The speakers at a public banquet may drone on for an hour or so without saying anything or giving utterance to a sentence worth reporting and then something of supreme importance may be said. The good reporter recognizes its worth instantly; the poor one does not.
Colonel William Rockhill Nelson, who won fame as editor of the Kansas City Star, had this to say in an address to the students of a School of Journalism:
There is just one point I wish to emphasize to the young men who are expecting to engage in newspaper work. That is, that the reporter is the essential man on the newspaper. He is the big toad in the puddle.
Young fellows looking forward to a newspaper career often have in mind an editorship of some sort. They want to guide and instruct public opinion. The trouble is that the public doesn’t yearn to have its opinion guided and instructed. It wants to get the news and be entertained.
Consider who are making the real newspapers and magazines to-day. Not the grave and learned publicist who is giving advice on the state of the Nation from the seclusion of some hole in the wall; not the recluse with a bunch of academic theories.
It is the reporter with the nose for news. He is the only fellow who has any business around newspapers or magazines. In general his job is not to produce literature, but to do reporting.
Often a good pair of legs makes a good reporter. The newspaper man must always be on the job, always hustling, always ready to go to any inconvenience or suffer any fatigue to get the news. And above all, so far as routine reporting goes, he must be honest and accurate.
Charles Dickens, who was a reporter before he became a writer of novels, says of some of his experiences:
I have often transcribed for the printer, from shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.
The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which we “took” as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the country and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket handkerchief over my notebook after the fashion of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.
I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep—kept in waiting, say, until the Woolsack might want restuffing.
Returning home from political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated in miry by-roads, toward the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.
Of the reporter’s familiarity with limitless phases of life it has been said:
The reporter of to-day has to be courageous, sharp as a hawk, mentally untiring, physically enduring. He comes in contact with everybody from monarchs to beggars, from noblemen to nobodies. He sees the tragedy and the comedy of human life, its cynicism and toadyism, its patient struggling and feverish ambition, its sham and subterfuge, its lavish wealth and deepest poverty, its good deeds and most hideous crime.
Mr. H. G. Wells says of writers that “they meet philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, and the great.”
As illustrating the high place a man may make for himself while writing for the news department of a newspaper, let us quote from an editorial article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Of Saxon stock though of Irish birth, a Royal scholarship graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, William Crooke, for forty years of the New York Sun’s staff as a news writer and nearly all that period in charge of the Sun’s Brooklyn news, came to be known to every police and fire department official, to most of the clergymen and all the big politicians of either party in old Brooklyn as “Billy Crooke”; always respectfully and often affectionately regarded, trusted by every one because he never betrayed a confidence and never misrepresented any communication or interview.
Mr. Crooke, qualified by high education for the writing that analyzes and illuminates the world’s happenings, and a keen incisive stylist in his reporting work, was satisfied to be a reporter. He felt to the full the dignity of what he was doing; he realized that it is news that makes a newspaper, not features and not comment. He was a newspaper-maker in the best sense. Kindliness, dry humor, accurate observation, integrity, and dignity made “Billy” what he was.