II
Events put a check on my runaway ambition in forty-eight hours. The head of the biggest clothing house, and the largest advertiser in the city, called on me. I received him magnificently in my new office, motioning him to take a chair. I can see him yet—stout, prosperous, and to the point. As he talked, he toyed with a great seal that hung from a huge hawser-like watch-chain.
“Say,” said he, refusing my chair, “just keep out a little item you may get hold of to-day.” His manner was the same with me as with a salesman in his “gents’” underclothing department.
“Concerning?” I asked pleasantly.
“Oh, there’s a friend of mine got arrested to-day. Some farmer had him took in for fraud or something. He’ll make good, I guess; I know, in fact. He ain’t a bad fellow, and it would hurt him if this got printed.”
I asked him for particulars; saw a reporter who had the story; learned that the man was a sharp-dealer with a bad reputation, who had been detected in an attempt to cheat a poor farmer out of $260—a bare-faced fraud indeed. I learned that the man had long been suspected by public opinion of semi-legal attempts to rob the “widow and the orphan,” and that at last there was a chance of “showing him up.” I went back with a bold face.
“I find, though the case has not been tried, that the man is undoubtedly guilty.”
“Guilty?” said my advertiser. “What of that? He’ll settle.”
“That hardly lessens the guilt.” I smiled.
The clothing man looked astounded. “But if you print that he’ll be ruined,” he sputtered.
“From all I can learn, so much the better,” I answered.
Then my man swore. “See here,” he said, when he got back to written language. “He’s just making his living; you ain’t got no right to stop a man’s earning his living. It ain’t none of any newspaper’s business. Just a private affair between him and the farmer, and he’ll settle.”
“I don’t see how,” I put in somewhat warmly, “it isn’t the business of a newspaper to tell its public of a dangerous man, arrested for fraud, caught in his own net so badly that he is willing to settle, as you claim. It is my obvious duty to my constituents to print such a case. From the news point of view—” I was going on smoothly, but he stepped up and shook his fist in my face.
“Constituents? Ain’t I a constituent? Don’t I pay your newspaper for more advertising than any one else? Ain’t I your biggest constituent? Say, young man, you’re too big for this town. Don’t try to bully me!” he suddenly screamed. “Don’t you dare bully me! Don’t you dare try it. I see what you want. You’re trying to blackmail me, you are; you’re trying to work me for more advertising; you want money out of me. That game don’t go; not with me it don’t. I’ll have you arrested.”
And he talked as though he believed it!
Then he said he’d never pay me another cent, might all manner of things happen to his soul if he did. He’d go to the Bulletin, and double his space. The man was his friend, and he had asked but a reasonable request, and I had tried to blackmail him. He worked that blackmail in every other sentence. Then he strode out, slamming the door.
The “little item” was not printed in the Herald (nor in the Bulletin, more used to such requests), and, as he had said, he was my biggest advertiser. It was my first experience with the advertiser with a request: for this reason I have given the incident fully. It recurred every week. I grew to think little of it soon. “Think of how his children will feel,” say the friends of some one temporarily lodged in the police station. “Think of what the children of some one this man will swindle next will say,” is what I might answer. But I don’t,—not if an advertiser requests otherwise. As I have grown to phrase the matter, a newspaper is a contrivance which meets its pay-roll by selling space to advertisers: render it therefore agreeable to those who make its existence possible. Less jesuitically it may be put—the ultimate editor of a small newspaper is the advertiser, the biggest advertiser is the politician. This is a maxim that experience has ground with its heel into the fabric of my soul.
We all remember Emerson’s brilliantly un-New-England advice, “Hitch your wagon to a star.” This saying is of no value to newspapers, for they find stars poor motive power. Theoretically, it must be granted that newspapers, of all business ventures, should properly be hitched to a star. Yet I have found that, if any hitching is to be done, it must be to the successful politician. Amending Mr. Emerson, I have found it the best rule to “yoke your newspaper to the politician in power.”
This, then, is what a small newspaper does: sells its space to the advertiser, its policy to the politician. It is smooth sailing save when these two forces conflict, and then Scylla and Charybdis were joys to the heart. Let us look into the advertiser part of the business a bit more closely.
The advertiser seeks the large circulation. The biggest advertiser seeks the cheapest people. Thus is a small newspaper (the shoe will pinch the feet of the great as well) forced, in order to survive, to pander to the Most Low. The man of culture does not buy $4.99 overcoats, the woman of culture 27–cent slippers. The newspaper must see that it reaches those who do. This is one of the saddest matters in the whole business. The Herald started with a circulation slightly over 2,000. I found that my town was near enough to two big cities for the papers published there to enter my field. I could not hope to rival their telegraphic features, and I soon saw that, if the Herald was to succeed, it must pay strict attention to local news. My rival stole its telegraphic news bodily; I paid for a service. The people seemed to care little for attempted assassinations of the Shah, but they were intensely interested in pinochle parties in the seventh ward. I gave them pinochle parties. Still my circulation diminished. My rival regained all that I had taken from him at the start. I wondered why, and compared the papers. I “set” more matter than he. The great difference was that my headlines were smaller and my editorial page larger than his. Besides, his tone was much lower: he printed rumor, made news to deny it—did a thousand and one things that kept his paper “breezy.”
I put in bigger headlines—outdid him, in fact. I almost abolished my editorial page, making of it an attempt to amuse, not to instruct. I printed every little personality, every rumor that my staff could get hold of in their tours. The result came slowly, but surely. Success came when I exaggerated every little petty scandal, every row in a church choir, every hint of a disturbance. I compromised four libel suits, and ran my circulation up to 3,200 in eleven months.
Then I formed some more conclusions. I evolved a newspaper law out of the matter and the experience of some brothers in the craft in small cities near by. Briefly, I stated it in this wise: The worse a paper is, the more influence it has. To gain influence, be wholly bad.
This is no paradox, nor does it reflect particularly upon the public. There is reason for it in plenty. Take the ably edited paper, which glories in its editorial page, in the clean exposition of an honest policy, in high ideas put in good English, and you will find a paper which has a small clientele in a provincial town; or, if it has readers, it will have small influence. Say that it strikes the reader at breakfast, and the person who has leisure to breakfast is the person who has time for editorials, and the expression of that paper’s opinion is carefully read. Should these opinions square with the preconceived ideas of the reader, the editorials are “great”; if not, they are “rotten.” In other words, the man who reads carefully written editorials is the man whose opinion is formed—the man of culture, and therefore of prejudice. Doubtless he is as well acquainted with conditions as the writer; perhaps better acquainted. When a man does have opinions in a small city, he is quite likely to have strong ones. A flitting editorial is not the thing to change them. On the other hand, the man who has little time to read editorials, or perhaps little inclination, is just the man who might be influenced by them if read. Hence well-written editorials on a small daily are wasted thunder in great part, an uneconomic expenditure of force.
When local politics are at fever-heat, a different aspect of affairs is often seen: editorials are generally read, not so much as expressions of opinion, but as party attack and defense. During periods of political quiet the aim of most editorial pages is to amuse or divert. The advertiser has noted the decadence of the editorial page, and as a general thing makes a violent protest if the crying of his wares is made to emanate from this poor, despised portion of the paper. An advertisement on a local page is worth much more, and he pays more for the privilege.
So I learned another lesson. I shifted, as my successful contemporaries have done, my centre of editorial gravity from its former high position to my first and local pages. I now editorialize by suggestion. News now carries its own moral, the bias I wish it to show. This requires no less skill than the writing of editorials, and, greatly as I deplore it, I find the results pleasing. Does the Herald wish to denounce a public official? Into a dozen articles is the venom inserted. Slyly, subtly, and ofttimes openly do news articles point the obvious moral. The “Acqua Tofana” of journalism is ready to be used when occasion demands, and this is very often. Innuendo is common, the stiletto is inserted quietly and without warning, and tactics a man would shun may be used by a newspaper with little or no adverse comment. I mastered the philosophy of the indirect. I gained my ends by carefully coloring my news to the ends and policies of the paper. Nor am I altogether to blame. My paper was supposed to have influence. When I wrote careful and patient editorials, it had none. I saw that the public mind must be enfiladed, ambushed, and I adopted those primary American tactics of Indian warfare: shot from behind tree trunks, spared not the slain, and from the covert of a news item sent out screeching savages upon the unsuspecting public. Editorial warfare as conducted fifty years ago is obsolete; its methods are as antiquated to-day as is the artillery of that age.