What is the Nature of the Work in Journalism?
The main purpose of a newspaper is to give the day’s news. Another purpose is that of making the meaning of this news clear to the readers. Moreover, newspapers often furnish their readers with advice and with useful information as well as with entertaining reading. There was a time when the purpose of a paper was thought to be that of simply stating conditions as they are. At the present there is a rapidly growing tendency to use the newspaper to state conditions as they should be. A newspaper that tells what to do to make things better plays a great part in making democracy safe.
In any large newspaper plant there are three main divisions—the business office, whose duty it is to make the paper pay; the plant that must see to the actual printing of the paper; and the editorial department, which prepares all of the reading matter except the advertisements. It is with the editorial department that the term “journalism” is connected, and it is with the work of that department that this pamphlet deals.
There are two classes of reading matter in a newspaper, the news and the editorial comment, each class of material being prepared by a different force of writers. The editor in chief is at the head of the editorial staff, and since editorials consist of opinions rather than of bare statements of new facts, he holds the most important position on the paper. He is helped by men who are very well informed about all matters that are of interest to the public. The number of these helpers is from one to a dozen, according to the size of the city paper.
The managing editor looks after gathering and reporting news. His department is made up of several parts, each one in charge of an editor. The news editor looks after all out-of-town news, that is, all news from other countries or from this country outside of a distance 75 miles from the city of the newspaper. The telegraph editor looks over “copy” sent in by outside reporters and decides what is good and what is poor. The Sunday editor gets up the pictures and other “features” and special articles outside of strictly news articles. The art editor decides upon the pictures to be used and the method of making those pictures. The cable editor prepares the foreign news by filling in cable messages and making long articles out of them. The city editor hires and directs reporters on city work and on work outside the city but within a distance of seventy-five miles, having sometimes as many as seventy-five helpers within the city, and as many as that outside called local correspondents. The sporting editor looks after news of sports and has an assistant for each kind of sport. The night city editor covers late news, being in charge after 6 p. m. to receive copy brought in by reporters previously assigned to their duty by the city editor. The night editor is in charge of the “make up” of the paper and the getting of the paper to press. Most newspapers also have other editors called department editors for such departments as music, drama, society, finance, literary criticism, railroads, real estate, and stock markets. The department editors gather as much of their news as possible by themselves. Their work differs from that of other editors in that their copy goes directly to the printer and is not first looked over and corrected by the city editor.
The life of a newspaper man is not an easy life. A study[11] of newspaper work in Boston sums up the hardships and difficulties in the life of a reporter in the following way:
[11] Vocational Studies, Journalism, P. 11. School Ed., Teachers’ Auxiliary, No. 16, Collins Publicity Service, Philadelphia, Pa.
“The hours are long and irregular. On a morning paper they run from 1 in the afternoon until midnight, usually with an occasional evening off. But the free evenings can never be counted on in advance; they come only when the news happens to be slack. On the afternoon papers the hours are almost as bad, for, while they are only supposed to be from half-past 8 or 9 to 5, an assignment will very often come in at the last minute that will keep the reporter out until midnight. This means little or no freedom.
“The irregular hours also affect the meals. An assignment often takes the reporter out into the suburbs for hours at a stretch, where there are no restaurants, and where one can only work as fast as possible in order to get back to town. It means all kinds of weather, too, for suicides and elopements will occur, be it fair day or foul, in houses several miles from the nearest car track, and they have to be looked up at once. A long, hard trip, like this, is not only an every day matter, but it means no extra pay.”
The desk man or editor, while freed from the hardships of travel, has other difficulties to overcome. These difficulties are set forth in the following further quotation from the same report:
“As the time for going to press approaches, the copy pours in faster and faster, the composing room signals that the paper is already overset and yet perhaps, now, at the last minute, an item of first importance in the whole day’s events comes in, and room must be made for it. In the midst of all this clamor the desk man must keep his head, racing through the piles of copy, weighing its merits discriminately and giving as cool and careful decision as though he had all the leisure and quiet in the world.”