I
Eulogies and laudatory paragraphs, alternating with sneers, ridicule, and deprecations, long have been the lot of the country editor. Pictured in the comic papers as an egotistic clown, exalted by the politicians as a mighty “moulder of public opinion,” occasionally chastised by angry patrons, and sometimes remembered by delighted subscribers, he has put his errors where they could be read of all men and has modestly sought a fair credit for his merits.
At times he has rebelled—not at treatment from his constituency but at patronizing remarks of the city journalist who sits at a mahogany desk and dictates able articles for the eighteen-page daily, instead of writing local items at a pine table in the office of a four-page weekly. Thus did one voice his protest: “When you consider that the country weekly is owned by its editor and that the man who writes the funny things about country papers in the city journals is owned by the corporation for which he writes, it doesn’t seem so sad. When you see an item in the city papers poking fun at the country editor for printing news about John Jones’ new barn, you laugh and laugh—for you know that on one of the pages of that same city daily is a two-column story in regard to the trimmings on the gowns of the Duchess of Wheelbarrow. And it is all the more amusing because you know the duchess does not even know of the existence of the aforesaid city paper, while John Jones and many of his neighbors take and pay for the paper which mentioned his new barn. Don’t waste your pity on the country newspaper worker. He will get along.”
Little money is needed to start a country paper. There are those who claim that it does not require any money,—that it can be done on nerve alone,—and they produce evidence to support the statement. True, some of the editors who have the least money and the poorest plants are most successful in their efforts to live up to the conception developed by the professional humorist; but it is not fair to judge the country editor by these—any more than it would be fair to judge the workers on the great city dailies by the publishers of back-street fake sheets that exist merely to rob advertisers; or to judge the editors of reputable magazines by the promoters of nauseous monthlies whose stock in trade is a weird and sickening collection of mail-order bargains and quack medicine advertisements.
The country editor of to-day is far removed from his prototype of two or three decades ago. It would be strange if an age that gives to the farmer his improved self-binder, to the physician his X-ray machine, and to the merchant his loose-leaf ledger, had done nothing for the town’s best medium of publicity. The perfection of stereotype plate manufacture by which a page of telegraph news may be delivered ready for printing at a cost of approximately twenty cents a column, and the elaboration of the “ready print,” or “patent inside,” by which half the paper is printed before delivery, yet at practically no expense over the unprinted sheets, have been the two great labor-savers for the country editor. Thereby he is relieved, if he desire, of the tedious and expensive task of setting much type in order to give the world’s general news, and the miscellaneous matter that “fills up” the paper. His energies then may be devoted to reporting the happenings of his locality and to giving his opinions on public affairs. By his doing of these, and by his relations toward the public interests, is he to be judged.
After all, no one man in the community has so large an opportunity to assist the town in advancement as the editor. It is not because he is smarter than others, not because he is wealthy—but because he is the spokesman to the outside world.
He is eager to print all the news in his own paper. Does he do it? Hardly. “This would be a very newsy paper,” explained a frank country editor to his subscribers, “were it not for the fact that each of the four men who work on it has many friends. By the time all the items that might injure some of their friends are omitted, very little is left.”
“I wish you would print a piece about our schoolteacher,” said a farmer’s wife to me one afternoon. “Say that she is the best teacher in the county.”
“But I can’t do that—two hundred other teachers would be angry. You write the piece, sign it, and I’ll print it.”
“What are you running a newspaper for if you can’t please your subscribers?” she demanded—and canceled her subscription.
So the country editor leaves out certain good things and certain bad things for the very simple reason that the persons most interested are close at hand and can find the individual responsible for the statements. He becomes wise in his generation and avoids chastisements and libel suits. He finds that there is no lasting regard in a sneer, no satisfaction in gratifying the impulse to say things that bring tears to women’s eyes, nothing to gloat over in opening a wound in a man’s heart. If he does not learn this as he grows older in the service, he is a poor country editor.
His relations to his subscribers are intimate. There is little mystery possible about the making of the paper; it is as if he stood in the market-place and told his story. Of course, the demands upon him are many and some of them preposterous. Men with grafts seek to use the paper, people with schemes ask free publicity. The country editor is criticised for charging for certain items that no city paper prints free. The churches and lodges want free notices of entertainments by which they hope to make money; semi-public entertainments prepared under the management of a traveling promoter ask free advertising “for the good of the cause.” Usually they get it, and when the promoter passes on, the editor is found to be the only one in town who received nothing for his labor.
It is characteristic of the country town to engage in community quarrels. These absorb the attention of the citizens, and feeling becomes bitter. The cause may be trifling: the location of a schoolhouse, the building of a bridge, the selection of a justice of the peace, or some similar matter, is enough. To the newspaper office hurry the partisans, asking for ex parte reports of the conditions. One leader is, perhaps, a liberal advertiser; to offend him means loss of business. Another is a personal friend; to anger him means the loss of friendship. The editor of the only paper in the town must be a diplomat if he is to guide safely through the channel. In former times he tried to please both sides and succeeded in making enemies of every one interested. Now the well-equipped editor takes the position that he is a business man like the others, that he has rights as do they, and he states the facts as he sees them, regardless of partisanship, letting the public do the rest. If there be another paper in town, the problem is easy, for the other faction also has an “organ.”
Out of the public’s disagreement may come a newspaper quarrel—though this is a much rarer thing than formerly. The old-time country newspaper abuse of “our loathed but esteemed contemporary” is passing away, it being understood that such a quarrel, with personalities entangled in the recriminations, is both undignified and ungentlemanly. “But people will read it,” says the man who by gossip encourages these attacks. So will people listen to a coarse street controversy carried on in a loud and angry tone,—but little is their respect for the principals engaged. Country editors of the better class now treat other editors as gentlemen, and the paper that stoops to personal attacks is seldom found. Many a town has gone for years without other than kindly mention in any paper of the editors of the other papers, and in such towns you will generally find peace and courtesy among the citizens.
Of course, there are politics and political arguments, but few are the editors so lacking in the instincts of a gentleman as to bring into these the opposing editor’s personal and family affairs. It has come to be understood that such action is a reflection on the one who does it, not on the object of his attack. This is another way of saying that more real gentlemen are running country newspapers to-day than ever before. This broadening of character has broadened influence. The country paper is effecting greater things in legislation than the county conventions are.
“The power of the country press in Washington surprises me,” said a Middle West congressman last winter. “During my two terms I have been impressed with it constantly. I doubt if there is a single calm utterance in any paper in the United States that does not carry some weight in Washington among the members of Congress. You might think that what some little country editor says does not amount to anything, but it means a great deal more than most people realize. When the country editor, who is looking after nothing but the county printing, gives expression to some rational idea about a national question, the man off here in Congress knows that it comes from the grass-roots. The lobby, the big railroad lawyers, and that class of people, realize the power of the press, but they hate it. I have heard them talk about it and shake their heads and say, ‘Too much power there!’ The press is more powerful than money.”
This was not said in flattery, but because he had seen on congressmen’s desks the heaps of country weeklies, and he knew how closely they were read. The smallest editorial paragraph tells the politician of the condition in that paper’s community, for he knows that it is put there because the editor has gathered the idea from some one whom he trusts as a leader—and the politician knows approximately who that leader is. So the country editor often exerts a power of which he knows little.