The New Reporting
Insurgent Mexico, by John Reed. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]
“Who is John Reed?”, asked the newspapers when, forgetting for the moment their name-worshipping arrogance, they discovered that the best reports from Mexico were coming, not from the veteran correspondents, but from an unknown. The answer is that John Reed is the only “correspondent” that the Mexican mix-up or the present European struggle has yet brought to light, who has a really new and individual method of reporting. These are not dogmatic, cock-sure, crisis-solving “articles” from the front, but simple, vivid reporting of scenes and actions that have some reason for being reported. And John Reed is about the only reporter who has shown us that the Mexican people have visions of a future. The newspapers and those whose duty it seems to be to uphold the old idea are now crying that Reed’s simple realism is too slight to be of value as history, and that he does not “get beneath the surface”—but these people have still to see which kind of reporting can endure as history.