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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 1940
He knew what they'd find in that old cowhide trunk
YOUNG HEIRS MIGHT BE SURPRISED—but he knew the fortune that was paid the Hawkinses when the railroad came through in '78 and how they never spent or banked a cent of it.
The old-time country editor was like that. He knew his county like the back of his hand, from the secret thoughts of the supervisors to the last thankyou-marm on a dead-end road.
He knew every man, woman, and child and their Great-Aunt Nellie who ran off with the lightning-rod agent. He knew the story of every yellow old record in the courthouse—and what the boys were laughing at in the livery stable last Sunday. He knew what chance the town had of getting that button factory, and why the parsonage would have a new tenant soon.
The people he wrote for were just as much an open book to him as the news he wrote for them. He wasn't being quaint when he put the results of the school spelldown on page one, or filled five pages with country correspondence. That was meat and drink to the folks out on the R.F.D. routes—far more important than the Boer War or even silver at 16 to 1—and he knew it.
That old-time country editor had grasp... complete, integrated understanding of all the news of his locality, and the whole of the mind for which it was written. And his formula, "the nearer the news, the bigger," was essentially the formula of all old-time journalism—in the big cities, as well as in the county seats.
But when Dewey entered Manila Bay and boys in bicycle shops began tinkering with the front ends of buggies, the old order began to pass away. The great, complex world forced itself into the affairs and thoughts of easy-going, turn-of-century America.
Economics, world politics, finance, industrial management, material resources, labor, social theory—they all began to matter somehow. They got you into wars and strikes and hard times. Science began to matter when diphtheria and t.b. were found not to be acts of God. Art began to matter when your daughter came back from Paris or Peoria calling you a Philistine.
America's mind, stretching, pushing out its horizons, called for more news...more kinds of news...news from beyond the railroad depot. And the news poured in—from the just-hatched wire services, from specialists of all kinds, from the syndicates, the feature writers, the correspondent
Soon the old one-man grasp was gone. The torrent of news was too great and too swift, its sources too many and too remote, for any one man to handle and absorb it all.
And if the editor was swamped, the reader was drowned. In self-defense, he learned to pick his way about his newspaper, snatching a bit here and a bit there, mostly according to the ingenuity of the headline-writer. Often he missed news of importance; often he failed to see what a series of day-by-day stories added up to in the end.
There was a crying need for a new experiment in journalism. A need for somebody with a national viewpoint-free from the pressure of daily and hourly deadlines—to bring the news together so that the intelligent reader could get its essentials, grasp them, make them his own.
That somebody turned out to be The Weekly Newsmagazine. With its advantage of time for reflection and discussion, the Newsmagazine made this task its single-minded purpose. It set out to do the country editor's job with a world-wide scope and on a national scale.
... To take all the week's news and make the picture make sense to the average intelligent American. To set it against a fully comprehended background. To write it vividly, compactly, forcefully ... with full appreciation of the mind for which it is intended ... with the touch of human understanding that brings people and events to moving, breathing life.
The Newsmagazine is written by experts, but never for experts. No story in TIME can go galloping off on a hobby; it must be paced firmly and smoothly to the brisk stride of the whole magazine, whether the subject is world affairs or politics, or business or finance, or medicine, religion, or the arts.
That is why TIME seems to be written by one man, who knows TIME readers as the old-time country editor knew the folks in his county. That is why the average TIME reader starts at the beginning and goes through to the end, feeling that every line gives him something that he wants and needs and can use.
This is one of a series of advertisements in which the Editors of TIME hope to give College Students a clearer picture of the world of news-gathering, news-writing, and news-reading—and the part TIME plays in helping you to grasp, measure, and use the history of your lifetime as you live the story of your life.