I think these confessions are ample enough and blunt enough. When I left the high school, I would have wished to word them in Stevensonian manner. That was some time ago. We who run small dailies have little care for the niceties of style. There are few of our clientele who know the nice from the not-nice. In our smaller cities we “suicide” and “jeopardize.” We are visited by “agriculturalists,” and “none of us are” exempt from little iniquities and uniquities of style and expression. We go right on: “commence” where we should “begin,” use “balance” for “remainder,” never think of putting the article before “Hon.” and “Rev.,” and some of us abbreviate “assemblyman” into “ass,” meaning nothing but condensation. Events still “transpire” in our small cities, and inevitably we “try experiments.” We have learned to write “trousers,” and “gents” appears only in our advertisements. In common with the very biggest and best papers we always say “leniency.” That I do these things, the last coercion of environment, is the saddest, to me, of all.
THE COUNTRY EDITOR OF TO-DAY
BY CHARLES MOREAU HARGER
I
Eulogies and laudatory paragraphs, alternating with sneers, ridicule, and deprecations, long have been the lot of the country editor. Pictured in the comic papers as an egotistic clown, exalted by the politicians as a mighty “moulder of public opinion,” occasionally chastised by angry patrons, and sometimes remembered by delighted subscribers, he has put his errors where they could be read of all men and has modestly sought a fair credit for his merits.
At times he has rebelled—not at treatment from his constituency but at patronizing remarks of the city journalist who sits at a mahogany desk and dictates able articles for the eighteen-page daily, instead of writing local items at a pine table in the office of a four-page weekly. Thus did one voice his protest: “When you consider that the country weekly is owned by its editor and that the man who writes the funny things about country papers in the city journals is owned by the corporation for which he writes, it doesn’t seem so sad. When you see an item in the city papers poking fun at the country editor for printing news about John Jones’ new barn, you laugh and laugh—for you know that on one of the pages of that same city daily is a two-column story in regard to the trimmings on the gowns of the Duchess of Wheelbarrow. And it is all the more amusing because you know the duchess does not even know of the existence of the aforesaid city paper, while John Jones and many of his neighbors take and pay for the paper which mentioned his new barn. Don’t waste your pity on the country newspaper worker. He will get along.”
Little money is needed to start a country paper. There are those who claim that it does not require any money,—that it can be done on nerve alone,—and they produce evidence to support the statement. True, some of the editors who have the least money and the poorest plants are most successful in their efforts to live up to the conception developed by the professional humorist; but it is not fair to judge the country editor by these—any more than it would be fair to judge the workers on the great city dailies by the publishers of back-street fake sheets that exist merely to rob advertisers; or to judge the editors of reputable magazines by the promoters of nauseous monthlies whose stock in trade is a weird and sickening collection of mail-order bargains and quack medicine advertisements.
The country editor of to-day is far removed from his prototype of two or three decades ago. It would be strange if an age that gives to the farmer his improved self-binder, to the physician his X-ray machine, and to the merchant his loose-leaf ledger, had done nothing for the town’s best medium of publicity. The perfection of stereotype plate manufacture by which a page of telegraph news may be delivered ready for printing at a cost of approximately twenty cents a column, and the elaboration of the “ready print,” or “patent inside,” by which half the paper is printed before delivery, yet at practically no expense over the unprinted sheets, have been the two great labor-savers for the country editor. Thereby he is relieved, if he desire, of the tedious and expensive task of setting much type in order to give the world’s general news, and the miscellaneous matter that “fills up” the paper. His energies then may be devoted to reporting the happenings of his locality and to giving his opinions on public affairs. By his doing of these, and by his relations toward the public interests, is he to be judged.
After all, no one man in the community has so large an opportunity to assist the town in advancement as the editor. It is not because he is smarter than others, not because he is wealthy—but because he is the spokesman to the outside world.
He is eager to print all the news in his own paper. Does he do it? Hardly. “This would be a very newsy paper,” explained a frank country editor to his subscribers, “were it not for the fact that each of the four men who work on it has many friends. By the time all the items that might injure some of their friends are omitted, very little is left.”