much interested in a contract the city was about to make with a lighting
company, a longterm contract at an exorbitant price. No opposition was
expected. The city council had been “seen,” the reformers silenced. I
knew some of the particulars. I knew that both parties were gaining at
the public expense, to their own profit and the tremendous profit of the
gas company. I, fearless in my new control, sent out a small editorial
feeler, a little suggestion about municipal ownership. This time my
editorial did have influence. No mango tree of an Indian juggler
blossomed quicker. I was called upon one hour after the paper was out.
What in the name of all unnamable did I mean? I laughed. I pointed out
the new holdings of stock I had acquired. What did the gentlemen mean?
They didn’t know—not then.
I had a very pleasant call from the gas company’s attorney the next day.
He was a most agreeable fellow, a man of parts, assuredly. I, a
conscious chattel, would now appraise myself. I waited, letting the
pleasantry flow by in a gentle stream. By the way, suggested my new
friend, why didn’t I try for the printing of the gas company? It was
quite a matter. My friend was surprised that the _Herald_ had so
complete a job-printing plant. The gas company had all of its work done
out of town, at a high rate, he thought. He would use his influence,
etc., etc. Actually, I felt very important! All this to come out of a
little editorial on municipal ownership! The _Herald_ didn’t care for
printing so very much, I said. But I would think it over.
The next day I followed up my municipal ownership editorial. It was my
answer. I waited for theirs. I waited in vain. I had overreached myself.
This was humiliation indeed, and it aroused every bit of ire and revenge
in me. I boldly launched out on a campaign against the dragon. I would
see if the “press” could be held so cheaply. I printed statistics of the
price of lighting in other cities. I exposed the whole scheme. I stood
for the people at last! My early fire came back. We would see: the
people and the _Herald_ against a throttling corporation and a gang of
corrupt aldermen.
Then the other side got into the war. I went to the bank to renew a
note. I had renewed it a dozen times before. But the bank had seen the
Gorgon and turned to stone. I digged deep and met the note. A big law
firm which had given me all its business began to seek out the
_Bulletin_. One or two advertisers dropped out. Some unseen hand began
to foment a strike. Were the banks, the bar, and, worst of all, the
labor unions, in the pay of a gas company? It was exhilarating to be
with “the people,” but exhilaration does not meet pay-rolls. I may state
that I am now doing the gas company’s printing at a very fair rate.
I saw that the policy was a good one, nevertheless. I also saw that it
could not be carried to the extreme. So I have become merely
threatening. I have learned never to overstep my bounds. I take my lean
years and my fat years, still a hireling, but having somewhat to say
about my market value. What provincial paper does not have the same
story to tell?
My public doesn’t care for good writing. It has no regard for reason.
During one political campaign I tried reason. That is, I didn’t denounce
the adversary. Admitting he had some very good points, I showed why the
other man had better ones. The general impression was that the _Herald_
had “flopped,” just because I did not abuse my party’s opponent, but
tried to defeat him with logic! A paper is always admired for its
backbone, and backbone is its refusal to see two sides to a question.
I have reached the “masses.” I tell people what they knew beforehand,
and thus flatter them. Aiming to instruct them, I should offend. God is
with the biggest circulations, and we must have them, even if we appeal
to class prejudice now and then.
I can occasionally foster a good work, almost underhandedly, it would
seem. I take little pleasure in it. The various churches, hospitals, the
library, all expect to be coddled indiscriminately and without returning
any thanks whatever. I formerly had as much railroad transportation as I
wished. I still have the magazines free of charge and a seat in the
theatre. These are my “perquisites.” There is no particular future for
me. The worst of it is that I don’t seem to care. The gradual falling
away from the high estate of my first editorial is a matter for the
student of character, which I am not. In myself, as in my paper, I see
only results.
I think these confessions are ample enough and blunt enough. When I left
the high school, I would have wished to word them in Stevensonian
manner. That was some time ago. We who run small dailies have little
care for the niceties of style. There are few of our clientele who know
the nice from the not-nice. In our smaller cities we “suicide” and
“jeopardize.” We are visited by “agriculturalists,” and “none of us are”
exempt from little iniquities and uniquities of style and expression. We
go right on: “commence” where we should “begin,” use “balance” for
“remainder,” never think of putting the article before “Hon.” and
“Rev.,” and some of us abbreviate “assemblyman” into “ass,” meaning
nothing but condensation. Events still “transpire” in our small cities,
and inevitably we “try experiments.” We have learned to write
“trousers,” and “gents” appears only in our advertisements. In common
with the very biggest and best papers we always say “leniency.” That I
do these things, the last coercion of environment, is the saddest, to
me, of all.
THE COUNTRY EDITOR OF TO-DAY
BY CHARLES MOREAU HARGER
I
Eulogies and laudatory paragraphs, alternating with sneers, ridicule,
and deprecations, long have been the lot of the country editor. Pictured
in the comic papers as an egotistic clown, exalted by the politicians as
a mighty “moulder of public opinion,” occasionally chastised by angry
patrons, and sometimes remembered by delighted subscribers, he has put
his errors where they could be read of all men and has modestly sought a
fair credit for his merits.
At times he has rebelled—not at treatment from his constituency but at
patronizing remarks of the city journalist who sits at a mahogany desk
and dictates able articles for the eighteen-page daily, instead of
writing local items at a pine table in the office of a four-page weekly.
Thus did one voice his protest: “When you consider that the country
weekly is owned by its editor and that the man who writes the funny
things about country papers in the city journals is owned by the
corporation for which he writes, it doesn’t seem so sad. When you see an
item in the city papers poking fun at the country editor for printing
news about John Jones’ new barn, you laugh and laugh—for you know that
on one of the pages of that same city daily is a two-column story in
regard to the trimmings on the gowns of the Duchess of Wheelbarrow. And
it is all the more amusing because you know the duchess does not even
know of the existence of the aforesaid city paper, while John Jones and
many of his neighbors take and pay for the paper which mentioned his new
barn. Don’t waste your pity on the country newspaper worker. He will get
along.”
Little money is needed to start a country paper. There are those who
claim that it does not require any money,—that it can be done on nerve
alone,—and they produce evidence to support the statement. True, some of
the editors who have the least money and the poorest plants are most
successful in their efforts to live up to the conception developed by
the professional humorist; but it is not fair to judge the country
editor by these—any more than it would be fair to judge the workers on
the great city dailies by the publishers of back-street fake sheets that
exist merely to rob advertisers; or to judge the editors of reputable
magazines by the promoters of nauseous monthlies whose stock in trade is
a weird and sickening collection of mail-order bargains and quack
medicine advertisements.
The country editor of to-day is far removed from his prototype of two or
three decades ago. It would be strange if an age that gives to the
farmer his improved self-binder, to the physician his X-ray machine, and
to the merchant his loose-leaf ledger, had done nothing for the town’s
best medium of publicity. The perfection of stereotype plate manufacture
by which a page of telegraph news may be delivered ready for printing at
a cost of approximately twenty cents a column, and the elaboration of
the “ready print,” or “patent inside,” by which half the paper is
printed before delivery, yet at practically no expense over the
unprinted sheets, have been the two great labor-savers for the country
editor. Thereby he is relieved, if he desire, of the tedious and
expensive task of setting much type in order to give the world’s general
news, and the miscellaneous matter that “fills up” the paper. His
energies then may be devoted to reporting the happenings of his locality
and to giving his opinions on public affairs. By his doing of these, and
by his relations toward the public interests, is he to be judged.
After all, no one man in the community has so large an opportunity to
assist the town in advancement as the editor. It is not because he is
smarter than others, not because he is wealthy—but because he is the
spokesman to the outside world.
He is eager to print all the news in his own paper. Does he do it?
Hardly. “This would be a very newsy paper,” explained a frank country
editor to his subscribers, “were it not for the fact that each of the
four men who work on it has many friends. By the time all the items that
might injure some of their friends are omitted, very little is left.”
“I wish you would print a piece about our schoolteacher,” said a
farmer’s wife to me one afternoon. “Say that she is the best teacher in
the county.”
“But I can’t do that—two hundred other teachers would be angry. You
write the piece, sign it, and I’ll print it.”
“What are you running a newspaper for if you can’t please your
subscribers?” she demanded—and canceled her subscription.
So the country editor leaves out certain good things and certain bad
things for the very simple reason that the persons most interested are
close at hand and can find the individual responsible for the
statements. He becomes wise in his generation and avoids chastisements
and libel suits. He finds that there is no lasting regard in a sneer, no
satisfaction in gratifying the impulse to say things that bring tears to
women’s eyes, nothing to gloat over in opening a wound in a man’s heart.
If he does not learn this as he grows older in the service, he is a poor
country editor.
His relations to his subscribers are intimate. There is little mystery
possible about the making of the paper; it is as if he stood in the
market-place and told his story. Of course, the demands upon him are
many and some of them preposterous. Men with grafts seek to use the
paper, people with schemes ask free publicity. The country editor is
criticised for charging for certain items that no city paper prints
free. The churches and lodges want free notices of entertainments by
which they hope to make money; semi-public entertainments prepared under
the management of a traveling promoter ask free advertising “for the
good of the cause.” Usually they get it, and when the promoter passes
on, the editor is found to be the only one in town who received nothing
for his labor.
It is characteristic of the country town to engage in community
quarrels. These absorb the attention of the citizens, and feeling
becomes bitter. The cause may be trifling: the location of a
schoolhouse, the building of a bridge, the selection of a justice of the
peace, or some similar matter, is enough. To the newspaper office hurry
the partisans, asking for _ex parte_ reports of the conditions. One
leader is, perhaps, a liberal advertiser; to offend him means loss of
business. Another is a personal friend; to anger him means the loss of
friendship. The editor of the only paper in the town must be a diplomat
if he is to guide safely through the channel. In former times he tried
to please both sides and succeeded in making enemies of every one
interested. Now the well-equipped editor takes the position that he is a
business man like the others, that he has rights as do they, and he
states the facts as he sees them, regardless of partisanship, letting
the public do the rest. If there be another paper in town, the problem
is easy, for the other faction also has an “organ.”
Out of the public’s disagreement may come a newspaper quarrel—though
this is a much rarer thing than formerly. The old-time country newspaper
abuse of “our loathed but esteemed contemporary” is passing away, it
being understood that such a quarrel, with personalities entangled in
the recriminations, is both undignified and ungentlemanly. “But people
will read it,” says the man who by gossip encourages these attacks. So
will people listen to a coarse street controversy carried on in a loud
and angry tone,—but little is their respect for the principals engaged.
Country editors of the better class now treat other editors as
gentlemen, and the paper that stoops to personal attacks is seldom
found. Many a town has gone for years without other than kindly mention
in any paper of the editors of the other papers, and in such towns you
will generally find peace and courtesy among the citizens.
Of course, there are politics and political arguments, but few are the
editors so lacking in the instincts of a gentleman as to bring into
these the opposing editor’s personal and family affairs. It has come to
be understood that such action is a reflection on the one who does it,
not on the object of his attack. This is another way of saying that more
real gentlemen are running country newspapers to-day than ever before.
This broadening of character has broadened influence. The country paper
is effecting greater things in legislation than the county conventions
are.
“The power of the country press in Washington surprises me,” said a
Middle West congressman last winter. “During my two terms I have been
impressed with it constantly. I doubt if there is a single calm
utterance in any paper in the United States that does not carry some
weight in Washington among the members of Congress. You might think that
what some little country editor says does not amount to anything, but it
means a great deal more than most people realize. When the country
editor, who is looking after nothing but the county printing, gives
expression to some rational idea about a national question, the man off
here in Congress knows that it comes from the grass-roots. The lobby,
the big railroad lawyers, and that class of people, realize the power of
the press, but they hate it. I have heard them talk about it and shake
their heads and say, ‘Too much power there!’ The press is more powerful
than money.”
This was not said in flattery, but because he had seen on congressmen’s
desks the heaps of country weeklies, and he knew how closely they were
read. The smallest editorial paragraph tells the politician of the
condition in that paper’s community, for he knows that it is put there
because the editor has gathered the idea from some one whom he trusts as
a leader—and the politician knows approximately who that leader is. So
the country editor often exerts a power of which he knows little.
II
But politics is only a part of the country editor’s life. The social
affairs of the community are nearest to him. The proud father who brings
in a cigar with a notice of the seventh baby’s arrival (why cigars and
babies should be associated in men’s minds I never understood), the
fruit farmer who presents some fine Ben Davis apples in the expectation
that he will get a notice, are but types. The editor may have some
doubts concerning the need of a seventh child in the family of the proud
father, and he may not be particularly fond of Ben Davis apples; but he
gives generous notices because he knows that the gifts were prompted by
kind hearts and that the givers are his friends.
When joy comes to the household, it is but the working of the heart’s
best impulses to desire that all should share it. The news that the
princess of the family has, after many years of waiting, wedded a
prosperous merchant of the neighboring county, brings the family into
prominence in the home paper. Seldom in these busy times does the editor
get a piece of wedding-cake, but nevertheless he fails not to say that
the bride is “one of our loveliest young ladies and the groom is worthy
of the prize he has won.” The city paper does not do that. Here and
there a country editor tries to put on city airs and give the bare facts
of “social functions,” without a personal touch to the lines. But
infrequently does he succeed in reaching the hearts of his readers, and
somehow he finds that his contemporary across the street, badly printed,
sprinkled with typographical errors and halting in its grammar, but
profuse in its laudations, is getting an unusual number of new
subscribers. Even you, though you may pretend to be unmindful, are not
displeased when on the day after your party you read that the guests
“went home feeling that a good time had been had.”
The time has not yet come for the country paper to assume city airs; nor
is it likely to arrive for many years. The reason is a psychological
one. The city journal is the paper of the masses; the country weekly or
small daily is the paper of the neighborhood. One is general and
impersonal; the other, direct and intimate. One is the market-place; the
other, the home. The distinction is not soon to be wiped out.
And when sorrow comes! Into the home of a city friend of mine death
entered, taking the wife and mother. The family had been prominent in
social circles, and columns were printed in the city papers, columns of
cold, biographical facts—born, married, died. But the news went back to
the small country town where in their early married life the husband and
wife had spent many happy years, and in the little country weekly was
quite another sort of story. It told how much her friends loved her, how
saddened they were by her passing away, how sweet and womanly had been
her character. The husband did not send the city papers to distant
acquaintances; he sent copy after copy of the little country weekly, the
only place where, despite his prominence in the world, appeared a
sympathetic relation of the loss that had come to him.
Week after week the country paper does this. From issue after issue
clippings are stowed away in bureau drawers or pasted in family Bibles,
because they picture the loved one gone. It may not be a very high
mission; but no part of the country editor’s work has in it more of
satisfaction and recompense.
After the funeral comes the real test of the editor’s good-nature. Long
resolutions adopted by lodges and church organizations are handed in for
publication, each bristling with the forms of ritual or creed, and each
signed with the names of the committee members upon whom devolved the
task of composition. A few country editors are brave enough to demand
payment at advertising rates for these publications; generally they are
printed without charge.
Nor is there a halt at this step in the proceeding. One day a sad-faced
farmer, with a heavy band of crape around his battered soft hat,
accompanied by a woman whose heavy veil and black dress are sufficient
insignia of woe, comes to the office.
“We would like to put in a ‘card of thanks,’” begins the man, “and we
wish you would write it for us. We ain’t very good at writing pieces,
and you know how.”
Does the editor tell them how bad is the taste that indulges the
stereotyped card of thanks? Does he haughtily refuse to be a party to
such violation of form’s canons? Scarcely. He knows the formula by heart
and “the kind friends and neighbors who assisted us in our late
bereavement” comes to him as easily as the opening words of a mayor’s
proclamation.
Occasionally there is literary talent in the family, and the “card” is
prepared without the editor’s assistance. Here is one verbatim as it
came to the desk:—
“We extend our thanks to the good people who assisted us in the sickness
and death of our wife and daughter: The doctor who was so faithful in
attendance and effort to bring her back to health, the pastor who
visited and prayed with her and us, the students who watched with us and
waited on her, the neighbors who did all they could in helping care for
her, the dormitory students, the faculty, the literary societies and the
A.O.U.W. who furnished such beautiful flowers, we thank them all. Then
the undertaker who was so kind, the liveryman and other friends who
furnished carriages for us to go to the cemetery—yes, we thank you all.”
Doubtless he feels that he should do something toward conserving the
best taste in social usage, and that the “card of thanks” should be
ruthlessly frowned down; but he sees also the other side. It is
unquestionably prompted by a spirit of sincere gratitude, and survives
as a concession to a supposed public opinion. Like other things that are
self-perpetuating, this continues—and the country editor out of the
goodness of his heart assists in its longevity. In no path is the
progress of the reformer so difficult as in that of social custom; and
this is as true on the village street as on the city boulevard.
III
The past half-decade has brought to the country editor a new problem and
a new rival,—the rural delivery route. Until this innovation came, few
farmers took daily papers. The country weekly, or the weekly from the
city, furnished the news.
Out in the Middle West the other morning, a dozen miles from town, a
farmer rode on a sulky plough turning over brown furrows for the new
crop. “I see by to-day’s Kansas City papers,” he began, as a visitor
came alongside, “that there is trouble in Russia again.” “What do you
know about what is in to-day’s Kansas City papers?” “Oh, we got them
from the carrier an hour ago.”
It was not yet noon, but he was in touch with the world’s news up to one
o’clock that morning—and this twelve miles from a railroad and two
hundred miles west of the Missouri River! In that county every farmhouse
has rural delivery of mail; and one carrier makes his round in an
automobile, covering the thirty miles in four hours or less.
The country editor has viewed with alarm this changing condition. He has
feared that he would be robbed of his subscribers through the familiar
excuse, “I’m takin’ more papers than I can read.” But nothing of the
kind has happened. Although the rural carriers take each morning great
packages of daily papers, brought to the village by the fast mail, the
people along the routes are as eager as ever for the weekly visit of the
home paper. If by accident one copy is missing from the carrier’s supply
on Thursday, great is the lamentation. It is doubtful if a single
country paper has been injured by the rural route; in most instances the
reading habit has been so stimulated as to increase the patronage.
This it has done: it has impressed on the editor the necessity of giving
much attention to home news and less to the happenings afar. This is,
indeed, the province of the country paper, since it is of the home and
the family, not of the market-place. This feature will grow, and the
country paper will become more a chronicle of home news and less a
purveyor of outside happenings, for soon practically every farmer will
have his daily paper with the regularity of the sunrise. On the whole,
instead of being an injury this is helpful to the rural publisher; it
relieves him of responsibility for a broad field of information and
allows him to devote his energy to that news which gives the greatest
hold on readers,—the doings of the immediate community. With this will
come more generally the printing of the entire paper at home and the
decline of the “patent inside,” now so common, which has served its
purpose well. If it exist, it will be in a modified form, devoted
chiefly to readable articles of a literary rather than of a news value.