Mr. Dana had no regard for typographical gymnastics. To him a head-line was something to fill the mind rather than the eye. He knew the utter impossibility of trying to startle the reader eight times in as many adjacent columns—a feat which Mr. Bennett and some of his imitators seemed to consider feasible. Surprise is not the only emotion upon which a newspaper can play. The Sun stretched all the human octaves from horror to amusement, but the keys of horror were only touched when it was necessary.
Make rules for news? How is it possible to make a rule for something the value of which lies in the fact that it is the narrative of what never had happened, in exactly the same way, before? John Bogart, a city editor of the Sun who absorbed the Dana idea of news and the handling thereof, once said to a young reporter:
“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
The Sun always waited for the man to bite the dog.
Here is Mr. Dana’s own definition of news:
The first thing which an editor must look for is news. If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful; and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public or of any considerable part of it.
There is a great disposition in some quarters to say that the newspapers ought to limit the amount of news that they print; that certain kinds of news ought not to be published. I do not know how that is. I am not prepared to maintain any abstract proposition in that line; but I have always felt that whatever the divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.
A belief has been accepted in some quarters that the Sun of Dana’s time preferred college men for its staff. This was in a way false, but it is true that a great many of the Sun’s young men came from the colleges. Mr. Dana’s views on the matter of educational equipment were quite plainly expressed by himself:
If I could have my way, every young man who is going to be a newspaperman, and who is not absolutely rebellious against it, should learn Greek and Latin after the good old fashion. I had rather take a young fellow who knows the “Ajax” of Sophocles, and has read Tacitus, and can scan every ode of Horace—I would rather take him to report a prize-fight or a spelling-match, for instance, than to take one who has never had those advantages.
At the same time, the cultivated man is not in every case the best reporter. One of the best I ever knew was a man who could not spell four words correctly to save his life, and his verb did not always agree with the subject in person and number; but he always got the fact so exactly, and he saw the picturesque, the interesting, the important aspect of it so vividly, that it was worth another man’s while, who possessed the knowledge of grammar and spelling, to go over the report and write it out.