Demand for the literature of business has made startling changes in the newspapers of to-day, affecting daily sheets as well as all journalism. Ten times as much space is given to market reports as was used forty years ago. Business news is lavishly exploited. It was little noticed in the old days.
It is a business age. The educational impulse of school and college is in the direction of business education rather than classical or general education. Technical schools are much more popular. Business schools are conducted by large corporations, by banks, by chambers of commerce. Banks, insurance companies, the railroad organizations, and big business concerns maintain statistical and information departments and publish pamphlets and periodical literature. Men competent to produce information are in demand and those of newspaper experience are preferred.
Publishers are putting out an avalanche of books on every phase of business. The demand for books of reference, books of the practical, in our libraries is overwhelming. Reports of the New York Public Library attest that seekers after books of technical information are numbered by hundreds of thousands.
Nearly all of the men who are furnishing this greatly increased volume of business information have had daily newspaper office experience. In looking through the lists of technical journals printed in New York I see the names of dozens of men as their editors whom I recognize as former daily newspaper men. They now have permanent and responsible posts at reasonably remunerative salaries. The work is not so continuously exacting as that required in the minor places in the newspaper. The hours of toil are shorter, are in the middle of the day, and are omitted on holidays and Sundays. These are important considerations to the man who elects to live by writing information.
CHAPTER VIII
THE VILLAGE NEWSPAPER’S IMPORTANT PLACE IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM
The young man about to start on a journalistic career should give long thought to the village newspaper. Our schools of journalism are graduating thousands of boys who intend to be editors. A few of them only can be taken on the big newspapers for their staffs are full to overflowing always. It is difficult, indeed, for a young man to get a place on a big city newspaper and the prizes are few if he does get it. Let us see what the small town newspaper offers.
In the big cities nearly all writers are employees. The managing editor is employed to direct the staff and to carry out the owners’ policies. Editorial writers are employed to write. They have no pecuniary interest in the property. In small cities the editors are part owners frequently; in the villages they are the full owners almost always.
For the so-called great newspaper the staff writes to order. The subjects are assigned and the treatment is indicated by the editor. The policy of the sheet toward the important questions of the day is understood and respected by all. Independence of thought is not supposed or permitted to disport itself from that policy. All articles are closely revised by some one else after the writer has finished with them. They are made to conform to established policy, precedent and practice. This tends to routine treatment rather than to bursts of originality. It influences to dull writing. The knowledge that his work is to be revised is repressive rather than stimulating to the writer. If changes in his article are frequent he chafes and frets, imagines that injustice is being done to him, gets discouraged and unhappy.