Newsreel

“ But even the staff did not understand how utterly the getting and printing of news absorbed the small man with the huge nose. To him it was a fetish—and more: it was his religion.
Once in a great while he gave voice to what was always in his mind, and preached his gospel to a group of reporters.
“A newspaper lives to give news. If it does not give the news—all the news—fully, clearly, it is no newspaper, but a dead rag. A newspaper is really a public institution, with a sacred duty to all the people.
“News is alive. It breathes. It has personality. ”

“ The popular demand for novelty and variety prevents any form of newspaper writing from becoming fixed, and results from time to time in the development of new forms and new styles of news writing. To make some news stories entertaining rather than purely informative, a number of newspapers5 abandon the conventional summary beginning, or lead, and use unconventional ones like the beginnings of short stories. They likewise give prominence to trivial happenings worked up into so-called “human interest” or “feature” stories, because in that form they make entertaining reading. ”

“ If we go into a library piled with books, old and new, we may find it hard to select one to suit our taste. But let a man lay his hand on a newspaper of a hundred years ago, with its stained yellow pages and its old-fashioned type, and he is interested at once. He sits down and reads it all through, advertisements and news and editorials—only, fortunately for the people of the olden times, there were very few editorials written then. And why does he do this? Because he recognizes the true nature of the newspaper. ”

“ When a busy American glances over his newspaper while he sips his breakfast coffee or while he clings to a strap on the way to his office, he reads only the stories that catch his interest—and he reads down the column in any one story only so long as his interest is maintained. Hence the ideal news story is one which will catch the reader's attention by its beginning and hold his interest to the very end. ”

“ These limitations in the colonial point of view, however, had several striking effects on the early journalism between 1704 and 1750, or thereabouts. The reader who examines the small, ill-printed, half illegible news sheets is surprised to find them more varied in many ways, and more distinctly literary than modern journalism aims to be. The simple fact of the matter is that the dearth of news at length forced the editorial mind to become inventive and even, in some instances, creative. ”

“ News are the soul of letters: when we give them a body of our own invention, it is as unlike to life as a statue. I have withdrawn so much from the -world, that the newspapers know every thing before me, especially since they have usurped the province of telling every thing, private as -well as public: and consequently, a great deal more than I should -wish to know, or like to report. ”

“ It was in my eighth standard, when one of the then Salesian fathers, Jude Borges, who taught moral science, brought copies of the Herald into the class and asked us to count the number of advertisements and the number of news items on each page. The verdict: There was more news than advertisements. The moral that day for us kids was: read the Herald newspaper, it enriches your knowledge because it has got more news than advertisements compared to the other leading daily. ”

“ 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. ”

“ None, indeed, who have ever known it, can wholly forget the generous rage with which journalism inspires its followers. To each of those young men, beginning the strangely fascinating life as reporters and correspondents, his paper was as dear as his king once was to a French noble; to serve it night and day, to wear himself out for its sake, to merge himself in its glory, and to live in its triumphs without personal recognition from the public, was the loyal devotion which each expected his sovereign newspaper to accept as its simple right. ”

“ If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful; and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public or of any considerable part of it. ”

“ Practical advice and useful information in special fields, humorous matter, and fiction, as given in the daily newspaper, do not differ materially from similar matter published in other forms and cannot be considered distinctly journalistic types of writing.
How news is gathered. Since the day’s news is the essential part of the daily newspaper, the gathering, writing, and editing of news is naturally the chief concern of journalism. ”

“ By far the most important and exacting task, which falls to its lot, is the provision of a daily—or weekly as the case may be—supply of news and that not of any news nor of enough news but of all the news. The distinction is of immense practical importance because it trebles the difficulty imposed on the conductors of a newspaper. ”

“ That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing is to propose practical improvements for it. ”

“ And such is the high personal honor of the average Parisian news gatherer that one Paris morning paper, which specializes in actual news as counter-distinguished from the other Paris papers which rely upon political screeds to fill their columns, locks its doors and disconnects its telephones at 8 o'clock in the evening, so that reporters coming in after that hour must stay in till press time lest some of them—such is the fear—will peddle all the exclusive stories off to less enterprising contemporaries. ”

“ This humorous ancient was not unlike the modern newspaper man. The hideous noise of the press, its conscience-annulling haste, its sense of power and almost uncontradictable certainty, [A] are [43] what he employs to warn his soul, his reason, not to look over his shoulder while he is at work. The fact is that the whole ingenious mechanism of a newspaper is so automatically conjointed and revolves so rapidly that by sheer fury and speed of movement it takes on a kind of synthetic life of its own. ”

“ If a politician or a clever and ambitious lawyer makes a startling charge against an institution that occupies a conspicuous place in our affairs, that is news, and the newspaper must print it. In order to make the news attractive to the jaded palate of its readers the dry-as-dust parts must be skimmed off, and seasoning added in such peppers and vinegars as the occasion permits, with a final dash of spice in the shape of pungent headlines that will arrest and hold the appetite. ”

“ Are there not a hundred little rivulets of news which never flow through the journals, but are passed from mouth to mouth, and seem shallow enough, but which, uniting at last, form a great stream of public opinion, and this, having formed itself imperceptibly, is suddenly found in full flow, and is so obvious that the newspapers forget to mention it? ”

“ But there would be a newspaper or two, pretty old now, as some people reckon the age of newspapers, but in Newbank a newspaper is very wisely considered new until it has been read, and news is always news until you have heard it, no matter how long after the occurrence. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Moreover, a new element has come to the front that played a much more subordinate part three or four decades ago—the headline. "Let me write the headlines of a people," said the late Henry D. Lloyd to the writer, "and I care not who makes its laws." It is the staring headlines that form the staple of the busy man's newspaper reading, and they are certainly hygienic for the eyes if not always for the mind. While the trend towards larger and clearer type [133] has gone on chiefly without the consciousness of the public, it has not been merely a reform imposed from without. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The story is a good one if the reader will suspend his sense of realism sufficiently to enjoy it. But in its purport [Pg 148] to be a true account of an arrest and a trial of certain persons, it makes one doubt first the story, then the newspaper that printed it, and finally newspapers in general. And so develops one of the main causes of criticism of the modern newspaper. A reporter must resolve to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A journal loses its power the moment it is wrong. ”

“ The sixpenny journals, the Evening Post, Commercial Advertiser, Courier, Journal of Commerce, and Express, perforce learned much from the Herald about news-gathering. Years later the Evening Post described the new spirit of enterprise which had seized upon journalism by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times of great excitement the Herald and Tribune raced locomotive engines against each other in order to get the earliest news ”

“ Taking the two branches of Anglo-Saxon journalism together as one whole, there is a very distinct tendency in America to attach greater prominence to the news-collecting side of journalism. Comment, criticism, propagandism are not excluded from American papers but the papers themselves live and flourish or die quickly according to the value which their public attaches to their news columns. ”

“ However interesting the theories and principles of the art of news writing may be for themselves, it is the practical application of them in the writer’s own work that gives them their value for the student of journalism.
Aims in studying news stories. The purpose in analyzing typical examples of news writing should be to discover in detail (1) how to obtain news, (2) how to determine its value, and (3) how to present it most effectively. Most stories reveal the means by which their contents were obtained and the importance which the writer or editor attached to each of the details. ”

“ In the magazine the patchwork of daily journalism is assembled into more meaningful designs. Local news is sifted of its provincialism to become matter of national concern. Topics which you rapidly skimmed in the afternoon newspaper three or four weeks ago are re-discussed in the weekly or monthly magazines in a way which often makes you feel that here, for the first time, they become of personal import. ”

“ Interest in news may generally be said to vary inversely in proportion to the distance between the place where the news originates and the place where the paper is published. Local interest is given to general news by bringing out those phases, or “local ends,” of telegraph news that are of significance in the community in which the paper circulates.
Every story indicates the evaluation of the news that it presents as made by the reporter or correspondent, and by the editor or the copy-reader. ”

“ But up to the middle of the eighteenth century, while the stamp duty remained at a penny, the growth of the press was very marked, insomuch that Dr Johnson bore testimony that "Journals are daily multiplied without increase of knowledge," and Crabbe lamented in poetic strain,
A daily swarm that banish every Muse,
Come flying forth and mortals call them News. ”

“ What is news? Where and how is news to be obtained? and, How is news to be presented to the reader? The first question involves the definition of news and the determination of its value, the second concerns the gathering of news, and the third has to do with structure and style in the writing of news.
What is News? Although every good newspaper worker recognizes news at once, and almost instinctively decides upon its value, most of them find it difficult to express in brief form what news is and what determines its value. ”