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THE YOUNG MAN AND JOURNALISM

BEGINNING IN NEWSPAPER WORK--THE REPORTER'S FIRST EXPERIENCES--UNPLEASANT TASKS

The beginner in newspaper work usually starts as a reporter of the simplest and most unimportant kind of routine news. The city editor tells him what to do and how to do it. The start is made easy for him. The prevailing supposition that reporters go out into the streets and hunt for news is far from fact. They do so in the small cities but not for big newspapers.

Newsgathering has become vastly systematized. Nineteen twentieths of the news comes through established channels of information and this explains why nearly all newspapers have the same facts. The sources of information are known in all newspaper offices. If a man falls dead in the street, or a fire starts in an important building, or an automobile crushes a child, or anything unusual happens in any street, it is known to every city editor within a few minutes; for a policeman reports it to police headquarters immediately, and reporters grab it. Similarly, shipping news is sent to the ship-news office; cases of sudden or unexplained death must be made public by official physicians; public parades and demonstrations are anticipated through the permit bureau, and so on. All day and all night this kind of news pours in to the city editor. With almost instant judgment he decides on its news value, discards it or hustles a reporter for the details. The new man gets the least important of this kind of work.

The city editor keeps a future book--like milady's engagement calendar--in which under proper date he records the events to be of that day: business meetings, conventions, adjourned cases, public dinners, everything and anything requiring the presence of a reporter. It is one of the important factors of the newsgetting system. Its proper keeping involves constant drudgery and painstaking care in the reading of newspapers for announcements or for clews to anything that is to happen. He reads, for instance, that an important business meeting has appointed a special committee to report at the next meeting; but no date of the next meeting is given. So he asks the new reporter, maybe, to ascertain and record it in the future book. The new man does many such errands, verifies many statements of fact, chases down many rumors.

In the great blizzard of March, 1888, when all transportation lines in New York City were abandoned came the story that several funeral processions were snowed under in Greenwood cemetery. A new reporter was sent. He toiled through storm and snow waist deep to the burial place and back, a task requiring something like six hours to accomplish, and ended the day's experience by thawing out his frozen feet in a bucket of water. And what he wrote was: "The rumor that three funeral processions were snowed under in Greenwood cemetery was found on investigation to be untrue."

The city editor has many sources of information similar to those just mentioned. In the big cities he is responsible for getting the news of the urban district, a task that involves almost every kind of newsgetting. This is especially true of New York City, for taken all in all nearly everything happens in New York that can happen anywhere. It is of metropolitan reporting that we are speaking just now.

The new reporter is asked to make news reports of the simplest of happenings. The narration of ordinary events is the easiest of all newspaper writing. Any intelligent high school boy can catch the knack of it and many a bright newspaper office boy has gone on to better things by absorbing that knack. It is easy to acquire because it may be largely imitative--that is, almost all routine news reports are written in the same groove of construction and in very much the same language, year in and year out, for news topics constantly repeat themselves.

It is in this deadly dull routine writing of routine news that we have our poorest and most slovenly newspaper results. The indifferent work done in this direction is more conspicuous in the London newspapers than in our own for there news reports have been reduced almost to formula.

We have said that the dates of fixed events to come are accumulated in the future book--meetings of all sorts, lectures, balls, sporting contests, celebrations, ceremonials, excursions and the like, of which the number and the variety are innumerable. To each of these a reporter is sent. Usually he is told before he starts about how long an article is expected of him. But he is charged to note especially anything unusual, odd, strange, or queer that may happen or be said. And always he must report to the desk, before he begins to write, for instructions as to the exact length of his article. Often two or three reporters are sent to a big meeting, one to write the introduction, another the first half of the speaking and a third the remaining part of the proceedings. This is to save time; and often the first half has been written and is in type before the last man has quit the meeting. Likewise in cases of big disasters, big celebrations, big sporting events, six or eight men are sent, each with a definite part to cover. Each writes his part and the copy reader dovetails them together into one continuous article. Team work of this sort is common enough in big offices.

The new reporter gets his fling at all of this kind of work. If he has the genuine newspaper spirit he is fascinated by his every experience. He searches the paper eagerly for the bit he has contributed. With a glow of satisfaction he contemplates his little record of a news event standing out in clear type, and he reads it again with those shivery gusts of emotion sometimes called "the thrill of authorship."

After a time, from the writing of petty paragraphs, he finds himself contributing articles a third or a half a column in length. The older men begin to notice his work, speak to him in praise of a well-constructed sentence or a nicety of verbal expression, ask him to come along with them to the beanery for a taste of coffee and cakes before going home for the night. He begins to participate in that most helpful and stimulating thing--the comradeship of the office. He comes daily in contact with forty or fifty men--garrulous veterans, and middle-aged marvels, and youthful geniuses who are doing all kinds of newspaper stunts from constructing ponderous editorial articles and criticisms to exploiting The Stiletto in Stanton Street or The Bludgeon on the Battery. These men are good-natured critics of each other's work and not less ready to praise than to condemn or question. They take interest in a new man of promise and help him. They read the newspapers and the periodicals, and the new books--for an intimate knowledge of contemporaneous events is essential to their progress. There are few dullards among them, few without positive opinions and a vocabulary to express them. Our young man greatly enjoys their explosive comments and their ferocious conclusions. They are so alert, so alive to everything that is going on. Their conversation is so interesting to him. The atmosphere is surcharged with good fellowship. Nobody is taking himself very seriously yet everybody is doing something in a businesslike way. Somehow things are different in the newspaper office from what he had expected.

The business of reporting becomes more fascinating as the reporter, gaining in skill and in ability, achieves to higher grade work. To write of big and important events becomes his ambition. It gives him prestige among his fellows, for it is the management's testimonial of confidence in him. Not until after careful consideration does the managing editor name the men who are to report a national political convention, or the inauguration of a president of the United States, or a great celebration. The very best members of the staff are summoned to write of such events and the assignment comes to be considered as an office reward of merit.

To do the big thing of the day is one of the prizes of the reportorial business. Indeed, it may be said of the newspaper man, that from his earliest beginnings always there is something higher to be attained until he becomes the editor in chief.

In the newspaper offices of cities of the larger size, reporters develop into desk editors, city editors, managing editors, music or dramatic or book critics, or editorial writers. Many prefer to do outside work rather than become editors or critics--prefer to write for the news columns, to mingle with the outside world and take part in its stirring events rather than face the routine and the monotony of desk work.

They are especially interested in taking an out of town commission for the investigation of a subject of wide importance--a rebellion in Mexico, an uprising against the government in Cuba, a crisis in Canadian politics, a conflict between labor and capital in Colorado, a socialistic struggle in Schenectady.

Such assignments call for thorough investigation at first hand on the spot, call for an acquaintance with the leaders of the movement that frequently becomes familiar and lasting, call for practical intimate study of the convulsion itself. Information thus gained may, after its publication in the newspaper, be used again in magazines, in books of record or in fiction. The special writer, for instance, who spends a month with the striking miners in the Michigan copper district comes to know much about life and labor there, about the copper industry, mining methods, the relation of the price of copper to miners' wages, the smelting of ore, the transportation of the raw and the finished product and a thousand other details of the business.

The newspapers do a vast amount of this kind of work. Its proper exploitation necessitates intelligent treatment by the writer. His information forms the basis for editorial comment, not only by the editors of his own newspaper but by those of other sheets, the periodical press, magazines and reviews; and also frequently it leads to government investigation or interference or regulation. Two or three years of this kind of work give a large fund of information to the writer. It is of immeasurable service to him as long as he lives.

Likewise the man who writes for the news columns on national politics finds himself most agreeably employed. In reality he is a specialist. All of his time is required to keep apace with the kaleidoscopic changes of American political life. He must be familiar with the important politics of every state and every big city, for they have immediate relation to the politics of the nation. To that end he makes many journeys. His most valuable asset is personal acquaintance with public men--the men who make politics and political history--and the more intimate the acquaintance the more interest and confidence he may be able to inspire. The political writer seeks to meet public men on every possible occasion, seeks to keep in touch with them and with the politics they represent.

If a conspicuous political leader in a Western state goes East it will be a part of his routine to see the political writers. With them he goes over the political situation of his region, tells them just what is going on and what is contemplated. Some of the talk is confidential, and the writer keeps the confidence. In turn the writers interest him in what they know of the politics of the East and of other states. In this way--so briefly indicated--the political writer comes to comprehend the politics of the nation. He must read all obtainable political literature and must absorb political information from any source at hand.

As said elsewhere in this book, you cannot learn politics from a textbook; you must absorb the politics of the day by a study of the events of the day, and great mental ability is required to keep apace with them. Political conclusions made to-day are upset by the events of to-morrow. The issues of one election are forgotten in the burning questions of the next. The newspapers and the periodical press are great sources of information, but greater than these is association by the newspaper writer with the men who are making politics.

The writer of national politics makes frequent trips to Washington. He goes to the national political conventions and to many of the state conventions. He is called on to write sketches of important candidates and obituary notices of statesmen. His opinions and his information are sought by editorial writers and by public men themselves. The magazines ask him for special articles. The political managers pay him for campaign literature. The greater his experience the more his services are in demand. Not infrequently he is called into party councils or is entrusted with delicate political missions. Candidates and leaders seek his advice and his influence. Presidents, cabinet officers, senators, governors and mayors tempt him to quit newspaper writing to become their secretaries--and these places are usually stepping stones to higher public life. Several presidents of the United States have chosen newspaper writers to be their private secretaries, half of the governors of New York State, in the last thirty years, and nearly every mayor of New York City have drawn their secretaries from the ranks of newspaper writers.

In addition to the gathering of political information the Washington correspondent writes of the doings of Congress. This of course involves study of public questions, the burning questions of the day. It furnishes a volume of information to the young man who is to continue his career as a journalist or who may turn to public or professional life, involving, as it does, study of engineering triumphs like the Panama canal, public improvements like the development of Western irrigation, tariff changes, taxation, national banking systems, the problems of domestic shipping and foreign commerce. The correspondent comes to know about diplomacy, the making of treaties, the relation of labor to capital, railway management, government regulation of traffic--and so on almost without limit.

The correspondent must know about these things if he is to write intelligently about them. He must be familiar with the business of the departments, must understand the army and the navy, should know the whereabouts of every regiment and every ship of importance. He should know the name and the politics and the post of every American diplomat, should know government finances--indeed, should know everything the government does. These things constantly are recurring in new and unexpected ways and they must be treated as important news of the day.

The reporter is the collector of news for the circulation of which the paper really exists. On his report of the Premier's speech the editor bases his leading article. He records the splendor of the Queen's drawing room, and the want and wretchedness of the poor. No festival is complete without him; and he turns up at every calamity. He chronicles the deeds of the hero and the crimes of the miscreant. He tells how the pulse of commerce beats in every market of the world. Science and art are beholden to his pen; and even religion itself has to thank him for some of its spread. He has become a necessity to newspaper production and no inconsiderable figure in national life.

The reporter is not sent out haphazard; he is out for a purpose and that purpose is the collection at first hand of facts and information that are supposed to interest a multitude of readers. If they are interesting to those who read them, how much the more so to the young man who, after investigation and verification to his own satisfaction, puts his conclusions on paper!

And note, if you will, how important is the work. Since the first use of printers' type the great events of the world, the events that have moved and influenced mankind, that have made the history of the world, have been announced first of all in the newspapers. They have been proclaimed to the world not by clergymen from the pulpit, or lecturers from the platform, or orators in legislative halls, not through the medium of books or magazines or pamphlets, or by the writers of editorial articles, or by critics--but in burning type by reporters.

It seems but yesterday, that midnight hour, when a reporter burst into the working room of a morning newspaper with the exclamation: "He's got it--we are going to have the electric light in every part of every house and over every desk in this room." He had hurried from Edison's first big test of the division of the electric current: had seen a hundred electric bulbs glowing in all their fascinating brightness by electricity transmitted over wires. And the people marveled at what he wrote about it.

Within the span of my own newspaper experience, reporters have given first information to the world of the discovery and development of electric lighting, heating, cooking and propulsion; of Roentgen rays; of the telephone; of the phonograph; of the automobile; the player piano; of the typesetting machine and the multiple page printing press; the shoe-making machine; of breech-loading guns, machine-made cartridges and diabolical explosives; of the airplane and the zeppelin; of wireless telegraphy; of steel construction in big buildings; of the marvels of construction in gigantic locomotives and steamships, in subways, and elevated railroads, bridges, and aqueducts; of bacillus treatment in medicine and the wonders of abdominal surgery; and hundreds of other developments of science. We have seen the declaration of a dozen wars and the signing of a dozen peace treaties; the announcement of the death of monarchs and the birth of princes, the assassination of rulers and the inauguration of their successors.

Some reporter has announced the discovery or the fact of every one of these things. He has been compelled to study the subject enough to write about it understandingly, and that study has brought him in contact with the men who have caused or invented it.

The reporter mingles constantly with the men who control the affairs of the world. This not only is fascinating, but it gives him confidence in himself, gives him personal address, ease of manner and of conversation, manliness of presence. It sharpens his wits. It takes away that paralyzing emotion so often felt by youth when in the presence of greatness. Nothing can be more stimulating to the intellect than association with intellectual men.

The reporter who writes of an important event usually is asked to continue on the case as long as it is of public interest. The man who wrote the narrative of the murder of White by Harry Thaw wrote of Thaw's publicities for a long time afterward. The man who reports a big labor strike is called on to report the next strike. He gets interested in the subject, makes it a study, and becomes authority on the relations between labor and capital. In this way as time goes on the reporter comes to be a sort of specialist in several topics and the knowledge thus acquired is of great value to him when he comes to editorial writing, or magazine work, or authorship of any kind, or if he goes into the law or into the public service or any other business. There is not any other employment probably in which a young man may gather so extensive a general contemporaneous knowledge as in newspaper reporting in a big city.

The speakers at a public banquet may drone on for an hour or so without saying anything or giving utterance to a sentence worth reporting and then something of supreme importance may be said. The good reporter recognizes its worth instantly; the poor one does not.

There is just one point I wish to emphasize to the young men who are expecting to engage in newspaper work. That is, that the reporter is the essential man on the newspaper. He is the big toad in the puddle.

Young fellows looking forward to a newspaper career often have in mind an editorship of some sort. They want to guide and instruct public opinion. The trouble is that the public doesn't yearn to have its opinion guided and instructed. It wants to get the news and be entertained.

Consider who are making the real newspapers and magazines to-day. Not the grave and learned publicist who is giving advice on the state of the Nation from the seclusion of some hole in the wall; not the recluse with a bunch of academic theories.

It is the reporter with the nose for news. He is the only fellow who has any business around newspapers or magazines. In general his job is not to produce literature, but to do reporting.

Often a good pair of legs makes a good reporter. The newspaper man must always be on the job, always hustling, always ready to go to any inconvenience or suffer any fatigue to get the news. And above all, so far as routine reporting goes, he must be honest and accurate.

Charles Dickens, who was a reporter before he became a writer of novels, says of some of his experiences:

I have often transcribed for the printer, from shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.

The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which we "took" as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the country and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket handkerchief over my notebook after the fashion of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.

I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep--kept in waiting, say, until the Woolsack might want restuffing.

Returning home from political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated in miry by-roads, toward the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.

Of the reporter's familiarity with limitless phases of life it has been said:

The reporter of to-day has to be courageous, sharp as a hawk, mentally untiring, physically enduring. He comes in contact with everybody from monarchs to beggars, from noblemen to nobodies. He sees the tragedy and the comedy of human life, its cynicism and toadyism, its patient struggling and feverish ambition, its sham and subterfuge, its lavish wealth and deepest poverty, its good deeds and most hideous crime.

Mr. H. G. Wells says of writers that "they meet philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, and the great."

Mr. Crooke, qualified by high education for the writing that analyzes and illuminates the world's happenings, and a keen incisive stylist in his reporting work, was satisfied to be a reporter. He felt to the full the dignity of what he was doing; he realized that it is news that makes a newspaper, not features and not comment. He was a newspaper-maker in the best sense. Kindliness, dry humor, accurate observation, integrity, and dignity made "Billy" what he was.

In most of the college publications one may find under the heading of Alumni Notes, an item such as this:

Jenkins left four of the offices with a definite feeling that New York was none too cordial to a budding newspaper man. But he failed to consider, because he did not know, that two or three young men visit the city room of a metropolitan newspaper every day on an errand similar to his. And he failed to realize, because he did not know, that in normal times a conservative newspaper hires about one new reporter a month.

"All right, report to-morrow at one o'clock," said the city editor and Jenkins left the office in a daze with a job. He had been trying for three days to get one and the interview that landed it had consumed not more than three minutes.

The reporter must be prepared to meet the active men of the world: the men who are doing the constructive work of the world. He must have presence and address to attract their attention. Usually he is a stranger to them. His presence is unwelcome to them. Experience has attested that the college boy is better fitted for this task than any other kind of beginner. He is familiar with the ways of society and has some notion of the public questions of the day and the vital problems of life. The green young man of uncouth appearance, of clumsy presence, of faltering, stammering speech makes a mighty poor reporter.

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