But numbers are not the only gauge of the influence of professional study on the calling itself. The mere presence, the work, the activities, and the influence of professional schools raise the standards of a calling. Those in its work begin to see their daily task from the standpoint which training implies. Since the overwhelming majority of newspaper men believe in their calling, love it, rejoice in it, regret its defects, and honor its achievements, they begin consciously to try to show how good a newspaper can be made with nothing but the tuition of the office. Inaccuracy, carelessness, bad taste, and dubious ethics present themselves at a different angle when judged in the light of a calling for which colleges and universities furnish training. A corporate spirit and a corporate standard are felt more strongly, and men who have learned all they know in a newspaper office have a just, noble, and often successful determination to advance these standards and endeavor to equal in advance anything the school can accomplish. This affects both those who have had college training and those who come to their work as newspaper men with only the education of the public schools, high or elementary. More than 1000 letters have been received by the School of Journalism in Columbia University, since it was opened, asking advice as to the reading and study which could aid a man or woman unable to leave the newspaper office to study to improve their work. College graduates, in particular on newspapers, begin systematic study on their own account, aware of an approaching competition. Definite standards in newspaper writing and in diction begin to be recognized and practiced in the office, and slips in either meet a more severe criticism.
Newspaper associations of all orders play their part in this spontaneous training. Advertising clubs and their great annual gatherings have censored the periodic publicity of the advertising column as no other agency whatever could possibly have done. How far this educating influence has transformed this share of the American periodical in all its fields only those can realize who have studied past advertisements. Every state has its editorial association. These draw together more men from the weeklies and the dailies in cities under 50,000 of population than from cities of more than 500,000. These associations thirty years ago were little more than social. They have come to be educational agencies of the first importance. They create and assert new norms of conduct and composition. The papers read are normally didactic. All men try to be what they assert they are. From the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, bringing together nearly 1000 of our leading newspapers to meetings of the weeklies of a county, a region in a state, a whole state, sections like New England or the Southern States of particular classes of periodicals, these various organizations are rapidly instituting a machinery, and breathing a spirit whose work is a valid factor in the education of the newspaper man. Not the least influence which the schools of journalism exert on the active work of the calling is through these associations, particularly in the states west of the Mississippi where, at the present stage of journalism in this region, state universities can through schools of journalism bring newspapers together at a "newspaper week."
Journalism raised to dignity of a profession by schools of journalism
The rapid growth in students registered in "journalism" courses did not gauge the demand for professional teaching in the craft of the newspaper or the magazine. A large share of the "journalism" taught consisted simply in teaching newspaper English. The college course has been nowhere so vehemently and vigorously attacked as in the training it gave in writing English. Few were satisfied with it, least of all those who taught it. At least one college professor, whose method and textbooks were launched thirty years ago, has recanted all his early work in teaching composition and pronounced it valueless or worse. The college graduate, after courses in English composition (at least one in the freshman year and often two or three more), in many instances found himself unable to write a business letter, describe a plan projected in business affairs, compose advertisements, or narrate a current event. This was not invariably the case, but it occurred often enough to be noted. Books, pamphlets, and papers multiplied on this lack of training for practical writing in college composition courses. The world of education discovered, what the newspapers had found by experience, that the style of expression successful in literature did not bring results in man's daily task of reaching his fellow man on the homely and direct issues of daily life. In literature, genius is seeking to express itself. In the newspaper and in business, the writer is trying—and only trying—to express and interpret his subject so as to reach the other and contemporary man. If he does this, he wins. If not, he fails. Genius can, should be, careless of the immediate audience, and wait for the final and ultimate response. No newspaper article and no advertisement can. For them, style is only a means. In letters, form is final. The verdict of posterity and not of the yearly subscriber or daily purchaser is decisive.
Journalistic writing demands a distinctive style and calls for immediate response
In the high school and college, from 1910 on, there came courses in English which turned to the newspaper for methods and means of expression, and were called "courses in journalism." They were really courses in the English of the newspaper, besprinkled with lectures on the diction of the newspaper and the use of words—futile efforts, through lists of words that must not be used, to give a sound rule of the selection of language by the writer, and, above all, attempts to secure simple, direct, incisive narrative and discussion. These are all useful in their place and work. They prepare a man for some of the first steps of the newspaper office, particularly in the swift, mechanical routine and technique of "copy," indispensable where what is copy now is on the street for sale within an hour.
Where an instructor has himself the gift of style and the capacity to impart it, where he is himself a man who sells his stuff and knows what stuff will sell, where he has taste and inspiring, effective teaching power, a course in newspaper English may carry a man far in acquiring command of his powers of expression to their profitable use. These "courses in journalism" sometimes run for only a single semester. Many run for the normal span of three hours a week through a year. Sometimes there are two in succession, the second assuming the task of teaching work which a newspaper beginner usually reaches in from three to five years: the special article, the supplement, study of a subject, the "feature" story, criticism, and the editorial. When these courses are based on assignments which lead a man to go out and get the facts on which he writes, they furnish a certain share of training in the art of reporting. Where this is done in a college town and a college community, however, the work is a far remove from that where the reporter must dive and wrestle in the seething tide of a great city, to return with news wrested from its native bed.
Courses in "newspaper English"
Newspaper English has its great and widest value to the man who wishes to learn how he can affect the other man. A course in it is certain, if the instruction is effective, to leave a student better able to express himself in the normal needs of life. This work is taken by many students as part of the effective training of college life, with no expectation of entering active newspaper work. The demand for publicity work in all business fields, and its value to the social worker, the teacher, and the clergyman, lead others to this specialized training. In at least one of our state universities, half those who take the courses in journalism do not look to the newspaper in the future. The curriculum is often so arranged that in a four-year college course it will be practicable to combine these courses in newspaper English with the parts of work offered, required for, or preparatory to the three learned professions, social service, business, and the applied sciences. Such an arrangement of studies frankly recognizes the value in general education and after life of training in the direct expression the newspaper uses. In no long time every college will have at least one such course in its English department.
But this course in direct writing stands alone, without any systematic training in journalism; it should not be called a course in journalism any more than a course in political science dealing with law, or a course in physiology or hygiene, can be called courses in law or medicine, because they cover material used in schools of law or schools of medicine. It is an advantage for any educated man to learn to write clearly, simply, to the point; to put the purpose, object, and force of an article at the beginning, and to be as much like Daniel Defoe and Franklin, and as little like Walter Pater or Samuel Johnson, as possible; it is well for him to have a general view of the newspaper and its needs; it is a mistake to leave him with the impression that he has the training journalism demands. He is no better off at this point than any college graduate who has picked up for himself, by nature or through practice and imitation, the direct newspaper method.