Now, that was a man who had genius; he had a talent the most indubitable, and he got handsomely paid in spite of his lack of grammar, because after his work had been done over by a scholar it was really beautiful. But any man who is sincere and earnest and not always thinking about himself can be a good reporter. He can learn to ascertain the truth; he can acquire the habit of seeing.
When he looks at a fire, what is the most important thing about that fire? Here, let us say, are five houses burning; which is the greatest? Whose store is that which is burning? And who has met with the greatest loss? Has any individual perished in the conflagration? Are there any very interesting circumstances about the fire? How did it occur? Was it like Chicago, where a cow kicked over a spirit-lamp and burned up the city?
All these things the reporter has to judge about. He is the eye of the paper, and he is there to see which is the vital fact in the story, and to produce it, tell it, write it out.
Dana saw the usefulness to a reporter of certain qualities which are acquired neither at school nor in the office:
In the first place, he must know the truth when he hears it and sees it. There are a great many men who are born without that faculty, unfortunately. But there are some men that a lie cannot deceive; and that is a very precious gift for a reporter, as well as for anybody else. The man who has it is sure to live long and prosper; especially if he is able to tell the truth which he sees, to state the fact or the discovery that he has been sent out after, in a clear and vivid and interesting manner.
The invariable law of the newspaper is to be interesting. Suppose you tell all the truths of science in a way that bores the reader; what is the good? The truths don’t stay in the mind, and nobody thinks any the better of you because you have told the truth tediously. The reporter must give his story in such a way that you know he feels its qualities and events and is interested in them.
Dana was catholic not only in his taste for news, but in his idea of the manner of writing it. Nothing gave him more uneasiness than to find that a Sun man was drifting into a stereotyped way of handling a news story or writing an editorial article. Even as he advised young men to read everything from Shakespeare and Milton down, he repeatedly warned them against the imitation, unconscious or otherwise, of another’s style:
Do not take any model. Every man has his own natural style, and the thing to do is to develop it into simplicity and clearness. Do not, for instance, labor after such a style as Matthew Arnold’s—one of the most beautiful styles that has ever been seen in any literature. It is no use to try to get another man’s style or to imitate the wit or the mannerisms of another writer. The late Mr. Carlyle, for example, did, in my judgment, a considerable mischief in his day, because he led everybody to write after the style of his “French Revolution,” and it became pretty tedious.
If a writer could not keep on without aping the literary fashion of another, then he was not for the Sun. Dana wanted good English always, but a constant spice of variety in the treatment of a subject, and in the style itself; therefore he chose a variety of men.
If he believed that the best report of a ship-launching could be written by a longshoreman, he would have hired the hard-handed toiler and assigned him to the job. He wanted men who would look at the world with open eyes and find the new things that were going on. Dana knew that they were going on. His vision had not been narrowed by too close application to newspaper offices where editors and managing editors had handled the stock stories year in and year out in the same wearisome way.