Newspaper boy

“ The country boy usually knows something of the technical side of the business. Likely enough he has learned to set type or run a typesetting machine, has lent a hand in the mailing room or the delivery department, has mastered many details that, though not essential, have given a comprehensive notion of how newspapers are made.
Nor should the young man from the country, ambitious for city experience, stay away from the city through fear of competition or through timidity. Do not be afraid. The newspaper men of the city are not smarter than those in the country. ”

“ It is not the ideal of the American boy either in country or city to live forever in a rented house or on a small salary, or, indeed, to live the simple life. The small-city journalism offers little else than these if the young man cannot become a newspaper owner. To the man who owns his sheet the rewards are more abundant. ”

“ These newspaper boys can spin the most gorgeous yarns on a speck of truth—it’s their business to stretch things to the breaking point you know, partner, and they sure do that. All that I discarded and threw over the side was just chaff, without a single sound kernel of wheat in it. When later on, after I’ve had time to digest things a bit when I go over what’s left, chances are there’ll be another sheaf of clippings go bad and be tossed out. Some of those stories were the bunk, made up in the reporter’s skillful brain out of nothing at all, even if interesting to the general reader. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not often he gets a newspaper; for it is not the like of us that can have newspapers and bread too at the same time in our houses. But now and then he begs an old one, partly torn, at the baker's, and reads it to us of a Sunday night. ”

“ THE MEN IN THE LOT
“Come ahead, Larry,” said Mr. Newton.
“Will the people in the house let us?” asked the boy, to whom the idea of anyone going through a private residence in this free and easy fashion seemed strange.
“I guess they won’t mind,” replied the reporter. “You see we newspaper men have to go ahead and do things. ”

“ There are always good words, cigars and drinks for the newspaper 'boys.' They are a lot of fine, clever, noble fellows—according to the press, and he believes it. He is a good man.
"He travels through life in the good old-fashioned way. ”

“ When you get to be a real newspaper man, Larry, you’ll find that your time is the paper’s you work for. You266 mustn’t sleep or be awake except in the interests of the sheet. But when there’s nothing doing, get all the rest you can. ”

“ In some other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a clipping from the Statesman—yellow and crisp with years—that tells of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat, men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo, horned out of the herd.
The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. ”

“ 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.
Colonel William Rockhill Nelson, who won fame as editor of the Kansas City Star, had this to say in an address to the students of a School of Journalism:
There is just one point I wish to emphasize to the young men who are expecting to engage in newspaper work. ”

“ The green young man of uncouth appearance, of clumsy presence, of faltering, stammering speech makes a mighty poor reporter.
Many newspaper office boys become good reporters. In constant contact with the editorial force they absorb knowledge of the business. Noneducated or partly educated youths may and do become excellent reporters of routine news, but they rarely get beyond the imitative stage. In the race for higher journalistic honors the college boys easily outstrip them.
A welcome addition to the staff is the man who comes from a country newspaper. ”

“ We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper—some good ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men; some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses, taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the most joy. ”

“ The mob of boys—all engaged in the news-trade—is something wonderful: fat boys, lean boys, sandy-haired and red-haired boys, tall boys and short boys, boys with red comforters (though it is summer) , and boys with sacks on their backs and money-bags in their hands; boys with turn-down collars; and boys whose extreme buttonedupness renders the fact of their having any shirts to put collars to, turn-down or stuck-up, grievously problematical. Hard-working boys are these juvenile Bashi-Bazouks of the newspaper trade. ”

“ Again, the birth of the newspaper with the Spectator Papers in the early years of the century, is another such sign of the times: the newspaper being one of the great social bonds of humanity, for good or bad, linking man to man, race to race in the common, well-nigh instantaneous nexus of sympathy. The influence of the press at the time of a San Francisco or Messina horror is apparent to all; but its effect in furnishing the psychology of a business panic is perhaps no less potent though not so obvious. ”

“ Not one man in ten reads books, but every one of us, except the very helpless poor, satiates himself every day with the newspaper. It is the parent, school, college, theatre, pulpit, example, counsellor, all in one. Every drop in our blood is colored by it. ”

“ It is the biography of a Day. It is a photograph, of twenty-four hours' length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's newspapers, which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written, and we give them to the girl to light the fire. It is a strange fact that nobody prizes a newspaper for its abstract value until it is about a century out of date. It would seem that newspapers are like wine; the older they are, the more valuable. ”

“ The stories of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the newspapers at intervals are pure fiction. Not one instance of even a well-dressed infant having been picked up in the streets is on record. They come in rags, a newspaper often the only wrap, semi-occasionally one in a clean slip with some evidence of loving care ”

“ 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. ”

“ Has the time come, or is it near at hand, when we can point to a person who is alert, superficial, ready and shallow, self-confident and half-informed, and say, "There is a product of the American newspaper"? The newspaper is not a willful creation, nor an isolated phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age, as much as our system of popular education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the newspapers are the teachers of the people has been reiterated on the platform, in the pulpit, and in the newspapers themselves. Wendell Phillips, a generation ago, in speaking of the importance of newspapers in this country, said: “It is a momentous, yes, a fearful truth, that millions have no literature, no schools, almost no pulpit but the press. It is parent, school, college, pulpit, theatre, example, counselor, all in one. ”

“ But I am chiefly conscious to-night of the debt of gratitude we all owe to the press. The newspaper—say what you will of it—is the immediate recorder and interpreter of life. Morning and evening it offers us that perpetual stimulus which makes the zest of living. Be your interests what they may, though you abstract your mind from the tumult of affairs and devote it to art or science, you cannot open a news [Pg 683] paper without the sensation of laying your hand upon the throbbing pulse of the world. ”

“ It is one of the advantages to boys selling papers, it is an educator. To be successful, they must become familiar with the news of the day and be able to cry it to induce men to purchase.
After the inaugural parade, when most people were tired, the newsboys, at their headquarters, “chipped in” and raised enough money to send one of the boys “down town to purchase a copy of every paper sold in the city.” The boy returned with New York, Philadelphia and Washington dailies and a dozen sellers were seated on the cots, each earnestly reading, and commenting on leading articles. ”

“ The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one. And there is not an interest—religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical—that is not within its grasp. All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press. ”

“ Accidents and minor crimes of all kinds many times are worth only a few lines as news, but as the basis for feature stories, they contain great possibilities. An incident in a crowded street car, a mishap on the street, a bit of conversation between two newsboys, a mistake made by a person unaccustomed to the ways of the metropolis, or any one of the hundred little episodes in the daily life of a city may be taken by the reporter as the subject of his feature story. Little children, because of the great appeal that they make to men and women of all classes, often furnish good material. ”

“ To me the newspaper is a daily astonishment. What we are all in search of is fresh and vital thought and suggestion; and no one can acquire the art of newspaper reading without getting, each day, one or many new points of view on the world and its great human currents.
Each one of our metropolitan papers is at enormous outlay to get strong, capable men—young men with new minds and old men with wise minds. ”

“ Gilbert smiled at a thought which came to him.
'The working man's Bible,' he said, 'is his Sunday newspaper.'
'And what does he get out of it? The newspaper is the very voice of all that is worst in our civilisation. If ever there is in one column a pretence of higher teaching, it is made laughable by the base tendency of all the rest. The newspaper has supplanted the book; every gross-minded scribbler who gets a square inch of space in the morning journal has a more respectful hearing than Shakespeare. These writers are tradesmen, and with all their power they cry up the spirit of trade. ”

“ Last of all comes the general reader and he asks nothing more of his newspaper than all the news of everywhere, collected at great cost, transcribed with finished skill and presented to him in just the way which pleases and flatters him most. All of them have on their lips the daily threat of giving up the paper, if they are not scrupulously satisfied. ”

“ This view may at first sight seem the presumptuous claim of a journalist for his trade. Let any of my hearers, however, try to imagine a newspaperless world and he will soon realise that I am not exaggerating. It is not merely a desire for amusement that makes the leaders of men in a besieged town, or even in so narrow a field as an Arctic expedition, encourage the foundation of a newspaper. They want it as a means of illumination quite as much as of entertainment. ”

“ But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social life. As everything has a cause, it would be worth while to inquire whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a taste created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another form, does the system of education in our common schools give the pupils a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or only of picking up scraps in the newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty meal at a lunch-counter? ”