BRISBANE ON JOURNALISM
(Continued from page 1.)
The second example of the powerful newspaper man is Mr Hearst. He fought the ice trust in New York city until it was compelled to reduce the price of ice. Many thousands of children died that summer because the poor people could not buy ice with which to keep milk sweet. We made a fight which compelled the trust to cut the price of ice in two.
An editor should be alive to even small things which need attention. Going to and from my home at Hampstead, I used to notice many wounded pigeons along in the hedges. They were the birds which the champagne sports had not been able to kill in their shooting matches on Long Island. I decided that this practice ought to be stopped. The sports told me it could not be, but I stopped it in a very simple way. I wrote to every member of the legislature, and asking them to let me know whether or not they would telling them about the cruel practice for a bill to suppress it, told them that we wished to lea the people know by means of our 800,000 circulation whether or not they favored such a practice. That was all that was necessary. The next session of the legislature made a law that stopped pigeon shooting.
We stopped race track betting in New York. A peculiar thin about this was that my editorial on the subject were printed in our Chicago paper at the same time track betting was stopped there they were in New York and rae New Orleans paper copied the edi before it was in New York. Materials and race track betting wa stopped in that city.
The editor is not always the ablest man in the world. He may be a very commonplace man, but he has a big advantage, because he has a great crowd back of him
The education of a newspaper man ought to begin in his earliest childhood if he is to be a news paper man worth while. I might say that it must begin in the crable. He must have almost born in him a feeling of the equality of men. He must be educated to have sympathy for those who suffer and those who are wronged. He must learn to regard as a joke the government which we have a present—a joke on republican or democratic government. He must begin all this as a child. Unless he got it from his father, he probably will never have it. A man who does not have a feeling of in dignation at seeing children working in the mills will never be a newspaper man. He must see that there ought to be a fairer distribution of money. There are people in New York who don't ever know how to throw away their money. I regard Fifth avenue a the great national varicose vein The ability to see these conditions sympathise, and to insist on relief is an important qualification for newspaper work.
Assuming that a man is fitted by nature for this work what should he study? The answer is everything. He doesn't need to be a scholar, but everything that he reads will help him. Lineoln in spite of his lack of education would have made a great newspaper man. Your education may be superficial—that doesn't matter so much; but it must be catholic. Read widely rather than thoroughly. You must know what has
been done before you begin work. Let those who are teaching journalism pick out the best things to read and condense them for their students.
There is only one place to start as a journalist. That is, as a reporter. The first department of newspaper work is, of course, the telling of what has happened. This ought to be done truthfully and exactly. I do not say that a reporter may not arrange his facts in such a way as to present the picture more vividly. When you are describing a street accident in which a little child was killed, it is all right to tell about the big red automobile that went by without stopping. That helps the picture.
The second department of the newspaper is the editorial. And what the people want to read is not what the editor thinks but what the people themselves think. You know the only thing a man has in this world is his own mind, his own feelings. You must interpret people to themselves. The most powerful editorial is that which leads people to say "That is just what I have always thought but never expressed." You must study your public, and write to suit them. In reporting, you must have the power to see the thing clearly and tell it plainly. It is a great power. You must practice writing a great deal, because the mind is like a field that has not been cultivated. You must learn to see the one thing that the people wish to hear about. I remember that one of my first assignments was to write a story about a man who had jumped from the Brooklyn bridge. There was nothing unusual about the incident, and I gave only a few lines to describing his leap. But I traced the story back into the slum where his family lived, and described how I found his little child sitting on the floor chewing a fish bone. A poor workman on the floor above had sent down his own dinner to the bereaved family. I was working for the elder Dana at the time and he cut the story out and posted it in his office. He said it was because I told the important thing. Of course that pleased me a good deal. We received over $8,000 for the family of the suicide. The New York Sun was the best school of journalism. I worked under Mr. Bogart and Mr. Clark and they helped me a great deal. Clark was the night editor of the Sun and had marvellous ability handling copy. On an election night when Clark was absent we had a long table at which twenty men worked, handling the copy. The next night Mr. Clark was in the office and did all of the work himself, at his little desk, besides getting up several columns of his own matter. Clark's handling of a reporter's copy was the best possible education. The reporter who saw his story the next day in the paper, with every unnecessary word cut out and with the important point which he had buried in the story brought up to the lead where it belonged, had the best possible opportunity of learning how to write. A school of journalism should lay great emphasis on this work of correcting copy and re-writing. Joseph Pulitzer I think, is one of the finest writers of English in America. When he began his work he could no speak a word of English. He goes a German translation of Shakespeare and turned it into English and then compared his version with the original English text. I was by such work as this that he learned to write.
Having decided to be a newspaper man, the next thing is to decide what kind of a paper you want to work for. There is the yellow paper—which is mine. I invented it and am proud of it. I suppose that a man is proud of almost any kind of a baby, if it is his. Then there is the other kind of a paper—the quiet kind. It is a very good kind of paper. You want to pick out your own kind and then work in that direction.
yellow paper—which is mine. I invented it and am proud of it. I suppose that a man is proud of almost any kind of a baby, if it is his. Then there is the other kind of a paper—the quiet kind. It is a very good kind of paper. You want to pick out your own kind and then work in that direction.
They say that my paper exaggerates. Exaggeration is usually nothing but a prompt presentation of the news. The most inaccurate reporter is far more careful than the most careful business man. If the ordinary man escapes from a burning building, he is sure that everybody else was burned. The reporter is the expert who is hired to exercise his judgment in such cases. The one thing to do is to educate your readers to know that a cable dispatch is not an affidavit but the best estimate of the facts that good newspaper work can give. When the first telegram about the Galveston disaster reached our office, it said that there were a thousand killed. I told the telegraph editor to print it fifty. Later we raised it to five hundred, and finally it turned out to be ten thousand. Not long ago we got a cable dispatch that there had been an earthquake in Martinique. We could learn nothing about it. The only thing we could find out was that all the cables in that vicinity were out of business. I figured that if the cables were injured here must have been an overflow of lava great enough to run down into the ocean. I knew that if there had been such an overflow as this the city had been overwhelmed. I told them to put it in the paper that there had been an earthquake in Martinique and that 20,000 people had been killed. It turned out to be 40,000. This is the way a newspaper man must exercise his judgement. Now as to sensationalism, the people must have it—just as the Japanese take opium. The ignorant man takes whisky, and the higher class person takes a philosophical discussion. When Newton was working out his discoveries in mathematics he labored under great excitement. He took calculus where some men would have used champagne. If people don't have some one kind of excitement they will have another and I believe that a paper that gives legitimate excitement to people renders a public service. We draw the line at vileness. We do not publish anything which I could not read before the young ladies in this room. Take the Thaw case for example. It was important because it involved an architect who knew everybody. It was probably the vilest case that has ever been tried in New York President Roosevelt wrote a letter to the district attorney, directing him to watch the newspapers to see if they published details of the case which would make it necessary to exclude them from the mails. The Hearst papers displayed the story prominently, to be sure, but they did not publish the indecent part. In New York the only papers which did not have this stuff were the Hearst papers and the Evening Post. The Brooklyn Eagle, which is known as a family paper, published the rottenest story of them all. in Boston the only paper which did not carry the details of this case were the Hearst paper and the Transcript. We publish stories of crime, of course. We can't help crime. I am told that Dean Williams has said in a lecture that Moses was really the
first great yellow journalist because there was so much crime in what he wrote. We can't help crime, but we can help printing details that a man can't read to his daughter—that is the test we make.
I once spoke to a conference of Presbyterian ministers and one of them said, "But, Mr. Brisbane you use such large black type on your front page, and then there will be a line of red type." I told him that the front page of the New York Journal was modeled after the thunder storm, which is the front page of the heavens made up by the Creator. We get in the black clouds and the red lightning. The rainbow suggests the coming Sunday supplement. The only thing we can't get into it is the thunder. If we could, I would have a copy of the Journal thundering on every street corner.
The newspaper is the only amusement that a great many people get. Some would tell them to work hard all week and then bore themselves on Sunday so as not to bring down the wrath of God Almighty on us. That is kind. But we really ought to give them a little excitement. The newspaper furnishes the vaudeville element in their lives.
When Mr. Harnsworth, the owner of the London Times, came to this country, bringing his big touring car, on his way to Florida to fish for tarpon, he told me that the New York Journal was all right, except that it ought to be printed on a much smaller sheet of paper, and in small type I said to him, "You are going down to Florida to catch tarpor because they are big and game and make a great disturbance lashing the water. How would you like it if I should turn your six foot tarpor into a sprat—just a little sprat?" "You brought along this big ear of yours. How would you like it if I should turn that into a baby buggy, in which your chaffeur could push you along?" Millions of our readers do all their tarpon fishing in the Journal.
There is one thing to remember in going into newspaper work. I is the most dangerous thing in the world for several reasons. I brings you into contact with the evil in life. Men lie to you, and you become cynical. A great many newspaper men, I am sorry to say, are cynical. Then, too newspaper work exposes the young man to all kinds of temptations. Finally, conditions grow worse as he grows older. He is likely to be less well off at the end of twenty years that he was at the end of the first year. The best asset that a young man brings into journalism is his freshness. He can see the thing which the older man overlooks having seen it so often. I was sent to report a prize fight once just because I knew nothing about it, and could see what the people wanted to know about. All that the old prize-fight editor could do was to draw a little diagram and make marks where the blows landed. The worst thing that can happen to a newspaper man is to become calloused. When a doctor for the first time cuts off a man's leg, he sympathises with the man. But after he has done that sort of thing for years, he can cut off legs and think about something else all the time. But that does not make him a worse doctor; it makes him a better one. The first time that a judge sentences a criminal, he sympathizes with him. After a while he gets over that. But lack of sympathy does not spoil him as a judge. The
newspaper man, however, who doesn't notice suffering and who gets so he does not care about injustice and wrong is a failure. He cannot do real newspaper work.
But ours is the most interesting and amusing business you can imagine. There are many contrasts in our work. Among my early assignments was one to go and write a story about triplets. I went and looked at them. They had little red and white and blue ribbons tied to them to show the order of their arrival. But I didn't write a very good story. I could do better now. Then, I was sent to tell about the arrival of a noted Japanese wrestler. I took a Chinaman along as interpreter, but the wrestler evidently got a wrong impression, for he rushed at me and threw me over his head against the ceiling. Then I was sent to report the Hell Gate explosion. Once, I was detailed as "leg man" to follow an old reporter to a fire in Brooklyn and bring back the story. The old reporter told me that no one was injured, and gave me his copy. But I learned through a little boy who was crying because his brother was missing, that twenty-four children who were suffering with sore eyes had been in one room of the asylum, and had all died in the fire. I told the city editor about it and that helped in my advancement. In company with some other newspaper men and an expert diver I went out in a boat and helped put an imitation torpedo under a British man-of-wor. We managed to get out of the scrape with the assistance of a little strong language, but after that the British men-of-war were protected by chains so that no boats could approach. In London, I had a place reserved in the House of Commons, and was the only American newspaper man who had a personal acquaintance with Gladstone.
There is no life so interesting as that of the newspaper man.
Don't Loan Your Ticket.
Manager Lansdon announced this morning that all athletic tickets used by persons other than the original purchaser, would be taken up at the gate should the deception be discovered.
Lost—A tortoise shell comb, near the law library, on Mississippi street, January 18. Finder please return to Fraser hall, room 104.
Don't fail to go the Aurora tonight.
If you need exercise, walk down to the Peerless.
Pay your bets at the College Inn.
If there is anything needed in toilet requisites you will hardly ever be disappointed if you ask for them at MeColloch's drug store.
Loomas wants your photo business.
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