Page 4 University Daily Kansan, September 27, 1980
Clymer
From nage 1
dedicating the new building, or at least dedicating the remodeled building. I heard Rolla speak, and I had not heard anything like it before. We had come from Denver, where the language tended more to the prosasic, I guess. I gazed in wonderment, and I listened as those powerful passages rolled out. I confessed somewhat what happened when it had been when a small boy I had seen my father cry. I came to love Rolla Clemmer for the way he wrote and the way he talked, and I think his impact on the journalism of our state was related quite largely to his use of the language. It was 19th century talk; even Henry Watterson hadn't impressed himself with such vivid imagery. The Talk Rolla gave that day a tribute to William Allen White. A passage or so,
White "burst in every morning with suggestions for timely news stories, which usually meant that the town's Sacred Cows were in for another distressing series of shocks and outrages. He interpolated straight-away news copy here and there with some twist of his own that raised ordinary reporting to a high level. He wrote headlines, in flowing purple ink strokes, which gave dash and color to staid Associated Press accounts. . . ."
About a staff party: "During the evening, as he stood with his hand on my shoulder, he said: 'All good boys and girls, Rolla, and not a boozer in the hunch.'"
INUS ROLLA CLYMER, on William Allen White. We came to recognize Rollas the Our Orator through the fifties and sixties, until he reached that point when he no longer could stand up and roll out the wonderful words. He was a regular at the University of California, Doho Dolphins Simons of the Lawrence Journal-World. It was Oscar Stauffer of Stauffer Publications in 1908, Whitley Austin of the Salina Journal in 1904, Drew McLaughlin Sr. of the Paola Republican in 1965. In 1966, he was given the KU Alumni Association citation for distinguished service. In 1977, he was the one to receive an award for Journalistic Merit, the fourth to be honored. Fred W. Brinkerhoff was the speaker.
"Mr. Clymer's editorials are not limited to any field," Brinkerhoff said. "They read literally with everything. He is no specialist, although he is an outstanding authority on the Kansas oil industry. . . Scanning the news of home and state and nation and world, the editor finds for the editorial columns the importance of other sanctums from other sanctums in Kansas he obtains inspiration for editorials of agreement or disagreement. From his contacts with the men and women he meets come ideas
that yield thoughtful observations in print. The variety of subjects is amazing . . ."
He had youthful dreams "to edit a paper whose thunderings would arouse the Masses, and find now that I am rich fortunate in my scribblings if I do arouse the wrathful Regular Advertiser and Constant Reader. I once imagined that, by some legdemain to the deponent unknown, I might achieve wealth as a few of our purse-proud publishers have done. All but the gold and silver I have laid up will never cause moth nor rust to work overtime in corrupting it."
And he mentioned some people who had influenced him: White, the Murdocks of Wichita, Ed Howe of Atchison, Henry Allen of the Beacon, Arthur Carppe of Topek, Charles Scott of Iola, George Marceau of Fort Scott, and many more. He said that "in my passage through this batter'd caravanseral, I have been able to witness the deeds of many sterling members of my profession, past and present, and to thrill the immensely grand accomplishments. The long leet of state's press has taken toward the spans in the few decades that embrace the spans of many living men, must surely be regarded as among the proudest gains which Mother Kansas has fashioned."
When the Kansas Centennial and the Civil War Centennial came along he was busy in a new role. He was chosen to portray Abraham Lincoln at ceremonies in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Ray Morgan wrote that "With soldiers standing by in the Union军队 uniforms of the day Lincoln came there 100 years before, Clymer raised the 34-star flag that Lincoln had raised on the flagstaff to commemorate the admission to Kansas."
HE WAS THE speaker in 1968 when Fred Brinkerhoff was named to the Newspaper Editors' Hall of Fame, and he chose the occasion to comment on what he termed, not surprisingly, the "Vahalla" of Kansas journalism:
"During the last four decades of the 19th century and the first six of the 20th, a stately procession of newspaper titans has marched across the Kansas scene. Perhaps no other state has bred so many of them, or of such surpassing superiority, in any comparable period. . . .
"Many of these editors would have been outstanding figures in any period of history, or in an clime. All of them were engrossed in the fascinating business of building their state from its pioneer trappings into an orderly structure of high civilization . . ."
And the years went by for the elder statesman of Kansas journalism. When he reached 80 he said he was not yet ready to write "20" on his career or on his life. "I am 80 years old today," he wrote. "My parents always hitherto I have been sensitive about revealing my age." He was honored in El Dorado, and he said of himself that "Fifty-two years ago this month his good fairy took him by the hand and led him into this bright haven. Here he has found satisfaction and peace which were the kind he had been repaid hundred-fold for any slight contribution he may have made to the general welfare."
It was June 4, 1977, when he died, at Allen
Park, after a long illness. The funeral,
was June 10, at the First Unitarian
Church.
Presbyterian Church. The editorial tributes were extensive; the Times carried two full pages of them. Gov. Robert Bennett eulogized him. His own paper said that "This man, this lifelong friend of both the high and the lowly, never reached for the stars. Yet there are those who believe that, at least, he has had a McLemore written of his as "The Boose"; "Here was a man who labored long and strenuously at the profession he loved, under physical handicaps of such severity that one of fiber long since have surrendered in despair. But that poetic soul was housed in whiterhead; the mind commanded and willed the physical frame to keep it strong." He believed that a like spent leaf." The Salina Journal, the Emporia Gazette, the Iola Register, the Witchia Eagle, the Lawrence Journal-World and all the others seemed to have something to say. Clyde M. Reed of the Parsons Sun, revered Rolla Clymer, gave the eulogy at the services in El Dorado: "The Clymer prose in the El Dorado was an important educational output was judged. The style, rhythm and vocabulary, not to mention the content, were the products of a master and a devoted perfectionist."
AND REEED RECALLED what Sen. James Pearson, who also spoke at the funeral, had said in 1868, when Rolla Clymer was undergone a stroke. "When he died, they can take his typewriter away from him."
These several years later, and remembering all the Clymer editors and the Clymer orations, we can feel special pleasure and pride that Rolla Clymer was once among us. I liked what Ray Morgan wrote in the Kansas City Times:
"On the day Rolla Clymer, respected editor of the El Dorado Tortoise, died, a sudden summer thunderstorm darkened the skies over the Flint River and caused an orange pattern sweeps across the waving grass.
"Darts of lightning zigzagged across the darkened skies, thunder rolled across the treeless hills and guts of heavy pounded at the grass. It was as though the spirits of ancient Indian hunts and sachems were in sorrow over the poet of the beloved grasslands."
And, some words from Clymer himself, to this day,
he concluded his White Dwarf words with this curse:
"Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furburts; for my purpose toToa sail beyond the sunrise in order to die." At what the Times published in its special edition of June 6, 1977:
The Hills have warmed me with their sheen
And charmed me by their grace;
Throughout life's bitter cudgeling
They've clasped me in embrace.
They that life itself must end
And I no longer fill
And I no longer fill
A horteschge spot. I do besech
A bootless spot, I do besech
Thev mav embrace me still."
The words of Rolla A. Clymer, August 7, 1965,
entitled "Requiem." We are honored almost
beyond measure in naming him this year to our
Kansas Newspaper Editors Hall of Fame.
Samsot
newspapers as representing the mood of the people?
Do editors challenge those polls, the products of technology? Do they ask what the sample includes? Do they ask what the margin of error is? Do they even know the terms to ask about?
Another problem is with advertising's market research. More applied science. More technology. Virginia Dodge Fielder, editorial research manager at the Chicago Sun-Times, recently pointed with pride to her group's influence on the editorial content of the paper.
She told a group of teachers that the market researchers had found that many people seemed interested in air conditioners at a particular time of year. Her group, the market researchers, convinced the editors that that particular time would be a good one in which the conditioners and how to shop for them. The series ran, she said, and public interest was high.
But no editor had challenged the assumption that the research began with. No editor had wondered whether the newspaper should be in the business of associating the course with the other series, what the series did. Perhaps the service was sound. But its premise was never questioned.
No challenge. Again.
The editor who nods assent when an opinion poll comes over the wires, who acquiesces to an editorial project suggested by a market researcher, who does not see the results about the validity of the basis of the research and its validity, is a dulled editor. A dulled editor isn't doing his or her job.
There must always be challenge.
AN EDITOR WHO simply nods might just as well not off to sleep.
Some editors might think such challenge is unnecessary. They might point to the popular nightly news shows on television to show that the media is not all that interested in depth reporting.
After all, television and its limits of time support a superficial, headline-type format that the public has come to expect from television. "What is it?" asks the crowd. "way it is," or, "that's all the news you need . . ."
What have many editors done, faced with this ubiquitous, competitive nuisance? They have shown fear at the prospect that something might be on television that is not in the newspaper. So a lot of them have simply followed the same and the cameras done the same, the same or have reported the same triviet that television did. They could always boast that television didn't beat them.
An editor must challenge to make sure the technology, as wonderful as it can be, is working for him and, more importantly, for the public, who are interested in the journalistic principles he should stand for.
Of course, television has its defenders. Eric Sevaride, in a PBS telecast, claimed that television made up for its deficiencies by fielding magazine-format shows.
r potting television. What a horrible way to go.
But, as Newsday's Alen Keneas concluded in a survey of television news a year ago, "This isn't where we're supposed to get our news. We're supposed to get it from the day, or night,"
So, too, with newspapers. It is not enough to point to national magazines, to other media to excuse provincial shortcomings. The readers of any newspaper expect to get their news from the
But what has all this television talk got to do with newspapers?
with newspapers.
THE FORMAT CHALLENGE that television has so far failed to overcome will be a challenge for newspapers in the '80s.
The electronic newspaper has been unveiled and will, according to many predictions, take over an ever larger share of the news business. Daily newspapers will be called upon to feel it in.
What challenge must editors make to this new technology? John Ahlhauser, an Indiana professor conversant with the development of the electronic newspaper, said that reporters would have to write shorter stories because only about 200 words would fit on the television screen—the vehicle for the electronic newspaper.
The only similar development in newspapers, one that forced writers to condense their work, was the tabloid. In too many cases, tabloid editors opted for what has become the television approach, and they were often employed or seduced or seduced in a new format. They stopped trying to present the news in detail.
newspaper,
Editors, then, will either copy television's sorry methods or will challenge their reporters to better utilize the space available.
Readers have been subjected to this confusion mainly because there has been no one to challenge the reports or the reporters. Out of the mass of reporters and editors, only a handful has been willing and able to challenge the technocracy.
That is why anyone reading newspapers has been assaulted by waves of economists predictions or pronouncements that the country is in a recession, coming out of one or heading into one, that the world either has been pitched straight to hell or has saved itself.
Technology, the application of science, has produced an alarming array of data, all part of what has been called the information explosion. It has produced, along with that data, a body of people who can interpret, analyze, estimate and predict. This is the new mandarin class, and editors have seemed loathe to challenge this class of elite and knowledgeable people.
rave newspapermerm lost some of the intellectual process that used to go into reporting, writing and editing? Have they lost the urge, the ability to challenge?
but back to technology and another problem it poses.
IT HAS SEEMED at times that they were cowed by the information explosion.
And if an editor somewhere has felt that he should be to cowed, he should have read about Gary Tennant.
Van Anda was hired as the managing editor for
Van Anda also read hieroglyphics. One night, poring over the material for one of many stories the Times had done on excavations, he looked at a picture and decided that the inscription it showed was a forgery. Van Anda's discovery was substantiated by Egyptologists who concluded that a young Pharaoh had been assassinated. His name was Tutankhamen.
the new York Times back at the turn of the century. He was not loved by the staff, but he was respected. He was not ousted by his boss. He was not ousted by a reason for that. He was not a dull editor.
DURING WORLD WAR I, Van Aranda mined himself with every available military map and charted the courses of various battles. By doing that, he anticipated many of the campaigns and got his people there ahead of the rest of the world's press.
Van Anand pushed the Times to expanded coverage of the great feats in aviation and in polar exploration, and a brief account of some of their accomplishments. Day Talees 's The Kingdom and the Power."
Van Anda was the first editor to publicize a young physicist and, when he was reading a story that one of his reporters had written about that physicist's speech. Van Anda made him make an equation. Van Anda had spotted a mistake that Albert Einstein had made in public.
Yes, today's editors have suffered from an information glut. But think of Van Anda. Had anything prepared him for aviation, for physics in the Einstein mold, for the first World War, for polar exploration, for the Titanic? He had not allowed himself to become dulled.
Van Anda also disputed the claims that the Titanic was uninkable and, when radio contact was lost, deduced what had happened and pushed his staff to a world scoop of the disaster.
Few editors are geniuses. In light of that, the rest must be even sharper, must work at learning even more, must challenge and prove themselves able to challenge, must be the ones who can harness and direct technology to serve the people.
It is too much of a dudge to decide that readers are becoming disaffected and are turning to television and that what editors and reporters need to do is to feel the readers the pap they want. That's what prime-time television is all about.
Technology was certainly around in Van Anda's day. It is present today with a vengeance. How many Titanics do we have? Are nuclear reactors safe?
Technology will be either the problem or the solution of the '80s for journalists.
This is the challenge. Journalists must maintain their tradition and must serve the public, even if the public does not evidence interest in being served. If editors do not continue, or maybe begin, challenging technology and its potential abuses, they will become more and more like the Cheshire Cat's smile—pleasantly visible, but with nothing behind it.
Davies
From page 1
They must challenge or become the publisher's dress swords—snazzy, ornate, perhaps, but without edge.
Science Monitor, said in a speech last year that journalism is a lot like the priesthood. "It means be scrupulous about the truth and following it wherever it leads. Some of today's novitates have a different view. They enter the profession not with a sense of clinical objectivity, determined to explore all views, hear all sides, but committed to a particular social cause. Journalism is, for them, merely an instrument to further this cause."
Hughes said journalists of this type were not welcome on the Monitor. Nor are they on The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times. Nor, I suspect, on many of your papers.
re maints the problem is one of misunderstanding. He says, "It is) namely the notion that the writers and editors of a newspaper hold values and pursue purposes somehow different from the wider community's; that, sequestered behind the archictecture, they seek to preserve themselves to be a kind of class apart—willed, self-important, cunning in the working out of our arrogant designs."
Charles Gusewelle, a columnist for The Kansas City Star and one of the most sensitive writers of the Year, wrote a column on the occasion of the Titanic. He found in which he touched on the problem of arrogance.
He continues, "Nothing could be further from the truth . . . . It may sound lame to say, but we do bitterly regret our occasional mistakes, just as we regret our talents' limitations."
I disagree in some measure with my colleague. I think some of us truly are arrogant. But whether we are or not really does matter. The answer is that we may use that way, and that is what really counts.
If we can put aside our arrogance, then perhaps we will listen to readers and begin to give them what they want. I don't mean we should pander to them and feed them nothing but the pabulum of good news. But if they tell us they care about neighborhood news, then we have to find a way to give them the former without giving up the latter.
A new and better rapport with our readers is important for another, more fundamental reason. It concerns the very existence of a free press in this country. If the public doesn't support us and the First Amendment, then it won't be long before the politicians and Supreme Court begin to dismantle it. Some think the dismantling process already has begun.
MY MESSAGE TODAY is a simple one. I hope you will help me plant the idea that editors and reporters can help set the tone that could result in a new, more trusting audience of readers. And that, in the long run, must surely be the official results for the folks in the business office.
Alexander Hamilton had this to say on the subject: "W whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting freedom of the press must altogether depend on public opinion and the general spirit of people and of the government."
Norman E. I Isaacs, chairman of the National News Council and one of this country's most remarkable journalists, said in a recent speech long-range trend is clearly against the press.
secure one punch. That is scary.
Just as scary, perhaps, is a finding from a Gallup poll earlier this year that showed Americans favoring the view that present curbs on the press are not strict enough rather than being too strict.
The chairman of the National
"It takes no genius to remark that down the road may lie a tipping point. What happens if public disaffection (with the press) goes beyond 50 percent? Or moves, say, to 55 percent? Will American journalists so much enough to understand why they support it so that rational citizens who can recognize that without a free press there can be no free nation?"
Perhaps you have seen the surveys indicating that a majority of people would not vote in favor of the Public Amendment today if it were put before the public. That is scary.
Maybe I should have told them that just working in a small town for three months was as good a reason as any. The pace there is different; the world isn't tipped down to a fraction of a second. It was a whole new world for me, because I had grown up in the Kansas City metropolitan area—and compared to Chanute, Kansas City is a mighty big city indeed.
"Why Chanute?" people kept asking me. I had no answer for them last spring when I told them I'd be spending my summer as the intern on the Chanute Tribune.
Or I could mention how my work kept me jumping, such as when I was called upon to write an account of a late-night bullfrog hunt. But I'd never been on a bullfrog hunt; I'm not even sure I'd know a bullfrog if I saw one. That assignment and I knew it had a little artistic license and several dogpuns.
If we are to do that Isaacs suggests, we must serve readers rather than ourselves. If we do that successfully, we just might find readers serving us.
Perhaps I should have told them all the advantages of working on a small-town newspaper. On a big metropolitan paper, I'd have been locked in one job all summer long. Not in Chanute. Before the末季 editorial editor (for two weeks), society editor (for one day), and done numerous other jobs involving political reporting, editing, makeup and pasture.
Yet the best answer may simply be the eternally patient people at the Tribune who remembered it what it was like to break into journalism. They even remembered it when they accidentally button on my terminal, prompting erased several stories that were to go on a page I'd laid out.
assignment so odd that many people (including myself) doubted my sanity. A Kansas inventor brought an air-powered car to Chanute and asked me to test-drive it, something that was more dangerous than it looked. I dugged huge holes in the floor of the car and我 felt it be road a few times before the trip was through. My sunburn was soothed somewhat by the front-page story that resulted.
But all this wouldn't convince most people. So maybe the best answer I could give them now is actually something I didn't do rather than something I did.
Oh, I could mention that I was given an
Don Munday
Our summer vacations
I didn't have to write a single obituary in those three months.
I rest my case.
I interviewed last spring for what I thought was a reporting position on a Harris group daily. But the summer position I was given was more than I bargained for. And more than I could have
Scott Faust
except for selling ads and taking pictures, I wore all the hats of a weekly newspaper. I was assigning editor, the one and only feature and
Each week was a headlong rush towards a Thursday pastime deadline. I had the editor's fears of unfulfilled holes and butting heads, and the editors' sources of sources and time constraints. I was on my own.
news reporter, copy editor, typesetter, layout editor and pasteup artist.
My Wednesday nights were, without fail, marathon layout and headline writing sessions held in my bedroom at home. Thursday meant I had to think of my ideas to work of, work of themes coalesce.
I had to put out special issues on Lenea's July Fourth celebration and the Aug. 5 primary races and faced the angry onlaught of a local restaurant that gained in connection with a food poisoning incident.
This summer my life was the Lenexa News. I thrived on the demands of the job and bathed in the satisfaction of each Friday's publication I have to have had the opportunity, to do so much so soon.
Vanessa Herron
On the first day of my internship as the Cofer-
ville Journal, I expected the worst.
On that first day, I was given a desk, a webbly chair, a tour of downtown Coffeeville and, along with an assignment to interview a high school tennis team, the keys to the company car.
After the first assignment and driving experience were over, I became more and more
trusted in the Journal newsroom-first with obituaries, then with courthouse records and, finally, with more complex stories.
I think I did well.
But, of course, there were a few slip-ups. One Monday morning, I made six major mistakes in a single crime story—the kind of mistakes that would have made our lawyer wake up in a cold night.
The story never reached the records page, but Paul McMasters, the managing editor, told me that he
When I left the Journal, I left behind friends I had not expected to make and work I was afraid I
I had gained newspaper experience, enough money for one semester's tuition and, most importantly, self-confidence.