THE VILLAGE NEWSPAPER’S IMPORTANT PLACE IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM
The young man about to start on a journalistic career should give
long thought to the village newspaper. Our schools of journalism are
graduating thousands of boys who intend to be editors. A few of them
only can be taken on the big newspapers for their staffs are full to
overflowing always. It is difficult, indeed, for a young man to get a
place on a big city newspaper and the prizes are few if he does get it.
Let us see what the small town newspaper offers.
In the big cities nearly all writers are employees. The managing editor
is employed to direct the staff and to carry out the owners’ policies.
Editorial writers are employed to write. They have no pecuniary
interest in the property. In small cities the editors are part owners
frequently; in the villages they are the full owners almost always.
For the so-called great newspaper the staff writes to order. The
subjects are assigned and the treatment is indicated by the editor.
The policy of the sheet toward the important questions of the day
is understood and respected by all. Independence of thought is not
supposed or permitted to disport itself from that policy. All articles
are closely revised by some one else after the writer has finished
with them. They are made to conform to established policy, precedent
and practice. This tends to routine treatment rather than to bursts of
originality. It influences to dull writing. The knowledge that his work
is to be revised is repressive rather than stimulating to the writer.
If changes in his article are frequent he chafes and frets, imagines
that injustice is being done to him, gets discouraged and unhappy.
The personality of the general writers for the press in New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago, is known to a few of their associates only--is
unknown to the general public. Indeed, it would puzzle even newspaper
men to name the editors in chief and the managing editors of the
morning and afternoon sheets in New York City, although many of them,
of course, are known to almost everybody.
In the small cities, and especially in the villages, these conditions
are in exact reverse. The editor owns his newspaper. He is known
personally or by reputation to almost every member of the community. He
may write as he pleases on any topic, about anything, about anybody.
He may praise his friends or lambaste his enemies; may be brilliantly
original or stupidly conservative or hopelessly imitative. He is
of great community influence and importance. Not even the village
clergyman is more so. He is made much of at all gatherings and is
welcomed wherever he goes. The huntsman brings him bags of game; the
gardener refreshes him with the earliest tender vegetables; his table
is spread with the choicest of juicy fruits.
The writers for the big newspapers discourse on topics of national
importance--topics that are supposed to interest the masses. Rarely do
they write about people they know or have met unless they are doing
reportorial work. The village editor busies himself chiefly with
matters of concern to his community alone. His references to national
topics may be few. Of his own people he may write with a sympathetic
personal interest born of close contact with them, with knowledge of
their whims, their excellences, their deficiencies, and their wants.
His purpose is to interest them. He knows that they are more interested
in themselves and in each other than in anything else.
A considerable proportion of village folks and farmers now take a daily
paper from the nearest city of size. This daily sheet covers national
and world-wide topics so completely that the weekly cannot compete with
it advantageously in these lines. But the daily sheet cannot compete
with the weekly in the printing of those delicious little intimacies
of village life that most of all do interest the villager. The oft
repeated assertion that the daily newspaper is running out the weekly
is untrue.
If the village editor chooses to do so he may achieve a supremely
satisfying influence. He is the spokesman of the community, voicing
its sentiments, explaining its needs, defending its rights. He may
render it extreme service by appealing to outside interests in praise
of its enterprises, its attractions, its prosperity. He may assist
it immeasurably by helping to organize and sustain its protective
associations, its commercial leagues, its welfare organizations, study
clubs and charity circles. He may encourage community pride. If he
praises Deacon Stevenson for the beauty of his lawn and floral effects
the deacon’s neighbors are sure to make rival lawns. The editor may
urge to clean village morals as well as to clean streets and tidy door
yards. He may create public sentiment and ripen patriotic spirit and be
the moral and the intellectual force of the region. He may lead in all
things.
The village editor may make himself beloved by his people. His relation
to them is that of close intimacy. He may print the good things they
say, may reproduce their ideas as well as describe their doings. He
records the important events of their lives, the details of their
successes, the parts they take in public affairs.
He welcomes the babies as they are born and wishes them their full
share of all the good things this Jolly Old Earth has to give. He
joins in congratulations, felicitations and joyful vociferations to
bewildered brides and grinning bridegrooms. And when the hand of death
is laid, he reverently and tenderly recalls that the summons must
come to all sometime; and he sorrows and grieves with those on whom
affliction has fallen.
The city newspaper is heartless when domestic scandals or business
irregularities are under public consideration. It has no thought of
lessening personal sorrow. The country editor reasons something like
this: “I do not pretend to print all the news of this community. My
readers are all known to me and are personal friends. They help me
in my business. Why should I print stuff that will give them pain or
sorrow? I am under no obligation to print anything about anybody. My
newspaper is conducted as a business proposition. I am responsible
for what it says and it is not any one’s business what I print. I am
personally interested in community interests and I wish to advance them
always; but I do not care to mix in my people’s personal quarrels or
their domestic affairs unless community interests are involved. Why
should I? Some people seem to think that I should print everything
about everybody--except themselves. There is a certain element in every
community that rejoices in other people’s discomfiture and I do not
wish to cater to that feeling.”
Not only does every one in the community read the community paper,
but every young man and every young woman brought up there subscribe
for it when going to live elsewhere. It comes as an intimate letter
from the old home, and nothing can be too trivial or too unimportant
to interest them so long as it relates to somebody or something they
have known in the days of their youth--the bursting of the old dam, the
fall of the old chimney, the burning of the old academy, or of the old
mill, the marriages, the deaths, the activities of former playmates in
political, business or social life, anything pertaining to the old home
town, anything that recalls the scenes of childhood, the memories of
youth--all are of absorbing interest.
Not long ago the editor of the Fulton (N. Y.) _Patriot_ made a big
hit by getting a lot of the people who had moved away to write
reminiscences of their early life in Fulton. Almost all of the
writers were remembered by the home readers and the letters made much
talk. Every error was pounced on and letters of correction started
controversy. People involved in the talk were pleased. Members of the
human family like to see their names in the newspapers.
But the editor should have ambitions and missions far beyond mere
village gossip. The small towns of the Eastern states have become
centers in which endless varieties of manufactured goods are turned
out, and it is up to the editor to exploit every new thing connected
with the raw material and with the making and the marketing of the
product in which the community is interested. The middle-state towns
are given largely to manufacturing on a larger scale, to coal and coke
and oil industries, to steel, to the making of machinery. The editor
should furnish all possible information. The South with its cotton,
sugar, and tobacco is an especially interesting field for community
specializing.
But greater than these is that vast industry spreading from the
Atlantic to the Pacific in which one half of the nation’s population
is interested because dependent on it--agriculture. Now, of the sixteen
thousand weekly newspapers printed in the United States more than ten
thousand are published in rural communities--in villages where the
prosperity of doctors, lawyers, merchants, tradesmen, schools and
churches depends on the prosperity of the farmer. Nearly every farmer
takes a journal devoted to agriculture; but farming conditions vary
greatly in different regions, and the village editor who can furnish
real information to the farmer of his immediate neighborhood will
perform the most valuable sort of community service. The average man is
more interested in his business than in anything else. He delights to
read about it.
The editor’s greatest concern should be to serve the interests of his
parish. The people look to him for leadership and help. They want the
community exploited. They want their share of everything going. They
want the prices of their products kept up and their taxes kept down.
They want good roads, good schools, good markets, attractive churches.
And they appreciate an excellent newspaper. There are hundreds of
villages and hamlets, especially in the South and in the West, that are
far removed from any large city. Their inhabitants lose interest in the
doings of the great outside world, but their own needs are sensed with
no shallow understanding.
Village life throughout our country is taking on the attractions of
intellectual uplift and refinement that long have been the pride and
the boast of New England communities. The New England village, made
attractive by its imitation of the beautiful village of Old England,
has spread far across the continent. Poets and story tellers have
idealized its shady streets, gilded its church spires and praised its
intelligence with every felicity of language. It has its libraries, its
study clubs, its improvement associations, its lecture courses, its
high schools, its churches, its every facility for liberal education.
Usually there is a college close at hand.
It is something of a fad at the moment for our young writers of
novels to exaggerate the repulsive features of the American village,
to magnify its unpleasant aspects, to ignore its excellences. But
just as the measure of a man’s greatness should rest on his highest
achievements rather than on his lowest, so should the beauty of a
village be judged by its tidy lawns, its fragrant flower gardens, its
artistic vistas of shaded streets, instead of by its back yards, its
ash and garbage heaps, and its dumps for old tin cans. The degree of
its intelligence and refinement should include the people of education
and culture in the measurement as well as the louts, the clowns and the
vulgar ignorant.
The modern village has many of the essential advantages possessed by
the city: facilities for the development of intellectual life, for
study, for personal ease and comfort, for the enjoyment of social life.
You have a more wholesome existence; live a little nearer to nature;
your friendships are finer and more lasting. Your very environment
persuades to a greater appreciation of community comradeship.
Printing a newspaper here offers a fascinating and a fairly profitable
career to the young man just quitting his studies. Electricity and
gasoline have greatly increased the pleasures of village life, have
literally transformed rural regions by giving quick communication with
business and social and intellectual centers. Modern devices have
bereft life there of much of its old-time drudgery. The people are
wide awake. Their general intelligence is quite equal to the general
intelligence of city people.
Likewise, the newspapers are much improved. Modern printing machinery
and facilities have removed irksome processes. Editorial associations
and the technical newspaper press have inspired to higher ideals. The
business has become standardized on a higher plane of excellence. Many
of our high schools and almost all of our colleges have courses in
journalism. Their educational influences are reflected already in the
country newspapers, especially in the West. The state universities of
Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota, for instance, have sent hundreds of
young men back to their villages to do journalistic work. The leaven of
preparation is working wonders.
Moreover, success in village or small town journalism frequently
leads to success in big cities. The editors of big city newspapers
are overwhelmed with candidates for a place on the staff, but the
applicants usually are unknown beginners, and they are rejected. But
the village editor of real ability cannot hide his light; his good
work attracts attention. The managers of the great journals seek men
of superior quality and ask them to join the newspaper staff. Hundreds
of the finest editors in this country started or matured on our rural
newspapers. Good newspaper work, whether in city or country, attracts
attention and is sure of reward.
The village editor’s task is not easy. He writes almost all of the
edition and conducts the business end as well. His editorial page may
reflect his fancy for little or much comment, but he naturally will
have one article in each edition on a subject of national importance
and two or three relating to community interests. He will compile
from the daily sheets a column or two of the most important news of
the world and will clip from the exchanges interesting miscellaneous
matter, paragraphs and articles. He will encourage his readers to write
letters to the editor for publication, and these he will revise and
prepare. He will have a news correspondent in every neighboring hamlet,
and this news must be revised and made ready to print. His neighborhood
news is of vital importance for his villagers know almost all of the
inhabitants for miles around.
But his chief task is to be found in the collecting and writing of
so-called local news. The very life of his sheet depends on this
information. To gather it involves constant, painstaking toil. He has
to hunt for it, has to mingle with the people in the search for it.
The measure of his success as an editor may be found in his ability
to recognize what is news and what is not. This is an editorial
accomplishment that may be enriched by study and observation. Let him
seek to know what will interest his reader, what his constituents are
thinking about and especially what he can print that will set them to
talking. To make the paper interesting, to make it talked about, should
be his constant anxiety.
The mission of the village sheet is to amuse, to gossip, to reflect
community life rather than to educate. The editor lives in close
intimacy with his people and if he be wise he will assume the attitude
of making their interests his interests. He will make elaborately long
accounts of their public meetings, the social gatherings, the ball
games, the school contests, the things the people do. His constituents
may know of world-wide events from the city papers but they cannot
read about themselves anywhere else than in his paper. Thousands of
Americans never see their name in print except perchance in the village
newspaper and they are grateful, indeed, to see it there.
The village newspaper should not seek to imitate the city sheet. Its
editor should devote his energies to the rural needs and the rural
activities of his five thousand or ten thousand constituents. Let them
get their outside information from the city dailies or the periodical
press.
And our provincial editor’s acute temptation will be to imitate--to
make his sheet like his neighbor’s sheet. He will be tempted to save
time and study by stealing the thoughts of others. He wants a leading
editorial article. What so easy as to rewrite one from the columns of
a distant daily changing not the form of construction or the argument
or the conclusion--changing nothing but the wording. This is a common
practice of the lazy editor. I hope to be forgiven for so constantly
referring to it as a repressive influence, as a serious detriment to
the progress of American journalism. It easily becomes a habit. Its
practice is alluring for, if it produces a more thoughtful article than
the editor is capable of writing, the people praise it thus giving
to the editor the most subtle of all flattery, the flattery that is
undeserved, the flattery that attributes to a man something he does not
possess. The editor enjoys it overmuch.
The village editor usually is deep in local politics. Quite as much as
any one else does he help to name the town officers, the county rulers,
the man to the legislature, the congressman. Frequently, indeed, he is
called to these posts or to the higher honors of the State. He sits on
governing boards and he is a delegate to all sorts of conventions. He
is big in public affairs.
This kind of newspaper life is entirely different from that of the
city. It is a life that may be made exceedingly attractive and that
may be enjoyed to the uttermost because of its independence, its great
influence, its close intimacy with the people and its opportunities for
wholesome service. What the editor writes is read by everybody, the
children as well, and we all know how a child is influenced by what it
reads.
Some one has said of the village editor: “He comes pretty near being
the boss of the entire town.”