The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are
said to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements
enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and
embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is
left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.
Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of
human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that
it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Yet have I
known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.
The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been
the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were
journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme
in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and
resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population.
Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the
Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses
and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length he
struck a central idea—a really great, original idea—the idea of
printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday,
fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley and
Raymond—making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate—and, at longer
range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and
Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist;
Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and
partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters
and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting
their way to the front, but possessing the “nose for news,” using the
Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and
never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey
were caught young by the lure of printer’s ink. Bowles was born and
reared in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his
father, and Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse,
was broken to harness before he was out of his teens.
Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession,
it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage.
Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and
attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great
prescriptionist—he cannot be great in both—and the great lawyer is
rarely great, if ever, as counselor and orator.
[Illustration: Henry Watterson—From a painting by Louis Mark in the
Manhattan Club, New York]
The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be
able to write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a
little kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every
range of it between the editorial room, the composing room and the
pressroom. He must hold well in hand everybody and every function,
having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the
roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet
self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of
various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent
barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear.
Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep
to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving columns;
loving his art—for such it is—for art’s sake; getting his sufficiency,
along with its independence, in the public approval and patronage,
seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestedness being the
soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noble
purpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as to
bribers, “get behind me, Satan.” Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and
conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in life
he abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics and
diplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and
footsteps in the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the
Ambassador than as the Editor.
More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiring
journalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force—force of
prowess, force of habit, force of convention—to the Rule of Numbers,
the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the
teacher—the very Bible—of the people. The people are already beginning
to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their
newspapers. Newspaper owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the
value of character. Instances might be cited where the public,
discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly
yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. However impersonal it
pretends to be, with whatever of mystery it affects to envelop itself,
the public insists upon some visible presence. In some States the law
requires it. Thus “personal journalism” cannot be escaped, and whether
the “one-man power” emanates from the Counting Room or the Editorial
Room, as they are called, it must be clear and answerable, responsive
to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy.