NEWSPAPERING TO-DAY
Many newspaper readers have a mistaken impression that reporters wander
aimlessly around the city, gathering news wherever they chance to run
across it. It may surprise them to learn that during the entire twenty
years that I was city editor of the _Evening World_ I do not think
there was a half-dozen times when a reporter brought into the office a
news story that he wasn’t sent after.
It seldom happens that a reporter stumbles upon news by chance.
Gathering the news of a great city is a carefully thought-out and
systematized piece of human machinery that operates under the personal
supervision of the city editor. There are news centers like the
criminal and civil courts, the municipal offices, police headquarters
and precinct station houses, the important hotels, the theaters, and
the places where politicians congregate, where reporters are constantly
on the alert and are held responsible for the routine news that is
certain to turn up. There are reporters stationed on the water front
who board every passenger ship at quarantine and make frequent trips to
the customhouse and shipping offices.
The big news, that which commands attention and is conspicuously
displayed on the front page, is either the unexpected or news that is
obtained through the persistent investigation of reporters working
under the direction of the city editor.
The unexpected news, such as fires, murders, suicides, elopements, and
business failures, comes to a newspaper in a variety of ways, chiefly
through the police. Every one of the twelve thousand policemen in New
York is unconsciously a newspaper reporter. He must telephone to his
precinct station every happening that comes to his notice and from
there it is promptly transmitted to police headquarters. A bulletin
is then posted at headquarters for newspaper reporters to copy and
telephone to their city editors.
Within ten minutes after a murder is discovered in the most remote
section of the city, news of it should be on the desk of every city
editor. Nearly all of the criminal happenings, together with accidents
in the streets, the subways and on railroads, reach the newspaper
offices through the police. At headquarters, also, alarms are sounded
on a gong, within hearing of the reporters, and the location of all
fires is telephoned to the city editors almost simultaneously with the
sounding of the alarm and a city editor telephones to the district
reporter nearest to the point where the fire or other happening is
located, dispatching him to cover it and often calling upon reporters
in adjacent districts to assist.
Readers of the paper frequently call on the telephone to tell of
something they have witnessed. I have received in this way tips from
men in almost every station of life. A bank president has called up to
report a thrilling runaway in Fifth Avenue, a Federal Judge to tell of
a fatal automobile collision on Riverside Drive, a florist to tell of
the sudden death of a great financier, and one of the most prominent
corporation lawyers in lower Broadway once got me on the telephone to
report that he had just seen a man leap from the fifteenth story of a
skyscraper across from his office.
Most city editors have an extensive list of acquaintances who telephone
to him out of friendship whenever they see or hear anything they
think might be of interest. I recall the time Bob Davis, editor
of _Munsey’s Magazine_, got me on the telephone to tell of a
disastrous train collision in the tunnel at Grand Central railway
station, in which many were killed and many injured. He had been on the
train and as soon as he could crawl out of the wreck he hurried to the
nearest telephone to let me know what had happened. In five minutes
twenty of our best reporters were on their way to report the details of
the accident.
Although he is one of the highest salaried magazine editors in America,
I sent Bob a check for twenty-five dollars. I was told that instead
of cashing the check Bob had it framed and that it still hangs in his
office as a testimonial of the first honest money he had earned since
Frank Munsey gave him a twenty-five thousand dollar a year job editing
a magazine.
Some of the best and most reliable tips come from women, particularly
women in business and women telephone operators. It is customary to
compensate them for their trouble and once a tipster has received
a newspaper check for something that cost him but little time and
trouble, he is always on the alert for an opportunity to earn another.
I have frequently rewarded a telephone operator for a tip that took
not more than two minutes to transmit, with a check that was more than
twice her wages for a full week’s work.
Clerks in big law offices often betray secrets of their employers and
clients for what they can get from a newspaper for a tip, the newspaper
not knowing that the tipster is guilty of disloyalty. Some of these
chaps are shrewds and wary and will barter for the sale of information
until they frequently are paid far more than their tip is worth. It is
from rascally clerks of this character that most of the sensational
news about divorce suits and breach of promise cases leaks out. I have
often had a fifteen dollar a week stenographer in some law office
offer to let me read the papers in some sensational lawsuit long before
the papers were filed in court. For this privilege they asked all the
way from fifty dollars to a thousand dollars. Usually their prices were
subject to compromise.
Sometimes tips come in that are untrue, but these are easily exploded
by the investigation of experienced reporters. One of the most
persistent tips of this character I ever had to do with was connected
with the death of a multimillionaire with presidential aspirations.
I was driving past his home on Fifth Avenue the day he died and a
physician who had just come from his bedside stopped me to tell of
his patient’s death. He gave me all of the particulars of his illness
and I had no reason for doubting his veracity. Yet the following day
word came from more than a dozen sources that the millionaire had been
shot in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House by a jealous husband.
Investigation showed that it was untrue, but the rumor spread all over
the city and kept reaching me through tipsters long after the man was
in his grave.
A similar rumor was associated with the death of the president of
one of the great trust companies, who shot himself at his home a few
hours after the trust company closed its doors at the beginning of a
financial panic. I knew the man and what prompted self-destruction
but tipsters came hurrying to my office the following day to tell
that he had been slain by a popular actress. The scandalous rumor was
kept alive for a long time in all of the fashionable clubs and was
revived and magnified when the actress, whose name was linked with the
banker’s, killed herself in a southern city. I know as positively as
it is possible to know anything one is not an eyewitness to, that the
actress did not murder him.
Another tip that came to the office from a hundred different persons
and was told with more than ordinary circumstantial detail, was
connected with the alleged mysterious disappearance of a beautiful
society girl. The story ran that she was looking at laces in a Fifth
Avenue department store when a strange elderly woman spoke to her and
casually mentioned that she knew of some wonderful bargains in laces
that were to be found in a small shop that was run by Armenians in a
side street not far away. The woman offered to go with the society girl
and show her the place and they left the department store together. As
they reached the street they encountered the society girl’s fiancé.
She told him where she was going and hurried along, after making an
engagement to meet him for luncheon in an hour at a nearby restaurant.
The young man waited for her long after the appointed time and growing
uneasy, telephoned to her home and finding she wasn’t there went in
search of her in the side street where she told him the lace shop was
located. He found one that had an Armenian proprietor in a basement and
when he began questioning the Armenian he replied so evasively that the
young man ran into the street and summoned a policeman to aid him in
searching the shop. On returning with the officer the shop was locked
and the proprietor had disappeared. They broke into the shop and in a
back room found the society girl. Her clothing had been torn from her
and she had been so brutally treated that she was unconscious. They
took her to a hospital and when consciousness was restored she was
hopelessly insane.
I have told the story here almost word for word as it was told to
me many times by as many different persons. There was little or no
variation and it came from so many persons of apparent reliability
that I refused for a long time to accept the word of reporters that
investigated it that the entire story was a palpable fake. The only
fact they found in way of corroboration was a small lace shop run by an
Armenian in a basement on the side street that had been named, but the
Armenian was known in the neighborhood as a reputable merchant. He had
been there for years and so far as I know is still there.
Not satisfied with the investigations made by reporters, I personally
went to Police Commissioner Waldo, roused his interest by telling him
that a magistrate and many persons of equal prominence had come to
me with the story, all telling the details practically alike, and
the Commissioner was so much impressed that he ordered a thorough
investigation by the ablest detectives in the department. There is no
longer any doubt in my mind that it was a fake from beginning to end.
The only solution I could ever conjecture was that the story must have
been manufactured and industriously circulated by vindictive enemies of
the Armenian lace merchant to injure his business standing.
Another fake that was even more widely circulated and which came to me
day after day for weeks, was that a young girl had been found murdered
in the lavatory of a Brooklyn department store. So persistent was
this report that newspapers were accused of suppressing a horrible
crime because they were afraid of incurring the displeasure of a big
advertiser. Yet there wasn’t a word of truth in the story, or a single
fact on which to base it, other than the name of the department store.
If it had been true all of the advertisers combined could not have
prevented publication. Although some uninformed persons may think
differently, the silence of a New York newspaper is not purchasable at
any price, nor are newspapers like the _World_ ever intimidated
into withholding news by any of its advertising patrons. I have
known, however, of several instances where big advertisers withdrew
their advertisements because they were unable to bluff an editor into
suppressing some perfectly legitimate piece of news.
Another demonstration of what editor McCullagh meant when he said
“Journalism is the art of knowing where hell is going to break loose
next and having a reporter on the spot to cover it,” forcibly came to
me at the time Mayor Gaynor was shot on the deck of a steamship as he
was about to sail for Europe. Early in the morning of that day, I sent
a reporter to the Mayor’s home in Brooklyn, thinking to get a more
satisfactory interview than could be had amid the bustle and confusion
on a ship that is about to take her departure.
After the reporter telephoned the result of the interview, I directed
him to accompany the Mayor to his ship in Hoboken and to remain with
him until the ship sailed. I sent a man with a camera to meet him and
to get a photograph of the Mayor.
Reporter and photographer were aboard of the ship when one of the
most sensational news happenings of the year took place, a crazy
assassin shooting down the Mayor because of a fancied grievance he
had been brooding over. It so chanced that the shot was fired at the
very instant the photographer clicked his camera. The film showed
the wounded Mayor sinking into the arms of those closest to him. The
photographer turned his camera and clicked it again as “Big Bill”
Edwards grappled with the madman and hurled him to the deck. Within
an hour both pictures appeared on the front page of the _Evening
World_.
One very dull day, when there was a dearth of news, my telephone rang
and an excited voice reported that a big excursion steamer was ablaze
in the East River. The man said he could see men, women, and children
jumping overboard in a mad panic to escape from the flames. He hung up
before I could ask a question or obtain from him the location of the
burning steamboat. In a jiffy a half-dozen men were in telephone booths
calling up points along the river for verification of what the man had
reported and as soon as the boat was located twenty of our reporters
were hurrying to the scene of disaster. I never witnessed more splendid
team work.
The steamer was the _General Slocum_, crowded far beyond her legal
capacity with Sunday school children and their parents. Survivors were
dragged by reporters from the water and rushed down to the _World_
building to tell their stories of what happened, the reporters
scurrying back after additional news. The boat was still burning and
rescuers were combing the waters about her for survivors when our
extra appeared on the street. Another extra was issued soon afterward
and within an hour was followed by another, the story having grown
into four full pages of the newspapers, with a dozen or more graphic
illustrations.
I recall that Harry Stowe, one of the most reliable reporters on the
staff, anxiously inquired of me over the telephone what estimate we
were printing of the loss of life and when I replied that our figures
indicated that between three and four hundred were believed to have
perished, he excitedly declared that there were not less than a
thousand. I cautioned him against exaggeration and didn’t change our
estimate. The actual loss of life was even greater than the estimate
given by Stowe.
On another dull day all of us were suddenly startled by a series of
terrifying explosions that jarred the _World_ building to the
foundation. We heard the crashing of glass in buildings all around us
and from the windows saw crowds rushing wildly through the streets. The
noise was like a bombardment.
Instantly a dozen telephones were active, our men calling in every
direction to locate the explosion. Calls came in from all over the
city and suburban surroundings from excited ones who wanted to know
what had happened. All that our men could learn was that the explosion
was across the river in Jersey. We directed all our energies then to
calling up points over there, but no one appeared to know where it was
located and the only information obtainable was that the damage was
widespread. A score of reporters hurried across the river on a blind
hunt.
Nearly an hour went by and we were still groping for information,
though every second of the time we kept the telephones in operation.
Such a condition had never confronted us before and all of us grew
wildly impatient with our impotence.
Don Seitz, the publisher, who had heard the explosions and the crashing
of glass and who had been importuned by telephone inquiries, tore into
the editorial rooms and angrily demanded an explanation of why plates
for an extra hadn’t reached the pressmen. I attempted to explain but
it was of no use. He didn’t want explanations, he wanted an extra.
Publishers get that way when they know something has happened that the
public is eager to read about and the presses are not in action.
Then came the news we had been straining our nerves to get. Irving Cobb
was one of our staff who had gone out of the office soon after the
explosion almost shook us from our chairs and had located it after a
wild chase in an automobile. The account he gave over the telephone
wire of what had happened when the dynamite dock blew up was far more
complete and comprehensive than I read in any of our contemporaries.
The remainder of the story, the damage in the financial district, the
havoc in the harbor and the effect in all of the nearby towns in New
Jersey and on Staten Island, was in the office and most of it in type
before we located the spot where it happened and what had caused it.
Our extra was on the street ahead of any of the others and that night
the publisher slept the sleep of the just and the righteous.
It was “having a reporter on the spot when hell broke loose” on the
Atlantic Ocean that gave the _Evening World_ one of the largest
news beats it ever had. Some will call it luck, but here is the way it
happened: A few days before the _Titanic_ crashed into an iceberg
and dragged to the bottom so many brave men and women, a reporter for
Mr. Pulitzer’s paper in St. Louis, the _Post-Dispatch_, called to
see me. He was taking a vacation and was to sail the next morning for
Italy. I was so busy that I could spare but a few minutes to chat with
him, long enough, however, for me to learn that he was to go on the
_Carpathia_ of the Cunard Line, a bit of information that proved
valuable in a time of pressing necessity that was soon to come.
When news of the _Titanic_ disaster was flashed into our office
one morning and with it the information that the _Carpathia_ had
come to the rescue and was picking up survivors from lifeboats and
rafts, I instantly thought of the _Post-Dispatch_ reporter and
sent him a wireless to prepare a complete story and I would meet the
_Carpathia_ with a tugboat off Sandy Hook.
Before sunrise the following morning several of the _Evening
World’s_ reporters accompanied me to Sandy Hook on the fastest tug
in the harbor and we sat all day in the tower of the wireless station
waiting for the _Carpathia_ to show up. It was night when she
entered Ambrose Channel. Our tug steamed alongside and when we shouted
through a megaphone for the _Post-Dispatch_ man, he leaned far out
over the rail from an upper deck and dropped a bundle of manuscript,
tied to a life preserver, into my outstretched arms. There was a dozen
columns of a brilliantly told story with all of the thrilling details
of heroism, of wives refusing to separate from husbands who were denied
a place in the lifeboats, of brave men who perished that women and
children might be saved, of the _Titanic’s_ commander who swam to
a lifeboat with a child in his arms and deliberately swam away to a
grave beneath the sea.
The tugboat nearly burst her boilers racing at full speed to the
Battery that we might get to the office with our story and issue an
extra that all New York was feverishly waiting for. Newsboys were
crying the extras throughout the city before the _Carpathia_ was
at her dock.
Besides giving the _Evening World_ a splendid beat over all of
its rivals, the story the _Post-Dispatch_ man brought enabled the
_Morning World_ to have a complete account in the edition that
goes to other cities, while the other morning papers were many hours
in gathering a comparatively fragmentary story from survivors and crew
after the _Carpathia_ had been docked.
Ralph Pulitzer, who inherited a spirit of liberality toward his
employees from his father, presented the _Post-Dispatch_ man with
a thousand dollars in cash that night and authorized him to double the
time allotted for his vacation abroad. For the little I did towards
securing the beat, he rewarded me almost as generously.
The Pulitzers have always been magnanimous toward men who work for
them. Perhaps it is one of the reasons of their phenomenal success. The
great genius who made the _World_ seldom let a week go by without
distributing benefits among those he thought deserving of special
generosity. Every man who by luck or industry scored an important
beat or turned in an unusually well-written story, sometimes simply a
striking headline, was almost certain to receive a substantial check
from the proprietor.
Mr. Pulitzer loved his profession, loved his newspaper, and loved his
men. He was a bigger man in all that goes to make up a man who is
truly great, than any other man I ever knew. Humanity lost a scholarly
teacher and devoted friend when death stilled his activities.
Once when he was at a health resort in the south of France, a secretary
brought in a bundle of newspapers to be read to the blind publisher.
There was an accumulation of copies of all of his publications for
several weeks, for he had been traveling so fast over Europe that the
mails from New York hadn’t overtaken him. The various editions of
the _World_ were gone carefully over and he then asked for the
_Post-Dispatch_, on which he first achieved fame and laid the
foundation for his fortune. Sam Williams started to read and stumbled
so confusedly that the blind man grew irritable and angrily asked what
ailed him, for he was always impatient of anything he construed as
indifference.
“The damned paper is so rottenly printed it is almost unreadable,” Sam
explained. “The type is bad, the ink is pale and dauby, the quality of
the paper is inferior and the presswork is worse than the rest.”
“Dear me, is it really so bad as all that,” replied Mr. Pulitzer. “From
the way you describe it I think they must have substituted shoe pegs
for type and tar for ink. Send a cable to Chapin to go out and take
charge for a month and put it in shape.”
Then he summoned Dunningham, his valet, to prepare him for a nap.
Almost before he awakened from it I was on my way to St. Louis. I
remained there six weeks, making such editorial changes as I thought
were necessary and causing the business manager no end of anxiety by
getting rid of all of the old type and ordering for immediate delivery
an entirely new outfit. I did other things that I believed were for the
good of the paper and ended my stay by engaging Horatio Seymour to take
editorial control.
The last day I was in St. Louis a dispatch came from Chicago,
announcing the suspension of the _Chronicle_ of that city.
Mr. Seymour, who was editor of the Chicago _Herald_ when
I was its city editor, had become editor and publisher of the
_Chronicle_, backed by John R. Walsh, a banker, who had formerly
owned the _Herald_. Walsh had just been sent to prison for a
swindle involving many millions and his downfall had wrecked the
_Chronicle_. I located Mr. Seymour amid the ruins by long-distance
telephone and made an engagement to meet him in Chicago the next
morning.
In the disconsolate mess I found him in it didn’t require
much persuasion to induce him to accept the editorship of the
_Post-Dispatch_ at a liberal salary and with a contract that
insured permanency. He got a good job that will endure as long as he
wishes it to and Mr. Pulitzer gained one of the brainiest editorial men
that American journalism has produced.
After we had arranged the details I left for New York, caught a severe
cold in the sleeper and was sick abed when my employer returned from
Europe, a few days later. As was his custom when he got back from an
extended trip, Mr. Pulitzer had a bundle of papers brought to his home
and read to him. On opening the _Post-Dispatch_ the secretary
commented on its improved appearance. Mr. Pulitzer had the paper fully
described and was told that I had bought entirely new type.
“Who authorized him to do that?” asked the Chief.
“He did it of his own initiative. Chapin does things and gets his
authority for what he does afterward.”
“Call up Shaw and tell him to increase Chapin’s salary five hundred a
year.”
Then he got me on the telephone at my home and said so many nice things
that I got well in spite of the doctor.
When Mr. Shaw, treasurer of the _World_, informed me of the
increase, he suggested that I write a note of acknowledgment to Mr.
Pulitzer, who had gone to his summer home in Bar Harbor. I did so,
thanking him for his generosity and adding, “I can wish myself no
better luck than to be permitted to continue in your service as long as
I work for anyone.”
The return mail brought this from his confidential man of business:
“The Chief was so much pleased with your letter that he has wired to
Shaw to double the increase.”
Lucky is he who has such a man for his employer.