Eric W. Allen

“ Even the struggle between parties, far less bitter than of old, may still supply honest editors with doubts. The editor's conception of the "public or social interest" is an element that it seems dangerous to leave in the code or to take out. Is it, after all, or will it in time become, his duty to tell the truth though the heavens, in his judgment, will fall?
A code must not legislate. There is no organized body in journalism that has sufficient prestige to speak for the profession or greatly to influence its practices. ”

“ It is, in a way, a mandate from the press to the Oregon School of Journalism to regard journalism "as a learned profession." This is not the way his vocation is regarded by many a reporter today, as anyone familiar with the American press well knows. Little midnight oil is burned in the study of the arts and sciences, or the fundamentals of sociology, economics, politics or religion by many reporters. Unlike the young ambitious lawyer or doctor, the reporter does not usually believe that success in his profession depends upon any intellectual effort aside from performing the tasks of the day ”

“ The modern press, as we know it, is less than a hundred years old. Three generations, in this country at least, have witnessed nearly the whole of the evolution of the journalist, the man who regards the gathering, presentation and interpretation of the news of the world as a science and an art, and its practice as a profession. Before, say, 1830 we have in journalism only the psychology of the pamphleteer and the politician applied through one of the collateral activities of the job printer. ”

“ It is easy to imagine why we find a group of editors enjoying the seashore. The Willamette Valley was just discovering the delights of the ocean, which was now for the first time easy of access. Furthermore, the little boom towns of Yaquina City and Newport were stimulated financially by the expenditures and shipments incident to rail road construction and stimulated imaginatively by the sincere belief that they together were about to become the New York of the Pacific coast. ”

“ The most virulent critics of the press as it exists do not deny the presence in the working personnel of the profession of a tremendous element of good will, character, technical knowledge, and aspiration for social improvement. The most satisfied of the newspaper's defenders—and there are many who point with pride to the contrast its present condition makes with its often erring past—cannot overlook the imperfections of the present and the need for vigilant care lest progress slacken and retrogression or decay set in. ”

“ Section VI, "Public Service and Social Policy" (page 285) , does not deny that the determination of "what the public wants "is and ever will be one of the great and puzzling problems of the journalist, but it does deny that the gratification of the public's whims is the foundation or only principle of journalism or that the newspaper editor is a mere merchant of information and entertainment. The public must have the facts; it must not be fooled or enticed to what the editor regards as right action; it must receive no prettier picture of the world than the facts justify ”

“ The new stream of immigration which began to flow in over the channels opened up by Henry Villard, himself a northerner, was again very largely of northern origin, as was natural for an immigration that mobilized at St. Paul and Minneapolis. These people tended to be Republican. They had a considerable percentage of city dwellers among them, and it was after this stream had gained some force that Oregon changed from a Democratic to a Republican state. ”

“ The American journal therefore is too much like a public service corporation to make partisanship, in the news at least, permissible. It is the American newspaper that has developed the "non-editorial" method of telling news facts, and which is struggling toward an unpartisan way of selecting news and governing emphasis—a much more difficult matter. It is for this attempt that the Oregon papers have declared themselves. As for propaganda, it is a snake that must somehow or other be scotched, or it will choke out much of the best opportunity in the profession. ”

“ He left the profession for a higher salary than he was earning as reporter or copy editor. The increasing power and prestige of the "promotion" industry helps to anesthetise the wound to his professional conscience and pride. As a trained newspaper man he needed no written code to tell him that it was wrong to sell his pen and to write news for the public under the censorship of a private interest. ”

“ HISTORICAL investigation lacks meaning and interest unless one can pose some kind of a question for himself and then direct his research toward an effort to find the answer. The question set up as the theme for this paper is, why was the Oregon Press Association organized in 1887, not sooner and not later? And why was it founded at Yaquina City? ”

“ A single reporter, stationed at a strategic point, can collect columns of readable news of this kind in a single day, while the economic reporter engaged on an industrial item might require greater ability and training and yet have to work weeks upon a single article. The tendency, therefore, can scarcely be ignored to let industry and government assume the burden of the more expensive investigations, while the reporter employed by the newspaper concentrates upon the most productive matter—the cheap stuff. ”

“ The population in this decade grew 82 %o, which is far faster than it has grown at any time since.
Oregon had 15 dailies in 1887. Except for the Portland Evening Telegram everyone of these was the offshoot of a weekly, perhaps even to be counted as a side issue, for in 1887, without exception, the weekly always claimed a much greater circulation than the daily. ”

“ Yet it is this personnel that is the strongest force behind the effort to raise journalism to a position as one of the learned and scrupulous professions. It is these men who are the backers of the new schools of journalism and it is they who encourage the teachers of journalism to criticise freely, to set up such ideals as they are capable of conceiving and presenting, to face the facts of the situation and to seek ethical solutions. The sons of such men form a large portion of the student bodies of the better schools of journalism which have been established in the last dozen years. ”

“ Those which have survived are the Salem Capital Journal, unique in that its weekly and daily were started at the same time, the Albany Democrat's daily edition, the Dallas Observer, now consolidated with the Itemizer, the Tillamook Headlight, and the Union Eastern Oregon Republican. Also, in 1888 the Pendleton East Oregonian, apparently a glutton for punishment, undertook the publication of three separate editions, a weekly, twice-a-week, and a daily, and kept on under that schedule for at least nine years, probably more. ”

“ Newspaper Publishers of Today
The newspaper publishers of today are men of varied origins and training. Many began their careers as printers; others inherited or invested in newspaper properties. The advertising solicitor, the circulation man, the newsboy, the office boy, the printer's devil, have developed into controllers of policy as frequently as the man who served his apprenticeship, such as it was, in the gathering and writing of news. An acute business judgment is a more uniform characteristic than any familiarity with the social effects of journalistic policies. ”

“ Counting dailies and weeklies published in the same office as separate papers, and including religious and trade weeklies and monthlies, there were 110 publications issued in Oregon as re ported to Ayer's in 1887. Counting only general newspapers, however, and listing as a single unit the weekly paper and its daily edition-this seems more in line with the realities of those days-there were 79 papers. Of these 79 papers existing in 1887, 13 were old-timers established before 1870 and representative perhaps of the first of these three streams of immigration, the northern Republican stream. ”

“ He is strong because of his virtues. The news he writes he writes well. He is well trained; he has every reason for exercising great care in his work. He has sympathetic access to the prime movers in the events he records; he fortifies himself by reference to documents; he has greater leisure than the reporter and often devotes it to a sound study of his specialty. ”

“ Those who came by sea had a character determined by the fact that the most active ship ping centers on the Atlantic coast were in the northern states, and those that came by land were at first very largely of those northern religious denominations that were represented by the missionaries. ”

“ It was such a body of men that adopted the Kansas Newspaper Code in 1910, and such a body that decided to make clear to the public a rather definite statement of their professional practices in Oregon in 1922.
It is becoming old-fashioned in such meetings to deny that there is room for further progress in journalism, or that study of newspaper problems may be of some effect. The old tendency to resent and sweepingly repudiate anything said in criticism of the press is disappearing from the newspapers themselves. ”

“ Economic laws are behind most of the tendencies of present day journalism. The public is not willing to pay the newspaper for studious and unbiased and laborious researches into public and business questions while the private interests concerned are willing to relieve the newspapers of this expense for the apparently trifling privilege of editing the copy from their own point of view. ”

“ Yet newspapers vary from the honest and courageous to the supine, and a code can set as a minimum the best practices of the profession, and as the optimum the state of perfect knowledge, perfect good will and perfect courage. ”

“ A great many cases are "exceptional" to this rule in average newspaper practice the country over. Not only is much of the most able and most highly paid journalistic talent of the country working today on these "exceptional cases" for private interests but the new system, that has grown so great since the War demonstrated the efficacy of organized propaganda, has obtained nearly exclusive control of much of the most important news matter, and has nearly shut out the professional journalist from many of its sources.
No more than any other tradesman does the promotion agent live by his vices. ”