“Is that ‘straight’?” asked Cumnock. “No favourites? No suppressions? No exploitations?”
“‘Straight’—‘dead straight’! And if I were you I’d make this particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If anybody”—with stress upon the anybody—“comes to you about this, send him to me.”
Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.
“We look too dull,” King began when Howard asked him if he had any changes to suggest. “We need more and bigger headlines, and we need pictures.”
“That is it!” Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in perfect accord. “But we must not have pictures unless we can have the best. Just at present we can’t increase expenses by any great amount. What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger headlines and plenty of leads?”
“I’m sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”
“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that phrase—‘our class of readers’—much longer. Our paper should interest every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s audience should be like that of a good play—the orchestra chairs full and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an ‘organ’ any longer?”
“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that we’re free to print the news?”
“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper—all the news and nothing but the news.”
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. “Hum—hum,” he said. “This is news. Well—the circulation’ll go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”