Newsagent

“ Gathering News.—The prospective reporter who supposes that newspaper men wander aimlessly up and down the streets of a city, watching and hoping for automobiles to collide and for men to shoot their enemies, will have his eyes opened soon after entering a news office. He will learn that a reporter never leaves the city room without a definite idea of where he is going. If newspapers had to police the streets with watchers for news as the city government assigns officers of the law, the cost of gathering news would be prohibitive. ”

“ The reporter who told me the story which I have just recorded, was an excellent specimen of the class—shrewd, a capital judge of character, and a good organiser. He had, however, never got beyond the stereotyped phrases which appear in every newspaper—indeed, there was no need for him to get beyond them. Every death “cast a gloom” over the locality where it occurred; and a chronicle of the weather at any time during the month of March caused him to let loose the journalist’s lion upon an unsuspecting public. ”

“ Such a system of local news gathering makes possible a staff of reporters relatively small as compared with the size of the city. Reporters employed by the city news association work under conditions practically the same as those in a newspaper office. Inasmuch as the stories that a news association reporter writes are edited in at least half a dozen newspaper offices by different editors and copy-readers, the reporter has the advantage of seeing how various papers treat the same news story. ”

“ Rapid, accurate judgment of news values, likewise, is an important qualification for a good newspaper man. “Get all the news and get it quick,” was the command that a certain city editor of the old school used to thunder at his cub reporters.
Perseverance. To get all the news, or sometimes to get any news, demands perseverance. The reporter must follow one clue after another until he finds what he is looking for, or is convinced that there is nothing [Pg 51] to find. By stopping in his pursuit before he has all there is to get, he may miss the biggest “feature” of the story. ”

“ Top heads are essential and long stories have their place, but the small item is the backbone of the newspaper structure and the reporter who discounts the value of the short, personal story as he grows mature in the business of finding and selling news, discounts his own value just that much.
Big stories will write themselves, if they are in the hands of a reporter of comprehensive vision and reasonable experience. They are the delight of the make-up editor and the inspiration of the local editor. ”

“ The general rules that govern all news writing apply with equal or greater force to the telegraph story. So far from taking an unworthy advantage of his comparative freedom from supervision, the correspondent should feel perhaps even more keenly than the local reporter the news writer’s obligation to be absolutely fair and accurate. It goes without saying that he should be concise, because the newspaper pays for every word that he sends over the wire. On the other hand he should never sacrifice clearness to save a few words. ”

“ Nothing could be farther from the truth. A newspaper that permitted such a condition would be swamped with libel suits within a week. In every newspaper office, certainly in every newspaper office worthy the name, there is an unceasing war against inaccuracy of every kind. The new reporter learns this when he comes in jubilant from an assignment, only to be sent back to get the middle initial of a name. The out-of-town correspondent learns it when he is called from his bed by long-distance telephone to explain a vague statement in a story he had wired earlier in the night. ”

“ Unlike almost any other profession, that of a newspaper reporter combines two very different activities—the gathering of news and the writing of news. Part of the work must be done in the office and part of it outside on the street. At his desk in the office a reporter is engaged in the literary, or pseudo-literary, occupation of writing news stories; outside on the street he is a detective gathering news and hunting for elusive facts to be combined later into stories. ”

“ The reporters and correspondents of the press associations work under practically the same conditions as the newspaper’s own correspondents, but they are responsible to the division head of the press association, whereas the newspaper’s correspondents are under the direction of the telegraph editor or of the state editor of the paper. The work of news gathering is not essentially different, whether done by a reporter or by a correspondent in the employ of a newspaper or of a news-gathering association. ”

“ Since news is the newspaper’s backbone, it is obvious that an understanding of what news actually is must be an integral part of the equipment of the public relations counsel. For the public relations counsel must not only supply news—he must create news. This function as the creator of news is even more important than his others.
It has always been interesting to me that a concise, comprehensive definition of news has never been written. What news is, every newspaper man instinctively knows, particularly as it concerns the needs of his own paper. ”

“ He should always make every reasonable effort to get all particulars as accurately as possible.
Great care should invariably be taken to have names and addresses correct. The reporter will do well to ask his informants to spell unfamiliar names for him. City, telephone, and society directories, the various kinds of “Who’s Who” volumes, and similar lists, are convenient sources for getting names, initials, and addresses. Even the necessity for speed in newspaper work is not a valid excuse for carelessness and inaccuracy in news gathering. ”

“ This duty falls on a special class of men called “watchers,” who are far from being ordinary reporters, as very often they have not been promoted to the dignity of writing a line, but they must know what news is and their function is to telephone to the head office any bulletins, which are41 promising, or any definite items, which need to be investigated and worked up, and in fact to be the eyes and ears of the newspaper. But they are eyes and ears which have to be open all the time. ”

“ I have tried to write for you a story of newspaper life and tell how a boy, who started in the lowest position,—that of a copy carrier,—rose to become a reporter. The newspaper covers a wide field, and enters into almost every home, telling of the doings of all the world, including that which takes place right in our midst.
There are many persons in the business, which is an interesting and fascinating one. ”

“ The Problem of News Gathering. The mystery of newspaper making, to the uninitiated, is how editors and reporters find out everything that happens and how they get it into print in a very short time. It seems strange to the average person that when an accident occurs in the block in which he lives, the first news of it often reaches him through the newspaper. The apparent omnipresence, not to say omniscience, of the reporter leads to the not unnatural assumption that the news gatherer walks about the city waiting Micawber-like for “something to turn up.” ”

“ The Making of the Newspaper. For a conception of the wonderful progress of the press, one must leave mere annals and enter the workshop. The newspaper such as Defoe edited was nothing more than a brief chronicle of news gathered haphazard, concluding with the advertisement of a quack doctor. Next came the reporter. The special correspondent here and there appeared in the seventeenth century, but he did not gain his place till the Crimean War, and in the United States not till the Civil War. Now every great daily has its hundred correspondents scattered about the globe. ”

“ To every newspaper in the kingdom there comes daily sufficient news of one sort or another to fill three sheets the same size. The duty of the journalist, if, of course, he is not a reporter or leader-writer, is to make a judicious selection as to what he shall publish and what he shall omit. ”

“ This has been done in the belief that the reporter should consider carefully the probable effect on the reader of every story that he writes. Since “the food of opinion is the news of the day,” the kind of food that he serves and the manner in which he serves it is a matter of consequence, not only to him and his newspaper but to society as a whole. Not until a reporter realizes the influence that his news stories may have on the ideas and ideals of thousands of readers, does he appreciate fully the significance of hisv work. ”

“ In organizing its news collecting, the newspaper only takes advantage of information filed for various official purposes by many different persons in no way connected with the newspaper. Policemen, firemen, sheriffs, coroners, and practically all officials of local, state, and national governments, as well as doctors, lawyers, and merchants are all unintentionally serving as reporters of news. ”

“ No set of rules could be drawn up to cover every case with which the correspondent has to deal. To equip himself to give the best service he should not only learn the general principles of news writing, but should study the columns of the newspaper he represents to find out its particular needs. He should remember, too, that no rule is iron-clad. A story falling under any head of the foregoing classification may possess some extraordinary feature that will make it worth printing. In that case the correspondent should be careful to build his story around the unusual part. ”

“ The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one who works his way up. He holds that the only way to start is as a printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting Police Captains. ”

“ In such departments of a modern newspaper as the City, Telegraph, Sporting, Financial, etc., the work of the reporters and editors is to chronicle and present the actual news. If nothing of vital interest has happened during the day, that is not their fault. ”

“ Inasmuch as the average newspaper in a large city receives from two to three times as much news daily as it can publish, it is necessary for editors to select from the available news, and to decide quickly which news is the most important for their readers. The fact that this news comes in by mail, telephone, and telegraph, as well as from reporters, at intervals throughout the day and [Pg 343] the night, makes it impossible for the editors to judge with absolute accuracy of the relative value of each piece of news as it is received. ”

“ To solve these problems another group of men is needed, the reporters proper, called, when they are on this service, “general42 workers.” As the original brief messages come in to the city editor, he details one or another of his young men to the spot, who sets to work to ransack every fragment of fact or probability, which throws light on the case. If a general worker has to think only of a morning newspaper and the matter is important, he will try to treat it exhaustively and not return to the office, until he has his story complete and ready for the press. ”

“ Others are regular contributors who fill certain amounts of space each week or month. Still others, specialists in their lines, write only occasionally, but deal in a scholarly, exhaustive way with their subjects. The feature stories in the news columns are written generally by the stronger men on the regular staff of reporters. Some papers have regular feature men on whom they rely for human interest stories. And any newspaper man who can handle such stories well may be sure of a place at an advanced salary over the ordinary reporter. ”

“ All I wanted was to get out.
"And now we bring you that popular round-table discussion of events of the day, News and Newsmen," the radio said, "featuring the men who edit the news for leading papers and wire services. Tonight our subject is 'Monolithians—Friend or Foe?' and our panel consists of Russell Sidenam, city editor of the World-Telegram; Barton Pascal, reporter on the Daily News; Herb Small, from the world desk of the Associated Press; and Sam Kent, assistant editor of the New York bureau of World Wide News...." ”

“ These men send important news by cable and correspondence by mail and it is their privilege to select their own topics, largely. Thus they prove or disprove their possession of that rare quality of journalistic excellence: the ability to judge what will be interesting or important to the far-distant reader. In the newspaper office at home the writer usually writes to order107 on an indicated subject and often without regard to his own notion of whether the topic is interesting or not. The foreign correspondent must judge for himself what to send. ”

“ Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic operators, by agents trained to regard only the accidental, the startling, the abnormal, as news; it is picked up by sharp prowlers about town, whose pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for something spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who regard casualties as the chief news. ”