long as he makes his articles interesting to the widest public, is not
required to give too strict attention to technicalities—he writes upon
this subject to-day and upon one at the opposite pole to-morrow. A
writer for a trade journal, on the other hand, need not give pains to
human interest if his technical grasp of the iron market, the
haberdashery trade, or the essentials of machine-shop practice is sure.
Moreover, each year’s experience in writing for a trade journal adds to
his knowledge of its subject and makes his work so much the surer and
simpler. But the writer of advertising must combine human interest with
strict accuracy; his subject is constantly changing, unless he is a
specialist in a certain line, taking advertising commissions at
intervals. To-day he studies the methods of making cigars and the many
different kinds of tobacco that enter therein; to-morrow he writes a
monograph on enameled tin cans, investigating the processes of making
them in the factory; and the day after that his topic may be breakfast
foods, taking him into investigations of starch, gluten, digestive
functions, diet and health, and setting him upon a weary hunt for
synonyms to describe the “rich nutty flavor” that all breakfast foods
are said to have. All the illustrative work of an advertising artist
must be so true to detail that it will pass the eyes of men who spend
their lives making the things he pictures. The Camusots and Matifats no
longer provide costly orgies for Grub Street, sitting by meekly to enjoy
the flow of wit and banter. They now employ criticism in moulding their
literature of business. It was one of them who, difficult to please in
circulars, looked over the manuscript submitted by an advertising free
lance with more approval than was his custom. “This is not bad,” he
commented; “not bad at all—and yet—I have seen all these words used
before.”
An interesting new development of advertising is the business
periodical, a journal published by a large manufacturer, usually, and
sent out monthly to retail agents or his consuming public. In its pages
are printed articles about the manufacturer’s product, descriptions of
its industrial processes, news of the trade, and miscellany. Many of
these periodicals are extremely interesting for themselves. There must
be dozens of them in New York—none of the newspaper directories list
them. Writers who are not especially familiar with the product with
which they deal often furnish a style of matter for them that is valued
for its fresh point of view and freedom from trade and technical
phraseology. These publications range from journals of a dozen pages,
issued on the “every little while” plan for the retail trade of a rubber
hose manufacturer, to the monthly magazine which a stocking jobber mails
to thousands of youngsters all over the land to keep them loyal to his
goods.
This, then, is the market in its main outlines. But a mass of detail has
been eliminated. In groups large and small there are the poster artists
who work for theatrical managers and lithographers; the strange, obscure
folk who write the subterranean dime-novel stories of boyhood; the
throngs of models who go from studio to studio, posing at the uniform
rate of fifty cents an hour whether they work constantly or seldom; the
engravers who have made an art of retouching half-tone plates; the great
body of crafts-and-arts workers which has sprung up in the past five
years and which leads the free-lance life in studios, selling pottery,
decorated china, wood, and metal work to rich patrons; the serious
painters whose work is found in exhibitions, and the despised “buckeye”
painter who paints for the department stores and cheap picture shops;
the etchers, the portrait painters, and the “spotknockers” who lay in
the tones of the crude “crayon portrait” for popular consumption—these
and a multitude of others inhabit Greater Grub Street, knowing no
regularity of employment, of hours, or of income.
IV
While its opportunities are without conceivable limitation, Grub Street
is not a thoroughfare littered with currency, but is paved with
cobblestones as hard as any along the other main avenues of New York’s
life and energy. The Great Man of the Provinces, landing at Cortlandt or
Twenty-third Street after an apprenticeship at newspaper work in a minor
city, steps into a world strangely different from the one he has known.
For, just to be a police reporter elsewhere is to be a journalist, and
journalism is the same as literature, and literature is honorable, and a
little mysterious, and altogether different from the management of a
stove foundry, or the proprietorship of a grocery house, or any other of
the overwhelmingly material things that make up American life. Times
have not greatly changed since Lucien de Rubempré was the lion of Madame
de Bargeton’s salon at Angoulême, and this is a matter they seem to have
ordered no better in provincial France. To be a writer or artist of any
calibre elsewhere breeds a form of homage and curiosity and a certain
sure social standing. But New York strikes a chill over the Great Man of
the Provinces, because it is nothing at all curious or extraordinary for
one to write or draw in a community where thousands live by these
pursuits. They carry no homage or social standing on their face, and the
editorial world is even studied in its uncongeniality toward the
newcomer, because he is so fearfully likely to prove one of the
ninety-nine in every hundred aspirants who cannot draw or write well
enough. The ratio that holds in the mass of impossible manuscript and
sketches that pours into every editorial office is also the ratio of the
living denizens of Grub Street. The Great Man of the Provinces is
received on the assumption that he is unavailable, with thanks, and the
hope that he will not consider this a reflection upon his literary or
artistic merit.
So he finds himself altogether at sea for a while. No Latin Quarter
welcomes him, for this community has no centre. His estimates of
magazine values, formed at a distance, are quickly altered. Many lines
of work he had never dreamed of, and channels for selling it, come to
light day by day. To pass the building where even _Munsey’s_ is
published gives him a thrill the first time; yet after a few months in
New York he finds that the great magazines, instead of being nearer, are
really farther away than they were in the provinces. Of the other
workers he meets, few aspire to them, while of this few only a fraction
get into their pages. He calls on editors, perhaps, and finds them a
strange, non-committal caste, talking very much like their own rejection
slips. No editor will definitely give him a commission, even if he
submits an idea that seems good, but can at most be brought to admit
under pressure that, if the Great Man were to find himself in that
neighborhood with the idea all worked up, the editor _might_ be
interested in seeing it, perhaps even reading it—yet he must not
understand this as in any way binding ... the magazine is very full just
at present ... hadn’t he better try the newspapers, now? For there are
more blanks than prizes walking the Grub Street paving, and persons of
unsound minds have been known to take to literature as a last resort,
and the most dangerous person to the editor is not a rejected
contributor at all, but one who has been accepted once and sees a gleam
of a chance that he may be again.
If the Great Man really has “stuff” in him, he stops calling on editors
and submits his offerings by mail. Even if he attains print in a worthy
magazine, he may work a year without seeing its notable contributors, or
its minor ones, or its handmaidens, or even its office-boy. Two men
jostled one another on Park Row one morning as they were about to enter
the same newspaper building, apologized, and got into the elevator
together. There a third introduced them, when it turned out that one had
been illustrating the work of the other for two years, and each had
wished to know the other, but never got around to it. An individual
circle of friends is easily formed in Grub Street, but the community as
a whole lives far and wide and has no coherence.
What ability or skill the Great Man brought from his province may be
only the foundation for real work. There will surely be extensive
revising of ideals and methods. A story is told of a poet who came to
the metropolis with a completed epic. This found no acceptance, so after
cursing the stupidity of the public and the publishers, he took to
writing “Sunday stuff.” Soon the matter-of-fact attitude of the workers
around him, with the practical view of the market he acquired, led him
to doubt the literary value of the work he had done in the sentimental
atmosphere of his native place. Presently a commission to write a column
of humor a week came to him, and he cut his epic into short lengths,
tacked a squib on each fragment, and eventually succeeded in printing it
all as humor, at a price many times larger than the historic one brought
by _Paradise Lost_. Another newcomer brought unsalable plays and high
notions of the austerity of the artistic vocation. Three months after
his arrival he was delighted to get a commission to write the handbook a
utilitarian publisher proposed to sell to visitors seeing the
metropolis. This commission not only brought a fair payment for the
manuscript on delivery, but involved a vital secondary consideration.
The title of the work was “Where to Eat in New York,” and its
preparation made it necessary for the author to dine each evening for a
month in a different café at the proprietor’s expense.
This practical atmosphere of Grub Street eventually makes for
development in the writer or artist who has talent. It is an atmosphere
suited to work, for the worker is left alone in the solitude of the
multitude. False ideals and sentimentality fade from his life, and his
style takes on directness and vigor. Greater Grub Street is not given to
reviling the public for lack of ideals or appreciation. The free lance’s
contact with the real literary market, day after day, teaches him that,
as soon as he can produce the manuscript of the great American novel,
there are editors who may be trusted to perceive its merit, and
publishers ready to buy.
V
This free-lance community of the metropolis is housed all over Manhattan
Island, as well as in the suburbs and adjacent country for a hundred
miles or more around. An amusing census of joke-writers and humorists
was made not long ago by a little journal which a New Jersey railroad
publishes in the interest of its suburban passenger traffic. It was
shown, by actual names and places of residence, that more than three
fourths of the writers who keep the suburban joke alive live in Suburbia
themselves.
New York has no Latin Quarter. As her publications are scattered over
the city from Park Row to Forty-second Street, so the dwellings of
free-lance workers are found everywhere above Washington Square. There
are numerous centres, however. Washington Square is one for newspaper
men and women, and in its boarding-houses and apartment hotels are also
found many artists who labor in studios near by. Tenth Street, between
Broadway and Sixth Avenue, has a few studios remaining, surrounded by
the rising tide of the wholesale clothing trade, chief among them being
the Fleischmann Building, next Grace Church, and the old studio building
near Sixth Avenue. More old studios are found in Fourteenth Street; and
around Union Square the new skyscrapers house a prosperous class of
illustrators who do not follow the practice of living with their work.
On the south side of Twenty-third Street, from Broadway to Fourth
Avenue, is a row of old-time studios, and pretty much the whole gridiron
of cross streets between Union and Madison squares has others, old and
new. Thence, Grub Street proceeds steadily uptown until, in the
neighborhood of Central Park, it may be said to have arrived.
Look over the roofs in any of these districts and the toplight hoods may
be seen, always facing north, as though great works were expected from
that point of the compass. Grub Street is the top layer of New York, and
dislikes to be far from the roof. A studio that has been inhabited by a
succession of artists and writers for twenty, thirty, forty years, may
be tenanted to-day by a picturesque young man in slouch hat, loose
neckerchief, and paint-flecked clothes, who eats about at cheap cafés,
and sleeps on a cot that in daytime serves as a lounge under its dusty
Oriental canopy. The latter ornament is the unfailing mark of that kind
of studio, and with it go, in some combination, a Japanese umbrella and
a fish-net. This young man makes advertising pictures, perhaps, or puts
the frames around the half-tone illustrations for a Sunday newspaper. By
that he lives, and for his present fame draws occasional “comics” for
_Life_. But with an eye to Immortality, he paints, so that there are
always sketching trips to be made, and colors to putter with, and art,
sacred art, to talk of in the terms of the technician. Or such an old
studio may shelter some forlorn spinster who ekes out a timid existence
by painting dinner cards or the innumerable whatnots produced and sold
by her class in Grub Street.
In the newer studios are found two methods of working. Prosperous
illustrators, writers, and teachers may prefer a studio in an office
building, where no one is permitted to pass the night, conducting their
affairs with the aid of a stenographer and an office boy. Others live
and work in the newer studios that have been built above Twenty-third
Street in the past decade. Few of the traditions of Bohemia are
preserved by successful men and women. The young man of the Sunday
supplement, and the amateur dauber, once he succeeds as a magazine
illustrator, drops his slouch hat, becomes conventional in dress, and
ceases to imitate outwardly an artistic era that is past. Success brings
him in contact with persons of truer tastes, and he changes to match his
new environment. This is so fundamental in Grub Street that the ability
of any of its denizens may be gauged by the editor’s experienced eye;
the less a given individual dresses like the traditional artist or
writer of the Parisian Latin Quarter, the nearer he is, probably, to
being one.
Women make up a large proportion of the dwellers in Grub Street, and its
open market, holding to no distinctions of sex in payment for acceptable
work, is in their favor. Any of the individual markets offers a fair
field for their work, and in most of them the feminine product is sought
as a foil to the staple masculine.
What is the average Grub Street income? That would be difficult to know,
for the free lance, as a rule, keeps no cash-book. Many workers exist on
earnings no larger than those of a country clergyman, viewed
comparatively from the standpoint of expenses, and among them are men
and women of real ability. Given the magic of business tact, they might
soon double their earnings. Business ability is the secret of monetary
success in Greater Grub Street. One must know where to sell, and also
what to produce. It pays to aim high and get into the currents of the
best demand, where prices are better, terms fairer, and competition an
absolute nullity. Even the cheapest magazines and newspapers pay well
when the free lance knows how to produce for them. Hundreds of workers
are ill paid because they have not the instinct of the compiler.
Scissors are mightier than the pen in this material market; with them
the skillful ones write original articles and books—various information
brought together in a new focus.
While untold thousands of impossible articles drift about the editorial
offices, these editors are looking for what they cannot often describe.
A successful worker in Grub Street divines this need and submits the
thing itself. Often the need is most tangible. For two weeks after the
Martinique disaster the newspapers and syndicates were hunting articles
about volcanoes—not profound treatises, but ordinary workmanlike
accounts such as could be tried out of any encyclopedia. Yet hundreds of
workers, any one of whom might have compiled the needed articles,
continued to send in compositions dealing with abstract subjects, things
far from life and events, and were turned down in the regular routine.
Only a small proportion of free lances ever become successful, but those
who do, achieve success by attention to demand, with the consequence
that most of their work is sold before it is written.
This community is perhaps the most diversified to be found in a national
centre of thought and energy. Paris, London, Munich, Vienna, Rome—each
has the artistic tradition and atmosphere, coming down through the
centuries. But this Grub Street of the new world is wholly material,—a
“boom town” of the arts,—embodying in its brain and heart only
prospects, hopes. Its artistic rating is written plainly in our current
literature. There is real artistic struggle and aspiration in it all,
undoubtedly, but not enough to sweeten the mass.
Greater Grub Street is utilitarian. That which propels it is not Art,
but Advertising—not Clio or Calliope, but Circulation.
JOURNALISM AS A CAREER
BY CHARLES MOREAU HARGER
I
In a recent discussion with a successful business man concerning an
occupation for the business man’s son, a college graduate, some one
suggested: “Set him up with a newspaper. He likes the work and is
capable of success.”
“Nothing in it,” was the prompt reply. “He can make more money with a
clothing store, have less worry and annoyance, and possess the respect
of more persons.”
This response typifies the opinion of many fathers regarding a newspaper
career. It is especially common to the business man in the rural and
semi-rural sections. The dry-goods merchant who has a stock worth twenty
thousand dollars, and makes a profit of from three thousand dollars to
five thousand dollars a year, realizes that the editor’s possessions are
meagre, and believes his income limited. He likewise hears complaints
and criticisms of the paper. Comparing his own placid money-making
course with, what he assumes to be the stormy and unprofitable struggle
of the publisher, he considers the printing business an inferior
occupation.
For this view the old-time editor is largely responsible. For decades it
was his pride to make constant reference to his poverty-stricken
condition, to beg subscribers to bring cord-wood and potatoes on
subscription, to glorify as a philanthropist the farmer who “called
to-day and dropped a dollar in the till.” The poor-editor joke is as
well established as the mother-in-law joke or the lover-and-angry-father
joke, and about as unwarranted; yet it has built up a sentiment, false
in fact and suggestion, often accepted as truth.
To the younger generation, journalism presents another aspect. The
fascination of doing things, of being in the forefront of the world’s
activities, appeals to young men and young women of spirit. Few are they
who do not consider themselves qualified to succeed should they choose
this profession. To the layman it seems so easy and so pleasant to write
the news and comment of the day, to occupy a seat on the stage at public
meetings, to pass the fire-lines unquestioned.
Not until the first piece of copy is handed in does the beginner
comprehend the magnitude of his task or the demand made upon him for
technical skill. When he sees the editor slash, blue-pencil, and
rearrange his story, he appreciates how much he has yet to learn. Of
this he was ignorant in his high school and his college days, and he was
confident of his ability. An expression of choice of a life-work by the
freshman class of a college or university will give a large showing for
journalism; in the senior year it will fall to a minor figure, not more
than from three to seven per cent of the whole. By that period the
students have learned some things concerning life, and have decided,
either because of temperament, or as did the business man for his son,
for some other profession.
To those who choose it deliberately as a life-work, obtaining a position
presents as many difficulties as it does in any other profession. The
old-time plan by which the beginner began as “devil,” sweeping out the
office, cleaning the presses, and finally rising to be compositor and
writer, is in these days of specialization out of date. The newspaper
business has as distinct departments as a department store. While a full
knowledge of every part of the workings of the office is unquestionably
valuable, the eager aspirant finds time too limited to serve a long
apprenticeship at the mechanical end in order to prepare himself for the
writing-room.
Hence we find the newspaper worker seeking a new preparation. He strives
for a broad knowledge, rather than mechanical training, and it is from
such preparation that he enters the newspaper office with the best
chances of success. Once the college man in the newspaper office was a
joke. His sophomoric style was the object of sneers and jeers from the
men who had been trained in the school of actual practice at the desk.
To-day few editors hold to the idea that there can be no special
preparation worth while outside the office, just as you find few farmers
sneering at the work of agricultural colleges. It is not uncommon to
find the staff of a great newspaper composed largely of college men, and
when a new man is sought for the writing force it is usually one with a
college degree who obtains the place. It is recognized that the ability
to think clearly, to write understandable English, and to know the big
facts of the world and its doings, are essential, and that college
training fits the young man of brains for this. Such faults as may have
been acquired can easily be corrected.
Along with the tendency toward specialization in other directions,
colleges and universities have established schools or departments of
journalism in which they seek to assist those students who desire to
follow that career. It is not a just criticism of such efforts to say,
as some editors have said, that it is impossible to give practical
experience outside a newspaper office. Such an opinion implies that news
and comment can be written only within sound of a printing-press; yet a
vast deal of actual everyday work on the papers themselves is done by
persons outside the office.
About twenty colleges and universities, chiefly in the Middle West and
Northwest, have established such schools. They range in their curriculum
from courses of lectures by newspaper men continued through a part of
the four-years’ course, to complete schools with a systematic course of
study comprehending general culture, history, and science, with actual
work on a daily paper published by the students themselves, on which,
under the guidance of an experienced newspaper man, they fill creditably
every department and assist in the final make-up of the publication.
They even gain a fair comprehension of the workings of linotypes,
presses, and the details of composition, without attempting to attain
such hand-skill as to make them eligible to positions in the mechanical
department.
These students, in addition to possessing the broad culture that comes
with a college degree, know how to write a “story,” how to frame a
headline, how to construct editorial comment, and they certainly enter
the newspaper office lacking the crudeness manifested by those who have
all the details of newspaper style to learn. This sort of schooling does
not make newspaper men of the unfit, but to the fit it gives a
preparation that saves them much time in attaining positions of value.
That a course of this kind will become an integral part of many more
colleges is probable.
In these schools some of the most capable students enroll. They are the
young men and young women of literary tastes and keen ambitions. They
are as able as the students who elect law, or science, or engineering.
From months of daily work in a class-room fitted up like the city room
of a great newspaper, with definite news-assignments and tasks that
cover the whole field of writing for the press, they can scarcely fail
to absorb some of the newspaper spirit, and graduate with a fairly
definite idea of what is to be required of them.
II
Then there comes the question, where shall the start be made? Is it best
to begin on the small paper and work toward metropolitan journalism? or
to seek a reporter’s place on the city daily and work for advancement?
Something is to be said for the latter course. The editor of one of the
leading New York dailies remarked the other day: “The man who begins in
New York, and stays with it, rises if he be capable. Changes in the
staffs are frequent, and in a half-dozen years he finds himself well up
the ladder. It takes him about that long to gain a good place in a
country town, and then if he goes to the city he must begin at the
bottom with much time wasted.” This is, however, not the essential
argument.