CALIFORNIA THE YOUNG MAN CHAPTER I BEGINNING IN NEWSPAPER WORK-THE RE- THE beginner in newspaper work usually starts as a reporter of the simplest and most unimportant kind of routine news. The city editor tells him what to do and how to do it. The start is made easy for him. The prevailing supposition that reporters go out into the streets and hunt for news is far from fact. They do so in the small cities but not for big newspapers. Newsgathering has become vastly systematized. Nineteen twentieths of the news comes through established channels of information and this explains why nearly all newspapers have the same facts. The sources of information are known in all newspaper offices. If a man falls dead in the street, or a fire starts in an important building, or an automobile crushes a child, or anything unusual happens in any street, it is known to every city editor within a few minutes; for a policeman reports it to police headquarters immediately, and reporters grab it. Similarly, shipping news is sent to the ship-news office; cases of sudden or unexplained death must be made public by official physicians; public parades and demonstrations are anticipated through the permit bureau, and so on. All day and all night this kind of news pours in to the city editor. With almost instant judgment he decides on its news value, discards it or hustles a reporter for the details. The new man gets the least important of this kind of work. The city editor keeps a future book-like milady's engagement calendar-in which under proper date he records the events to be of that day: business meetings, conventions, adjourned cases, public dinners, everything and anything requiring the presence of a reporter. It is one of the important factors of the newsgetting system. Its proper keeping involves constant drudgery and painstaking care in the reading of newspapers for announcements or for clews to anything that is to happen. He reads, for instance, that an important business meeting has appointed a special committee to report at the next meeting; but no date of the next meeting is given. So he asks the new reporter, maybe, to ascertain and record it in the future book. The new man does many such errands, verifies many statements of fact, chases down many rumors. In the great blizzard of March, 1888, when all transportation lines in New York City were abandoned came the story that several funeral processions were snowed under in Greenwood cemetery. A new reporter was sent. He toiled through storm and snow waist deep to the burial place and back, a task requiring something like six hours to accomplish, and ended the day's experience by thawing out his frozen feet in a bucket of water. And what he wrote was: "The rumor that three funeral processions were snowed under in Greenwood cemetery was found on investigation to be untrue" The city editor has many sources of information similar to those just mentioned. In the big cities he is responsible for getting the news of the urban district, a task that involves almost every kind of newsgetting. This is especially true of New York City, for taken all in all nearly everything happens in New York than can happen anywhere. It is of metropolitan reporting that we are speaking just now. The new reporter is asked to make news reports of the simplest of happenings. The narration of ordinary events is the easiest of all newspaper writing. Any intelligent high school boy can catch the knack of it and many a bright newspaper office boy has gone on to better things by absorbing that knack. It is easy to acquire because it may be largely imitativethat is, almost all routine news reports are written in the same groove of construction and in very much the same language, year in and year out, for news topics constantly repeat themselves. By routine reports are meant accounts of public meetings, conventions, legislative proceedings, trials in the courts, market reports, accidents, fires, suicides and petty crimes. These things are of the utmost importance to the newspapers. They constitute a large proportion of the news of the day. They are the very life of the news columns as presenting a record of the day's events. They are easy to write because they are written in the same manner day after day for they are constantly recurring. The puzzled young writer cannot go far astray if he turns back in the newspaper files to a similar meeting or accident or event and imitates that report. But let him be warned that if he continues to work in that way he becomes a routine writer, a hack reporter, and his advancement ceases. It is in this deadly dull routine writing of routine news that we have our poorest and most slovenly newspaper results. The indifferent work done in this direction is more conspicuous in the London newspapers than in our own for there news reports have been reduced almost to formula. We have said that the dates of fixed events to come are accumulated in the future book-meetings of all sorts, lectures, balls, sporting contests, celebrations, ceremonials, excursions and the like, of which the number and the variety are innumerable. To each of these a reporter is sent. Usually he is told before he starts about how long an article is expected of him. But he is charged to note especially anything unusual, odd, strange, or queer that may happen or be said. And al |