Frank Michael O'Brien

“ Make rules for news? How is it possible to make a rule for something the value of which lies in the fact that it is the narrative of what never had happened, in exactly the same way, before? John Bogart, a city editor of the Sun who absorbed the Dana idea of news and the handling thereof, once said to a young reporter:
“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
The Sun always waited for the man to bite the dog.
Here is Mr. Dana’s own definition of news:
The first thing which an editor must look for is news. ”

“ Life was everything—a new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, a policeman’s epigram, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers, the origin of a new slang expression, the idiosyncrasies of the City Hall clock, a strange four-master in the harbour, the head-dresses of Syrian girls, a new president or a new football coach at Yale, a vendetta in Mulberry Bend—everything was fish to the great net of Dana’s mind. ”

“ Calm, dispassionate, without the slightest atom of impulse, as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove, Lord got about him a staff that has been regarded by newspapermen as the most brilliant in the country. Independent of thought, with a placid idea of the dignity of his place, ever ready to concede the other fellow’s point of view even though maintaining his own, Lord was never known in all the years of his managing editorship of the Sun to utter an unkind word to any man on the paper, no matter how humble his station. ”

“ That was probably the first time that Charles A. Dana got his name into the Sun.
Although unqualifiedly opposed to Secession, the Sun did not believe that military coercion was the best way to prevent it. It saw the temper of South Carolina and other Southern States, but thought that it saw, too, a diplomatic way of curing the disorder. South Carolina, it said, had a greater capacity for indignation than any other political body in the world. Here was the way to stop its wrath:
Open the door of the Union for a free and inglorious egress, and you dry up the machine in an instant. ”

“ With mingled grief and indignation the Sun watched the Southern States march out of the Union. It poured its wrath on the head of the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, when that peculiar statesman suggested, on January 7, 1861, that New York City should also secede. “Why may not New York disrupt the bonds which bind her to a venal and corrupt master?” Wood had inquired.
The Sun had more faith in Lincoln than most of its Democratic contemporaries exhibited. Of his inaugural speech it said:
There is a manly sincerity, geniality, and strength to be felt in the whole address. ”

“ Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. ”

“ Cummings was probably the best all-round news man of his day. He had the executive ability and the knowledge of men that make a good managing editor. He knew what Dana knew—that the newspapers had yet to touch public sympathy and imagination in the news columns as well as in editorial articles; and he knew how to do it, how to teach men to do it, how to cram the moving picture of a living city into the four pages of the Sun. He advised desk men, complimented or corrected reporters, edited local articles, and, when a story appealed to him strongly, he went out and got it and wrote it himself. ”

“ So far as the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets is concerned, L’Empire est paix. The Sun shines for all; and on the site of old Tammany’s troubles and tribulations we turn back the leaves of the past, dispel the clouds of discord, and shed our beams far and near over the Regenerated Land.
Dana changed the appearance of the Sun overnight. He kept it as a folio, for he always believed in a four-page paper, even when he was printing ten pages, but he reduced the number of columns on a page from eight to seven, widening each column a little. ”

“ Nobody knew better than he what a bore a man becomes who flows opinion constantly, whether by voice or by pen.
For Dana, not the eternal verities in allopathic doses, but the entertaining varieties, carefully administered. He might be immensely interested in the destruction of the Whisky Ring, and in writing about that infamy articles which would scorch the ears of Washington; but he knew that not every man, woman, and child who read the Sun was furious about the Whisky Ring or cared to read columns of opinion about it every day. ”

“ The Sun has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. ”

“ Dana’s opinions on political questions were more eagerly sought than those of any other editor after Greeley’s death, and the Sun’s political news was complete; yet with Dana, and with the Sun, politics was, after all, only one small part of life. The whole world, with its facts and fancies, not the political problems of one continent, was the real field to be covered. ”

“ In the early thirties of last century the only newspapers in the city of New York were six-cent journals whose reading-matter was adapted to the politics of men, and whose only appeal to women was their size, perfectly suited to deep pantry-shelves.
Dave Ramsey, a compositor on one of these sixpennies, the Journal of Commerce, had an obsession. It was that a penny paper, to be called the Sun, would be a success in a city full of persons whose interest was in humanity in general, rather than in politics, and whose pantry-shelves were of negligible width. ”

“ How did the Sun reporters of the seventies compare with those of later years? As no two reporters are alike in vision and style, no two occasions identical in incident, no two dramatic moments twin, it is better to make comparison by choosing arbitrarily scenes far apart in years, but set on similar stages, and to lay before the reader the work of the Sun reporter in each case. ”

“ The Sun will always have all the news, foreign, domestic, political, social, literary, scientific, and commercial. It will use enterprise and money freely to make the best possible newspaper, as well as the cheapest.
It will study condensation, clearness, point, and will endeavor to present its daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner.
It will not take as long to read the Sun as to read the London Times or Webster’s Dictionary, but when you have read it you will know about all that has happened in both hemispheres. ”

“ That appears to be a sort of journalism in which nobody will ask who is the editor of a paper or the writer of any class of article, and nobody will care.
Whenever in the newspaper profession a man rises up who is original, strong, and bold enough to make his opinions a matter of consequence to the public, there will be personal journalism; and whenever newspapers are conducted only by commonplace individuals whose views are of no interest to the world and of no consequence to anybody, there will be nothing but impersonal journalism. ”

“ Clarke never thought well of himself as a reporter, and often said that in that capacity he was a failure. As a judge of news values, or news presentation, or as a giver of the fine literary touch which lent to the Sun’s articles that indescribable tone not found in other papers, Clarke stood almost alone.
The city editor of a New York newspaper sows seeds; the night city editor re-seeds barren spots, waters wilting384 items, and cuts and bags the harvest. The city editor sends men out all day for news; the night city editor judges what they bring in, and decides what space it shall have. ”

“ By this time Dana had framed a newspaper organisation more nearly perfect than any other in America. Grouping about him men suited to the Sun, to himself, and to one another, he had created a literary world of his own—a seeing, thinking, writing world of keen objective326 vision. Men of a hundred various minds, each with his own style, his own ambition, his own manner of life, the Sun staff focused their abilities into the one flood of light that came out every morning. ”

“ Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as “star” reporters, yet the saying that the Sun has no star men is not entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover little stories and cubs write big ones—if they can. A city editor does not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the skill of the trained reporter, yet it is Sun history that many new men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first blush, to be inconsequential. ”

“ In such brief biographies of Cummings as have been printed you will find that he is best remembered in the outer world as a managing editor, or as the editor of the Evening Sun, or as a Representative in Congress fighting for the rights of Civil War veterans, printers’ unions, and letter-carriers; but among the oldest generation of newspapermen he is revered as a great reporter. He was the first real human-interest reporter. He knew the news value of the steer loose in the streets, the lost child in the police station, the Italian murder that was really a case of vendetta. ”

“ There is hardly a man who has lived five years as a Sun reporter but could write his own story of the Sun just as he has written stories of life. Here but a few of these men and their work have been touched. It has been a long parade from Wisner of 1833 to Hill of 1918. Many of the great reporters are dead, and of some of these it may be said that their lives were shortened by the very fever in which they won their glory. ”

“ A couple of years after the establishment of the Evening Sun Brisbane was made its managing editor—a big job for a man of twenty-three years. In 1890 he went to the World, where he became the editor of the Sunday magazine and the most illustrious exponent of that startling form of graphic art which demonstrates to the reader, without calling upon his brain for undue effort, how much taller than the Washington Monument would be New York’s daily consumption of dill pickles, if piled monumentwise. ”

“ Men with actual capacity of certain sorts for acceptable writing have been frightened off from doing natural and vigorous work by certain newspaper critics and doctrinaires who are in distress if the literary proprieties are seemingly violated, and if the temper and blood of the writer actually show in his work. They measure our journalistic production by an English standard, which lays it down as its first and most imperative rule that editorial writing shall be free from the characteristics of the writer. ”

“ The time had forever departed when an Albany regency could tune the press of the State as easily and simply as Queen Elizabeth used to tune the English pulpits. As James Parton said, “An editorial is only a man speaking to men; but the news is Providence speaking to men.”
Thus Ben Day’s Sun remade American journalism—more by accident than design, as he himself remarked at a dinner to Robert Hoe in 1851.
It is evident that Day soon regretted the sale of the Sun, for in 1840 he established a penny paper called the True Sun. ”

“ Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun; nor can even a boy be found in New York City or the neighboring country who will not know in the course of the day what is promulgated in the Sun in the morning. ”

“ Its young men seem to vie with each other in tormenting the language. They will do better when they learn that there is more force in simple Anglo-Saxon than in all the words they can manufacture. We advise them to read the Bible and Common Prayer Book. Those books will do their souls good, anyway, and they may also learn to write less affectedly.
The Sun was as frank in discussing its own theories and ambitions as it was in criticising its contemporaries for dulness and poor writing. Dana’s dream, never to be realized, was a newspaper without advertisements. ”

“ But yesterday the fairest of the fair of the wondrous cities of the storied Antilles, bright, beautiful, glorious, glistening and shimmering in her prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent city in a setting of towering forest and mountain, now a waste of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear monotone, a dim blur on the landscape—it seems even more than the contrast between life and death. ”

“ The floor was efficient, for it was covered with rubber matting that deadened alike the quick footstep of Dana and the thundering stride of pugilistic champions who came in to see the sporting editor. But the city room’s only ornaments were men and their genius. Here wrote Ralph and Chamberlin, Spears and Irwin, and all the rest of the fine reporters of the old building’s years. ”

“ All the goodness of a good egg cannot make up for the badness of a bad one.
If you find you have been wrong, don’t fear to say so.
All these maxims were quite as useful to the merchant as to the newspaperman. They related to the broad conduct of life. They counselled against folly, so far as the making of newspapers was concerned, but they did not convey the mysterious prescription with which Dana revived American journalism from that trance in which it had forgotten that everybody is human and that the English language is alive and fluid. ”

“ Should the criticism be made that this book is not all-inclusive, let it be remembered that there can be no really complete history of the Sun except itself—the tons of files in which for eighty-five years Sun men have drawn their pictures of life’s procession. In a narrative like this only the outlines of the Sun’s course, margined with incidents of the men who made it great by making it as human as themselves, can find room. ”

“ That historian (he was a Herald man, and Bennett would have no managing editor) had not been reconciled to the fact that between the editor of a newspaper—the director of its policies and opinions and general style and tone—and the subeditors to whose various desks comes the flood of news there must be some one who will act as a link, lightening the labours of the editor and shouldering the responsibilities of the desk men. He may never write an editorial article; may never turn out a sheet of news copy or put a head on an item ”

“ Slavery is a creation of local law, and until a Legislature of Kansas or Nebraska enacts a law recognizing slavery, all slaves taken into the Territory will be entitled to their freedom.
It was at this time that the germs of Secession began to show themselves on the culture-plates of the continent. The Sun was hot at the suggestion of a division of the Union:
It can only excite contempt when any irate member of Congress or fanatical newspaper treats the dissolution of the Union as an event which may easily be brought about. ”