in flowing lines and happy sugges- 
 tion, pays better, just at present, than 
 the American presidency. One such genius 
 climbed in three short years from $15 a week 
 to $50,000 a year, with movie rights to fol- 
 low. A syndicate nearly always handles this 
 combination of art, dialogue, love, and
 
 176 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 laughter, supplying sketches and writings to 
 seventy or eighty newspapers. The appe- 
 tite for folk-lore being just as strong as at 
 the dawn of the race, those who do this work 
 are not only better known to the mass than 
 any other names in our dailies, but a num- 
 ber have guarantees of $50,000 a year under 
 long contracts, and two or three earn over 
 $100,000 a year on salary. 
 
 The ballad-maker once had nothing but 
 cakes and ale, but the newspapei poet whose 
 verse appears daily receives $30,000 or more 
 a year. A butt of malmsey Madeira (com- 
 muted now to £60 or £70 a year) is all the 
 British crown pays its poet laureate, but 
 democracy has larger and more tangible re- 
 wards for the verse-maker who catches its 
 fancy and holds its attention. 
 
 Of all the workers on the newspaper these 
 gifts are the most unique and inexplicable. 
 They meet a living human need not slaked 
 by the conventions of art, and no training 
 has yet been found either to develop or dis- 
 cover them. Colored supplements are often 
 called demoralizing; but who can hold an 
 ethical brief for Grimm's Tales or the morals 
 of many a fairy-story ?
 
 IX 
 THE COMPETITION OF "PUBLICITY" 
 
 The newspaper has been able to go on 
 through all the last century paying the small- 
 est salaries for the same ability because 
 there was no other demand for the writing 
 man. Books are few and pay little or noth- 
 ing. The United States, with all its millions 
 of population, yearly produces two-thirds as 
 many books as England, half of those sent 
 out in Italy, one-third of those written in 
 Germany, about as many as small lands like 
 Holland, Denmark, all in the years before 
 the war. 
 
 Not a tenth of the books published pay 
 the writer more than board wages. The 
 same book has brought a profit in Germany 
 when it had been a loss here to the author. 
 
 The man who wrote could not get even 
 low pay, except from the daily and weekly. 
 After he had published a third of his books, 
 Mr. Howells told me he believed all the men 
 who earned $5,000 a year from books could 
 
 177
 
 1/8 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 be seated at a dinner-party of eight. Frank 
 Stockton wrote me in 1886, after he had pub- 
 lished The Lady or the Tiger, and his best 
 output, that $125 I sent him as managing 
 editor of the Philadelphia Press for a syndi- 
 cated story was the best price he had ever 
 received. From $1,000 to $3,000 is now 
 paid for short stories, but not often. Ad- 
 vertising furnishes at present two-thirds the 
 revenue of daily papers and half the revenue 
 of weeklies and monthlies. A generation 
 ago the circulation furnished two-thirds the 
 revenue and advertising one-third. This 
 increase in advertising in periodicals, which 
 began after our Civil War, was followed 
 thirty years ago by a great flood of cir- 
 culars, pamphlets, posters, and every phase 
 of publicity outside of the periodical. There 
 are 9,000,000 people who own automobiles, 
 which means that they were equal to a 
 single payment of from $700 to $12,000. 
 There were even ten years ago only about 
 400,000 people buying bonds and shares. 
 There are now about 5,000,000 and 
 12,000,000 more who bought them in the 
 war. 
 
 This market has not been served by the
 
 "PUBLICITY" 179 
 
 newspaper. By their failure to censor finan- 
 cial advertising, the newspapers injured the 
 value of their advertising columns. They 
 would have been wiser if, instead of oppos- 
 ing, they had demanded, the passage of laws 
 requiring the scrutiny by a State authority 
 of every advertisement of a dubious security. 
 The financial institutions found that they 
 must reach customers by more direct chan- 
 nels than the newspaper. Railroads and in- 
 dustrials found that they must put their case 
 before the public. "House organs" were 
 needed in every corporation employing men 
 by the thousand. Employers discovered 
 that "morale" is as important in transporta- 
 tion lines, insurance companies, department 
 stores, mines, and factories as in an army. 
 When the Federal Reserve Bank was organ- 
 ized it had to have a periodical to reach all 
 the banks. The larger banks found that 
 they could keep their depositors only by in- 
 teresting them in banks. The little business 
 price circulars of the past have been fol- 
 lowed by costly magazines and books on 
 financial subjects, many of them most use- 
 ful as books of reference. Writers were 
 needed for this work, trained newspaper
 
 i8o THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 men. The salaries in this work are two to 
 three times as large as in regular newspaper 
 work of the same writing grade, the hours 
 and the tasks are less onerous, and the posi- 
 tions more permanent. 
 
 Able newspapermen are being drawn off 
 into this new calling exactly as the abler 
 lawyers of our day are drawn Into the service 
 of corporations ; but exactly as such lawyers 
 often find, though not invariably, that their 
 service of corporations shuts the door to 
 all political ambition, so the newspaperman 
 who enters this service loses his weight In 
 affairs. It is no longer possible, as It was up 
 to about fifty years ago, to draw great law- 
 yers, like Webster, Choate, Tilden, and Ev- 
 arts, Into the service of the commonwealth. 
 Ye cannot serve two masters. The news- 
 paperman goes through the same change 
 when he enters "publicity." He doubles 
 and trebles his Income, but his magazine arti- 
 cles are turned down by the monthlies and 
 weeklies. His special articles are rejected 
 by the Sunday supplement editors. His 
 name is put on the list of those whose every 
 contribution goes to the newspaper's adver- 
 tising manager to make certain that there Is
 
 "PUBLICITY" i8i 
 
 no free advertising concealed in it. He has 
 lost all the joy and the pulsing thrill of serv- 
 ing the many and the coming cause. These 
 are gone, never to return. He has, to use a 
 familiar experience, lost his "amateur stand- 
 ing," as the college man loses it by taking 
 pay for "summer baseball." 
 
 The work of publicity is honorable and of 
 good report. It has enlisted the zeal and 
 enthusiasm of some of the best newspaper- 
 men now living. It is a necessary and use- 
 ful task. It has its high-minded code, just 
 as advertising has. There are few more im- 
 pressive, more useful, and more energetic 
 ethical reforms than that which has come 
 in the last twenty years, both in advertising 
 and in publicity. There is this difference 
 between them, that the advertising agent is 
 paying for the space he secures. The pub- 
 licity man is sometimes paying for space, 
 though this in large establishments is prop- 
 erly the task of another office, the advertis- 
 ing manager. The publicity man, represent- 
 ing any establishment, bank, trust company, 
 railroad, "industrial," factory, college, uni- 
 versity or school, church or philanthropy, 
 has in charge an institution which produces
 
 i82 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 "news" useful and of interest to the public, 
 an event legitimate for publication. This 
 "news" it is the task of the publicity man 
 to put in such shape that a newspaper will 
 want to print it as news. A large part of 
 the news, particularly that relating to organ- 
 izations of all orders, is a duplex. On one 
 side it will benefit the entity represented ; on 
 the other it is of interest to the public. If 
 it is handled so that the latter comes to the 
 front its chance of being admitted to the 
 newspaper is greatly enhanced ; if the former, 
 it will be shut out as subject-matter for the 
 advertising department of a newspaper. In 
 addition, the publicity man puts such an 
 event in a shape which will appeal to the 
 friends and customers of the institution, in- 
 creasing the one and multiplying the other. 
 The last is, of course, the open and direct 
 course. As to the former, the newspaper is 
 watchful. For that large share of human 
 activities, religious, charitable, and educa- 
 tional, which our American system exempts 
 from taxation as does no European fisc, the 
 American newspapers give a generous space, 
 far beyond that habitual in England and 
 Continental Europe. Outside of this the
 
 "PUBLICITY" 183 
 
 newspaper is watchful and grows more alert 
 every year. A bureau existed for several 
 years, watching this field and notifying news- 
 papers of an approaching demand. This did 
 its work in educating the newspaper-ofifiice, 
 and was discontinued. 
 
 The publicity man addresses himself to 
 his work in the spirit of a lawyer, counsel 
 for a corporation. Exactly as at the bar 
 complaint is justly made that the weight and 
 ability of the legal profession serves cor- 
 porations, so publicity is diverting from the 
 newspaper the ability of journalism. When 
 the full tide of activities, dulled now in 1921, 
 was in progress in 1919 and 1920, there was 
 hardly a week but saw some conspicuously 
 able newspaperman turn to publicity, just 
 as able lawyers entered corporate service. 
 In some cities leading members of the bar 
 receive annually a retaining fee, whose ag- 
 gregate in the case of one conspicuous ex- 
 ample in Philadelphia in the recent past ran 
 to $200,000, whose real purpose was to pre- 
 vent this particular counsellor at law from 
 appearing against the corporations paying 
 this dubious tribute. 
 
 The doubt with which this practice was
 
 1 84 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 regarded by high-minded lawyers is closely 
 analogous to the feeling in the calling of 
 journalism that a man who enters on pub- 
 licity devotes to personal ends ability which 
 should serve public interests and public in- 
 terests alone. The personal standard and 
 conscience of men alike honorable will differ 
 on an ethical issue like this. Those who 
 take up publicity will find the world's ap- 
 proval and enjoy a prosperous professional 
 life; but those who, when offered by some 
 great corporation the opportunity to serve 
 it, have declined and prefer to preserve the 
 repute won by years of endeavor, that they 
 hold an unpaid brief for every good cause 
 and will not pitch their camp among the 
 prosperous tents and traffickers of Kedar, 
 will be happy and poor. 
 
 For publicity all the training of the jour- 
 nalist is wanted, and a plentiful measure of 
 character and address. There needs to be 
 special attention and study paid to economic 
 issues, transactions, events, and statistics. 
 The same careful study of the psychology of 
 attention needs to be made as advertising 
 demands. The special gift, not frequent, of 
 being accurate and interesting on subjects
 
 "PUBLICITY" 185 
 
 which bore most people is needed. It can 
 be cultivated, but it, like the news sense, is 
 a special equipment. If it is absent nothing 
 can supply it. Brought in daily contact 
 with financiers and financial affairs, the pub- 
 licity man has unusual opportunities and 
 openings to add to his personal fortune and, 
 if he so desires, to be selected for some im- 
 portant executive position in a financial in- 
 stitution. This precise phase of the work of 
 the journalist is recent, not over twenty-five 
 years old. There is a wide difference from 
 the rather shabby, uncertain, and secretive 
 man who, forty years ago, represented in 
 newspaper-offices the great corporations, and 
 the publicity man to-day, known, accepted, 
 and acceptable, and having a weight, force, 
 and position of his own. The development 
 of the publicity man has greatly diminished 
 and will end the sinister rumors that at- 
 tended in the past the old type of corpora- 
 tion representatives in newspaper-offices. 
 As a railroad lawyer said forty-five years 
 
 ago at Albany: ''That is all left to " 
 
 (naming the leading Albany lobbyist of 
 forty-five years ago); "I am only here to 
 diffuse an atmosphere of good feeling."
 
 i86 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 The "publicity man" needs in these days 
 a college education and the training of a 
 school of journalism whose graduates in all 
 the various institutions that have such 
 schools are turning to this work in depress- 
 ing numbers. He has to have newspaper ex- 
 perience and a wide newspaper acquaintance. 
 His personal repute, professional standing, 
 and the confidence he enjoys among news- 
 papermen must be high. The man most 
 successful has had the training of the city 
 room, held executive positions which make 
 journalists known to their calling, and shared 
 in gathering either political or financial news, 
 or, better still, both. He must know public 
 men. He must have an unerring instinct as 
 to what should be left out and what a news 
 or city editor will use. The publicity man 
 is changing the reserve of bankers and the 
 attitude of business men to newspapers 
 quicker than any other agency for two gen- 
 erations. He has turned the mere propa- 
 ganda of the past into an honorable service 
 to society, with the inevitable loss to himself 
 already mentioned. 
 
 The newspaper, which is straitened be- 
 tween the hazards of its business and the
 
 "PUBLICITY" 187 
 
 steady and successful pressure of printers 
 and pressmen for higher wages, will be 
 forced to raise the pay of the writing man in 
 order to keep experienced men of ability and 
 to attract younger men of promise. 
 
 In journalism and publicity aliice, there 
 are special pitfalls which go with the calling, 
 as in all occupations and vocations. Ano- 
 nymity tempts to careless utterance and 
 record, sometimes injurious to others, which 
 would not come over a signature; but this, 
 too, tempts to hitting harder than is meet, 
 from sheer pride in the personal word. To 
 overcome these, the judicial mind and an 
 inner responsibility are needed. The jour- 
 nalist is not tempted to invent, but he 
 risks inaccuracy so near is swift oblivion to 
 his work. Sensitive professional honor is 
 demanded here. Renan said the only temp- 
 tation from the truth that overcame him 
 was a happy phrase. Avoid it ! Personal 
 ends, offers, and profit tempt. As for the 
 financial writer to speculate on his early 
 news. This is fatal for all in journalism or 
 publicity. No one should enter this public 
 service unless he honestly feels he can resist 
 these temptations.
 
 X 
 
 DIFFERING AIMS AND TASKS 
 
 The newspaper presents itself to many 
 who seek its tasks as the path to various 
 aims — book reviewing, dramatic, musical, or 
 art criticism, foreign correspondence, writing 
 special articles, fiction, and general litera- 
 ture. They want to write; men on news- 
 papers write ; the conclusion seems inevitable 
 that the newspaper is the place for them. 
 
 So far as fiction is concerned — and this is 
 also true of the playwright — the chief, per- 
 haps the sole, advantage of the newspaper is 
 that reporting gives contact with a wide 
 range of life. This is particularly true of 
 women. They are, in spite of their partial 
 enfranchisement, much hedged about. They 
 reach the twenties and even the thirties sin- 
 gularly, often incredibly, ignorant. In the 
 past a conspiracy of silence has hedged them 
 about, not yet fully cut away. Training for 
 the newspaper and still more the city room 
 and the reporter's life gives them more ex- 
 
 i88
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 189 
 
 perience to the hour than any other work. 
 Genius does not need this. When George 
 Meredith was asked how much he had him- 
 self seen of "Our Conquerors," he said, 
 "Once, at dinner," and went on to say, in 
 substance, that with this a man equal to the 
 task could draw the portrait; he needed no 
 more. But I am not writing for genius. 
 The average writer needs experience, squan- 
 ders it at the beginning, runs dry and 
 wheezes. 
 
 For the average writer the newspaper will 
 give experience in abundant measure. Not 
 merely the under side and the seamy edge of 
 society, but the whole range. Much more 
 is needed. The best fiction is only produced 
 by intensive study. "The Cup" had two 
 years of solid study, and Robert Browning 
 gave rabbinical lore twelve years' study to 
 give the world "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and the 
 rest. With George Eliot's study for Romola 
 every one is familiar. Whitman was avid of 
 knowledge, and altered his reference to the 
 sperm-whale cow after a talk with a Long 
 Island whaler. 
 
 For those who enter the newspaper-office, 
 not seeking a permanent task, but in order
 
 190 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 to provide themselves with the material 
 needed in fiction, and to give their capacity 
 for expression the special and unique train- 
 ing furnished by the newspaper-office, there 
 exists the same necessity for the mastery 
 of fundamental studies. A generation and 
 more ago a father brought his son to a news- 
 paperman in Philadelphia for advice as to 
 his training for literature. When he finished 
 his preparatory school he had that flare for 
 engineering which seized so many. He had 
 pursued his studies in one of the best tech- 
 nical schools in the United States. He 
 could not bear to go on with the work of the 
 engineer. It had been agreed by father and 
 son that the case should be submitted to 
 a newspaperman, with critical experience. 
 He surprised both by advising two years, if 
 possible, one year as a minimum, at Johns 
 Hopkins University, in political science and 
 political economy, with history added, then 
 four or five years of work as a reporter. 
 Both accepted the advice. He went to 
 Johns Hopkins. He entered the Philadel- 
 phia Press office. He found there the sub- 
 ject of his best-known short story, Galleghcr, 
 and in five years he was launched in the sea
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 191 
 
 of letters. Ten years later he was asked by 
 the newspaperman who had given this ad- 
 vice whether it had proved wise. " But for 
 those semesters at Johns Hopkins," he said 
 with enthusiasm, "I should have had no 
 foundation, no solid ground, on which to 
 build my fiction. WTien one situation and 
 another came I knew how to handle it so as 
 to produce the effect of reality, because I 
 knew what the original thing was." Years 
 passed, the newspaperman was selected as 
 the first director of the School of Journalism, 
 endowed by Joseph Pulitzer. The morning 
 the announcements of his selection appeared 
 in the papers he was handed this telegram: 
 
 Your first student in Journalism congratulates 
 the Pulitzer School on your selection as its Di- 
 rector. Richard Harding Davis. 
 
 For real literature I doubt if a newspaper 
 does anything. Fiction is only a sort of 
 stepdaughter of letters. You can count on 
 the fingers of one hand all the novels still 
 generally read after three hundred years. 
 Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian 
 Nights, and the folk-tales of each race last.
 
 192 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 What else? Verse and drama of a high 
 order, prose which lives, and how little of 
 that there is ! Work on a newspaper is 
 likely to do harm in letters by squandering 
 the early precious years of production that 
 return not. Walt Whitman is, it seems to 
 me, the only American newspaperman who 
 has produced a work of the first order. The 
 newspaper and periodical undoubtedly gave 
 him contact and material as to the city, but 
 he used it because he was a divine tramp 
 and not because he was a good newspaper- 
 man. Who the truly great of the nineteenth 
 century are we do not yet know, but the 
 candidates thus far are none of them news- 
 papermen. 
 
 Criticism of the theatre, music, books, and 
 art in the newspaper attract many because 
 they are interested in the subjects, have a 
 yearning to express a personal opinion on 
 them and "lead the public" taste, and cher- 
 ish the desire to come in closer contact with 
 artists in their fields. This may come, but 
 not along the paths they propose or foresee. 
 The newspaper deals with these subjects, 
 not because they are part of "art," but be- 
 cause they furnish events which insist on
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 193 
 
 occurring, plays, concerts, exhibitions, sales, 
 and so on. These have to be reported, and 
 a report must first be accurate and next 
 informed. No one is trusted at a big party 
 convention unless he knows politics, has a 
 wide and personal familiarity and acquain- 
 tance with the principal figures, and can 
 place what is said and done in its proper 
 relation with the general stream of political 
 events, past, present, and to come. Less 
 effort is made to secure this in the drama, 
 music, book reviews, and the arts, because 
 the American public is nothing like as in- 
 terested in these as in politics, which is ill 
 for the arts and good for the State. There 
 are Latin communities in which the reverse 
 is true, with reverse results. 
 
 The rawest reporter sent to these events 
 does something to fit himself, if it is no more 
 than to note the spelling of the actor's name, 
 so as not to get it "Southern " when it should 
 be "Sothern," It is recognized, also, that a 
 man has to write more skilfully on these 
 topics than on a straightaway argument. 
 Temperament is also needed. What long 
 since took place, therefore, is that there is a 
 constant natural selection in progress in a
 
 194 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 newspaper-office by which certain men who 
 come to have charge of these fields generally 
 work into them, according to the aptitude, 
 the training, and the natural capacity and 
 judgment of each. Public interest is strong- 
 est in the stage and next in succession in 
 music, in painting and sculpture, and last in 
 books. Fiction leads here in American pub- 
 lic interest, and for serious works there is a 
 lesser outlay and a smaller interest. 
 
 Any man or woman of the necessary re- 
 quirements, "adequately" trained in jour- 
 nalism, or under present conditions merely 
 getting a place in the city room, who has a 
 genuine interest in these arts, and provides 
 himself with the necessary equipment, will 
 find himself writing notices, but the equip- 
 ment must be broad and fundamental. 
 More hopeless despair I have not often seen 
 in a writer than on the face of a young Har- 
 vard graduate who early in his college course 
 was promised a chance at book reviewing 
 on an evening paper which gave consider- 
 able space to book reviews, and was on the 
 list of an uncommonly good list of publish- 
 ers. As he was to write, he took writing 
 courses in college and "specialized in Eng-
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 195 
 
 llsh." He avoided all the sciences, he cut 
 out economics as "dull," and history as a 
 "beastly grind," not following the course of 
 the student who took all the history and lit- 
 erary courses he could find in the same cen- 
 tury, "because it made the dates easier." 
 My young friend was able, sincere, with a 
 good mind and a turn for critical expression. 
 He found that four-fifths of the books he 
 had to review dealt with science, affairs, and 
 the usual range of the day's publications. 
 For verse and fiction he was ready, but out- 
 side of that his college courses gave him no 
 background. 
 
 Fortune and accident play their share in 
 the selection of newspaper critics, but any 
 man, once on a newspaper, who wants a 
 task which does not carry as far or lead to 
 as much as political and financial journalism 
 or the management and presentation of 
 news will be writing on the art in which he 
 is interested if he studies it, reads on it, 
 pushes his acquaintance, and sedulously fol- 
 lows its criticism. If it is music, he will 
 take courses in the theory and history of 
 music. He will add to this, constant and 
 painstaking study of scores. He will learn
 
 196 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 the lives as well as the works of composers, 
 the records of musicians, the sequence of 
 programmes, and keep notes of time and 
 interpretation. He will not despise the 
 graphaphone. Our musical criticism, led by 
 Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, ranks higher than any 
 other. There are dramatic critics who read 
 and reread a play of Shakespeare, how- 
 ever often they have heard other interpre- 
 tations, when a new production appears. 
 Careful critics will seek the original of 
 any play "adapted" for the stage in Eng- 
 lish, and when a notable artist appears 
 from abroad go over foreign criticism on 
 his past performances. Much newspaper 
 criticism is, it is true, haphazard impres- 
 sion; much on the stage deserves little more; 
 but the critic who respects his task and 
 himself will spare no labor. His work will 
 show it, and he will gain a respect and at- 
 tention not paid to those who cleverly record 
 the personal reaction to each performance. 
 The true critic will read plays, the lives of 
 players, and keep track of criticism in Eng- 
 land, France, and Germany. He will give 
 hours to preparation for a new performance 
 of a Shakespeare play or the "Sunken Bell."
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 197 
 
 He will try to know what the artist wants 
 to do as well as what he does do. He will 
 watch the audience and he will report its 
 opinion as carefully as his own. He will see 
 every picture that is available, read endlessly 
 the history of art, keep his notes of past ex- 
 hibitions, and refresh and review from them 
 the past work of an artist as he passes from 
 stage to stage. Above all, he will remem- 
 ber that art is living, and he will not make 
 the mistake of insisting that there was jam 
 yesterday on the stage and will be to- 
 morrow, but that one need not expect any 
 to-day, not while he is writing criticism. 
 But all this will not do the job on the daily, 
 unless the critic is also interesting. 
 
 This sense of criticism needs to be bal- 
 lasted by the reading of the best criticism 
 now and in the past to avoid the easy task 
 of being flip. All this applies to the review 
 of books, save that here a wider knowledge 
 is needed. In few paths is the temptation 
 so strong to be easy and praise, because this 
 is all the publishers ever print in their cir- 
 culars and their newspaper advertising, and 
 critics love to be quoted and see their names 
 in advertisements. Reviewing is ill paid ; in
 
 198 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 proportion to the time it takes and its labor, 
 about half the other work of the newspaper. 
 It cannot be done adequately without a 
 constant effort to keep abreast with the 
 progress of science, art, discovery, theory, 
 and practice in the leading fields of human 
 action. The good and thorough reviewer 
 need have no fear of publisher or dread of 
 the advertising manager, except to give 
 prompt attention to books advertised, as is 
 right. A reader who has his attention drawn 
 to a title justly expects to know what the 
 book is like. I have never but once known 
 of a publisher who threatened to withdraw 
 his advertising, and this for a just review, 
 as held by a group of experts; but its truth- 
 telling ran across the personal preferences 
 of an autocratic English manager. 
 
 The promotion of men to the editorial j 
 page nearly always comes by selection from 
 the news, city, and critical staff, but where 
 there are scores of men who can report, do 
 Sunday specials, and write criticism there 
 will not often be one who can turn out edi- 
 torials, effective and acceptable. The ex- 
 periment is constantly being made, particu- 
 larly by publishers, of bringing in able men
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 199 
 
 in literature or affairs to write editorials, but 
 almost invariably with failure. The life of 
 the news getter, and experience in and about 
 legislatures and conventions, State or fed- 
 eral, are needed to develop the editor after 
 he has had all a city room can give him. 
 He needs an embracing sympathy, a howling 
 joy in a fight, courage and the will to take 
 large responsibilities and risks as large with 
 his own place after midnight. "Nobody 
 ever reads editorials" is often said, but 
 nothing somehow cuts into circulation like 
 a blunder in an editorial. Vigor and force 
 of statement is the hardest of all gifts to 
 achieve, and it cannot be imparted. Many 
 good all-around editorial writers fail at this 
 point. The long leader is to-day ineffective. 
 The short is a miracle and works the miracu- 
 lous. A single phrase in a Sun editorial 
 killed Hancock as a presidential candidate; 
 Napoleon said of Coleridge's editorials that 
 they were worth an army corps to England ; 
 and Manton Marble checked wanton arrests 
 in the Civil War by an editorial in The 
 World. There is probably no post on a 
 newspaper so often and so long waiting for 
 the right man as on its editorial page.
 
 200 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 Successful editorial writers have almost 
 without exception begun their training early. 
 They are always voluminous readers, and 
 while they have neglected much in college, 
 books they have not neglected. Endlessly 
 do they read newspapers and must be soaked 
 in newspapers from college and high school. 
 The forensic instinct must be strong. The 
 affairs of all countries must interest. As for 
 the great game of politics and of legislation, 
 of reform and exposure, this must be like a 
 religion. Judgment, exact knowledge of in- 
 tricate situations, the ability to absorb hint, 
 suggestion, and illumination from those di- 
 recting great affairs, and the knowledge of 
 what must be left out — these only come with 
 experience and contact with many men of 
 many minds. Now that women are in ac- 
 tive touch with all that counts, a new edi- 
 torial problem is present, but for some rea- 
 son for which I have no explanation I have 
 never known of a woman that wrote good 
 editorials, save on social studies, though I 
 have known of or have known several who 
 wisely guided an editorial page. There must 
 be women with the editorial mind, but I have 
 never known one, and I ask no larger reward
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 201 
 
 than to spur some young woman, reading 
 these Hnes, triumphantly to prove that I am 
 wholly wrong. 
 
 The casual writing of the college news- 
 paper does nothing like so much to prepare 
 men for the more serious tasks of a daily as 
 hard, conscientious reading in history, sci- 
 ence, political economy, political science, 
 philosophy, and literature. All reading is 
 valuable; this reading in preparation for 
 newspaper work is invaluable. 
 
 Acquaintance with artists, authors, and 
 actors has its fruitage. If a man writes 
 effective criticism such acquaintance comes 
 spontaneously and naturally. It is unwise 
 to seek it or to cultivate it. Unless a man 
 has carefully equipped himself by reading, 
 study, and experience, acquaintance is mis- 
 leading. You have to know a good deal 
 before the utterance of artist, actor, or 
 author can tell you much. A course in a 
 life class Is worth more than any amount of 
 studio talk about the ideal nude. The care- 
 ful exhaustive study of such paintings of the 
 past as our galleries hold quicken the eye 
 and train the judgment for the new more 
 than can artists.
 
 202 THE NEWSPAPERMAN 
 
 The peril of the young critic is that he will 
 see fault rather than achievement, and tell 
 what a picture play or presentation is not, 
 instead of describing and interpreting what 
 it is. The present and not the absent is 
 before us to be criticised. It is easy to see 
 deficiency; it is difficult to see and weigh 
 achievement. The path to recognition of 
 what is being done lies in the study of 
 
 The dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule 
 Our spirits from their urns. 
 
 If you have once made their acquaintance 
 you are fitted to recognize the real thing 
 when it crosses your path. The frequent 
 peril of the old and experienced critic is 
 that, unless he knows the development of 
 past art, he will not recognize the develop- 
 ment of his own day and slam the door of 
 his criticism in the face of the advancing 
 future. If you have taken the trouble to 
 master Byzantine art you can understand 
 the cubists. If you know from your own 
 reading what a fool Jeffrey made of him- 
 self for all time over Wordsworth, or Vol- 
 taire over Shakespeare, you are very much
 
 AIMS AND TASKS 203 
 
 less likely to make a fool of yourself over 
 the new verse of to-day. Whether you ap- 
 prove or not, your method of approach and 
 expression will be different. 
 
 The earlier in his life the future critic 
 begins to read and see the critics and the 
 monuments of the past, in all the arts, the 
 more likely he is to get a chance to do criti- 
 cism and the longer he will continue to write 
 good criticism. 
 
 Lastly, let me note that among the men 
 who do effective work in these fields, the 
 proportion of those who have kept up their 
 Greek and Latin, their French and German, 
 is large, larger than elsewhere.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ability and aptitude for journal- 
 istic work, 5-8 
 
 Advertiser, Boston, editorial dic- 
 tion changed in, 108 
 
 Advertising; value and relation 
 to journalism, 178-180 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, as a news- 
 paper critic, 86 
 
 Artists and cartoonists, work of, 
 
 17s, 176 
 AthencBum, London, place in 
 
 periodical literature, 71, 148 
 Authorship and journalism, 21, 
 
 22, 74, 81-92 
 
 Bennett, James Gordon, busi- 
 ness ability, 146, 171; journal- 
 istic vision, 79 
 
 Bible, The, as a model for dic- 
 tion, 95, 99, 102, 104, 10s, 112, 
 140; quoted (Ezekiel), 32-34 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, place in 
 periodical literature, 71 
 
 Brisbane, Arthur, discusses sal- 
 aries, 159, 160; as newspaper- 
 man, 166 
 
 Brownell, WilHam Crary, as 
 city editor and friend of the 
 author, 127 
 
 Browning, Robert, opinion of 
 periodical pubUcation, 26-28; 
 study for authorship, 189 
 
 Calkins, Hiram, remarkable 
 memory for names and faces, 
 73, 74 
 
 Calhng to newspaper work, the, 
 16-18, 88, 89 
 
 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonder- 
 land, enriches EngUsh lan- 
 guage, 94 
 
 Chamberlain, Ivory, large salary 
 of, 158 
 
 CivU and Military Gazette, La- 
 hore, example of world-wide 
 journalism in English, 107 
 
 Columbia University School of 
 Joumahsm, 124, 125, 170 
 
 Commercial Advertiser, The (N. 
 Y.), circulation a century ago, 
 121 
 
 Comparison of journalism with 
 other professions, 1-9, 41, 42, 
 70, 166 
 
 Comparison of newspaper with 
 other periodicals, 70, 71 
 
 Correspondents, work and pay 
 
 of, 154-156 
 
 Criticism, training for and stand- 
 ards of, 194-199, 202, 203 
 
 Crome, skill as craftsman and 
 painter, 83 
 
 Dana, Charles A., his news- 
 paper EngUsh, no, in; or- 
 ganizes The Sun, 122; salary 
 as Tribune editor, 157 
 
 Davis, Richard Harding, news- 
 paper exfX-'rience and other 
 training, 85, 190, 191; war 
 correspondent, 156 
 
 de Goncourt and criticism, 130 
 
 205
 
 206 
 
 INDEX 
 
 De Quincey and style, 139 
 Dewey, John, as teacher and 
 
 thinker, 93 
 Dickens, Charles, as newspaper- 
 man, 85 
 Difficulties and disadvantages 
 of journalistic profession, 40, 
 43, 44, 88, 89, 164, i6s, 167- 
 169, 187 
 Divisions of newspaper work, 8,9 
 Dreiser, Theodore, as newspaper- 
 man, 85 
 
 Editorial writing, 192-200 
 Eliot, George, study for Romola, 
 
 189 
 ElUs, Dr. William T., syndi- 
 cated Sunday-school lessons, 
 
 57 
 English, newspaper, chapter VI, 
 
 93-113 
 Equipment, personal, 69-80 
 
 Fiction-writers aided by news- 
 paper work, 84, 8s, 90 
 
 Field of journalism, 4, 52-64, 
 70, 71, 130, 131 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, saves news- 
 paper style, 108, 109 
 
 Function of the newspaper, 32, 
 37, 38, 45 
 
 Garrison, editorial opinions of, 
 140, 141 
 
 Genghiz Khan, example of sol- 
 dierly equipment, 69 
 
 Gibbon, newspaper training for 
 history-writing, 86 
 
 Gilder, Richard Watson, names 
 swift readers, 76; opinions of 
 poets, 82 
 
 Government and the press, 46, 
 47, 52 
 
 Greeley, Horace, early training. 
 
 122; editorial opinions, 140, 
 141; finance, 146, 157 
 Growth of newspaper, 29, 30, 36, 
 37, 121 
 
 Hammond, History of New York, 
 its narrowness, 53 
 
 Harden, Maximilian, style of, 
 108 
 
 Harding, President Warren G., 
 as a successful journalist, 173 
 
 Harper's Magazine, place in 
 periodical literature, 71 
 
 Harrington, H. F., competence 
 as head of School of Journal- 
 ism, Northwestern University, 
 128 
 
 Health, strain upon, 71-73, 77 
 
 Henry, O., aided by journalism, 
 87; as journaUst, no 
 
 Herald, New York, profits, 146; 
 salary paid, 158 
 
 History-writers aided by news- 
 paper work, 86 
 
 Hitchcock, Senator Gilbert M., 
 journalistic training, 173 
 
 Howells, William Dean, as jour- 
 naUst, 85; opinions of literary 
 pay, 177, 178 
 
 Hurst, Fanny, newspaper train- 
 ing of, 8s 
 
 Independent, The, place in peri- 
 odical Uterature, 71 
 
 Information, value of general, 
 10, 201, 203 
 
 Irving, Sir Henry, importance of 
 business success to theatre, 
 145 
 
 James, Henry, lack of newspaper 
 
 training, 8s 
 Johns Hopkins University, R. 
 
 H. Davis attends, 190, 191
 
 INDEX 
 
 207 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, and English 
 style, 106, io8, 109 
 
 Keats, John, enriches English 
 language, 94 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, as a journal- 
 ist, 8s 
 
 Koran, The, contributions to 
 language and style, 95, 96, 98 
 
 Krebhiel, H. E., dean of musical 
 critics, 196 
 
 Language, traditions, growth, 
 
 and development of, 95-1 10 
 Lincoln, Abraham, political 
 
 opinions, 140 
 Literature and journalism, 20, 
 
 21-24; chapter V, 81-92; 191 
 Lord, Chester G., judge of 
 
 young writers, 167 
 
 McCarthy, Justin, History of 
 Our Own Time, shows news- 
 paper training, 86 
 
 Macchiavelli, The Prince, 
 preaches distorted doctrine, 
 
 45 
 
 McClure, S. S., as newspaper- 
 man, 152 
 
 Meredith, George, as news- 
 paperman, 85; genius as 
 writer, 189 
 
 Merrill, Bradford, on newspaper 
 circulation and profit, 149 
 
 Miller, Hugh, Schools and School- 
 masters, on degrading one's 
 talent, 82 
 
 Missouri University has first 
 School of JournaUsm, 125 
 
 Moral responsibihty of journal- 
 ist, 32-35, 38-39, 49-51 
 
 Nation, The, place in periodical 
 literature, 71 
 
 National attitudes toward jour- 
 nalism, 14-16 
 
 News and circulation area, 12 
 
 News defined, 13 
 
 News, instinct for discovering, 
 8, 10-12 
 
 North American Review, place in 
 periodical literature, 71; pub- 
 lishes poets' early work, 90 
 
 Northwestern University, School 
 of Journalism, organized by 
 Chicago Tribune, 128 
 
 Ochs, Adolph S., joumaUst and 
 
 business man, 171 
 Origin and growth of newspaper, 
 
 29, 30, 36, 37, 121 
 Outlook, The, place in periodical 
 literature, 71 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette publishes Ar- 
 nold's criticism, 86 
 
 Patton, ex-president of Prince- 
 ton, opinions of religious news, 
 56 
 
 Pay for newspaper work, 152, 
 156-163, 171, 175-178 
 
 Personal influence on the press, 
 
 51. 52, 174 
 
 Poetry and the press, 82-86, 89, 
 90 
 
 Poets, newspaper, 176 
 
 Political leanings of a news- 
 paper, 47, 48, 50, 58-60, 
 
 172-175 
 
 Poole, Ernest, as a newspaper- 
 man, 85 
 
 Poor Richard, appears first in a 
 periodical, 87 
 
 Power of the press, 137, 138, 
 140-143 
 
 Press, Philadelphia, publishes 
 Stockton, 178; Davis on, 190 
 
 Professional schools, 1 14-144
 
 208 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Profits of newspapers, 145-151 
 
 Public Ledger, Philadelphia, quo- 
 tation to illustrate newspaper 
 style, 93 
 
 Publicity, value and effect of, 24, 
 25. 42. 54-55; chapter IX, 
 177-187 
 
 Pulitzer, Joseph, enlarges scope 
 of the newspaper, 58, 59; 
 great reader, 77; newspaper 
 politics and profits, 170, 171; 
 School of Journalism, 191 
 
 QuaUfications of a journalist, 1 1- 
 14. 38, 57, 58 (see also Tech- 
 nical training) 
 
 Quarterly, The, place in periodi- 
 cal Uterature, 71 
 
 Reading, a newspaperman's, 75- 
 78 
 
 Reference habit, the, 78 
 
 Religious news, 55-58 
 
 Review, Edinburgh, place in peri- 
 odical literature, 71 
 
 Rhett, Southern journalist of 
 Civil War, 141 
 
 Rice, Allen Thorndike, as news- 
 paperman, 152 
 
 Rice, Grantland, skill of, no 
 
 Ripley, George, salary of, 157 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, rapid 
 reader, 76; use of newspaper 
 in pubUc service, etc., 63, 64 
 
 Saturday Review, The, place in 
 periodical literature, 71 
 
 Schools of journalism, 1 17-144 
 
 Service of newspaper to com- 
 munity and society, 19-21, 23, 
 24, 32, 45 {see Field of journal- 
 ism) 
 
 Shakespeare as model of style, 
 140 
 
 Shaw, George Bernard, as news- 
 paperman, 83 
 
 Sinclair, Upton, as newspaper- 
 man, 85 
 
 Special writer, the, 64-66, 151 
 
 Spectator, The, circulation, 121; 
 place in periodical literature, 
 71; profits, 148 
 
 Status of the journalist, 41 
 
 Stockton, Frank, pay for story, 
 178 
 
 Strachey, Lytton, Queen Vic- 
 toria, shows influence of news- 
 paper training, 86 
 
 Style in journaUsm, 9-1 1 
 
 Sun, The New York, age, 149; 
 Brisbane and Lord on staff, 
 166, 167 ; influence illustrat- 
 ed, 199; organized by Dana, 
 122; publishes O. Henry, 87, 
 no 
 
 Syndicating, value of, 152 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, salary of, 157 
 
 Technical training of newspaper- 
 man, 61-63, I I 7-144. 194. 
 195 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
 as newspaperman, 85 
 
 Times, London, religious news, 
 60; solvency of, 145 
 
 Times, New York, work of Ochs 
 on, 171 
 
 Trade journals, service of, 178- 
 i8s 
 
 Trades unions and salaries, 161 
 
 Tribune, Chicago, organizes 
 School of Journalism, 128; 
 success of, 146 
 
 Tribune, New York, early sal- 
 aries paid, 157 
 
 Truth in journaUsm, 49 
 
 Typewriting, use in newspaper 
 work, 74, 75
 
 INDEX 
 
 209 
 
 Variations of newspaper method 
 
 and ideal, 66-68 
 Vision, the essential gift of, 7g, 80 
 Vocabulary of newspaperman, 
 
 93-113 
 
 Walter, John, makes London 
 Times pay, 145 
 
 Watterson, Henry, skill as a 
 reader, 77 
 
 Wellington, adherence to gov- 
 enmient, 46 
 
 Whitman, Walt, benefited by 
 leaving newspaper work, 82, 
 83; seeker of knowledge, 189 
 
 Williams, Dr. Walter, organizes 
 School of Journalism in Uni- 
 versity of Missouri, 125 
 
 Women in newspaper work, 125, 
 
 152, 153 
 World, The New York, acquired 
 by Pulitzer, 58; early salaries 
 paid, 158; example of influ- 
 ence, 199; personal relations 
 of author on, 127; profits 
 under Pulitzer, 170; youth of 
 employees, 73 
 
 Yancey, Southern journalist of 
 
 Civil War, 141 
 Youth and journaUstic work, 5, 
 
 73. 89 
 
 Zola, opinion on value of news- 
 paper training to literary 
 style, 85
 
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