staff. The writer has more time for study and recreation. He has the satisfaction of doing the highest grade of newspaper work. His responsibility is not excessive for his articles are subject to revision and to criticism in advance of publication. It is clean, wholesome intellectual work with a minimum likelihood for mistake or error.

But, in the larger cities the editorial writer's work is anonymous. He is little known except by his associates, for the practice of signing editorial articles has not become common. The names of other writers are made conspicuous. The man who describes the financial situation, the bridge whist savant, some of the book reviewers, the playhouse critics, even the writers of base ball games and prize fights, these are permitted to print their names at the head of their columns. Not so the editorial writers although they perform the highest service for the newspaper, doing the work requiring the most brains and the severest study. If one of them writes an especially noteworthy article the editor in chief quite likely gets the credit for it from the public.

Editorial writing requires a different literary touch from that of plain narration. It is harder to catch the knack of it. The special article or news report gives information only; the editorial article seeks to persuade, or explain, or amuse. It must attract the reader's attention and it is the writer's art of combining chat, information and opinion that accomplishes this result. Its opportunities for literary perfection are limitless. Every possible conceit, or trick of lan

guage, argument, invective, ridicule, sarcasm, humor, frolic, pathos, every element that enters literature, may be indulged in, and the more striking the more successful.

Always the editorial article should have a purpose. Always exists the opportunity for nicety of language, for that use of words to befit the thought that constitutes good composition. The editorial writer must not forget that almost all readers seek to be amused rather than instructed.

"I had not thought of that before" is a common comment of the newspaper reader. But the editor had thought of it because he had been taught to think. He must be informed of the world's events and be prepared to tell the reader exactly what they mean.

Let it be impressed on the young man in journalism that he must learn to explain as well as to record. And let it be repeated that he must expect to think for that very large proportion of his readers who from lack of time and from force of habit and from inability because they have not practiced it, are unable, unaided, to diagnose and draw conclusions from the burning questions of the day. You cannot give better service than by explaining the alpha and the omega of important events.

CHAPTER V

WHAT TO PRINT-THE PROBLEM OF HOW TO INTEREST AND INFORM THE READER

In his meditations over newspaper possibilities the late Joseph Pulitzer found himself reasoning that the existing newspapers were written above the understanding of the multitudes and consequently were not read by them. Hundreds of thousands of the metropolitan district population read no daily newspaper because the prices of the sheets were high and because editorial utterances were "over their heads," were too profound, too argumentative, too scholarly. Mr. Pulitzer pictured to himself a newspaper so simple of speech and so simple of editorial expression that this vast population could understand it. He purchased the New York World, reduced its price, tried to make it appeal to the masses, and before long he had attained a very great circulation and a very great fortune.

Now, Mr. Pulitzer accomplished this result by contemplating his newspaper from the viewpoint of the reader rather than from that of the editor. He gave the people something they had wanted. Giving the public what it wants is the surest way of securing a horde of readers. His reading matter was mild; the typog

raphy spectacular. He attracted attention with headlines a foot high and with letter press that looked like thickly woven barbed wire fence. One half the page was daubed with blotches of black type and the other half was smeared with red ink. But typographical eccentricity alone does little harm; it's a question of taste.

Mr. Pulitzer had made his great success on the lines indicated above and was breathing easily. It was not until another man came along who outdid Mr. Pulitzer in multiple exaggerations of the same game that the country saw the most riotous journalism ever known anywhere. Mr. Pulitzer's early efforts at sensationalism were as a smoking ash barrel when compared with the Vesuvius of volcanic flame and melted lava that followed. That Mr. Hearst would collect a bigger mob of readers was inevitable, but Mr. Pulitzer lost no readers and gained many. Both establishments kept up the contest as long as circulations continued to grow; but with the pause of the rocket rise things began to simmer down to a less spectacular splendor of insanity. The inflammation of the imagination subsided and gradually they approached the routine and the respectability of the other newspapers.

It was the same old story—the story so familiar to every journalist of ripening years-of building up a newspaper circulation by spectacular methods and then relapsing into ordinary goodness with a deliberation so gradual that the reader does not notice the change. For every editor knows that the more details of sin, vice, and crime he crams into his newspaper the more

copies of that newspaper will be sold; and every editor knows that the most subtle temptation that besets him is the temptation to print the things that should not be printed and that temptation is the more acute because he knows that the people want to read them. Aye! there's the rub! The people want the sensational stuff. The very sensational newspapers sell three or four times as many copies as do the conservative ones. The proportion is even larger in London and Paris. In our large cities almost all the newspapers of great circulation began the building up process by audacious sensationalism; as they became prosperous they became moderate.

Joseph Addison of long-ago literary fame recognized the public liking for sensation. He says in The Spectator: "At the same time I am very sensible that nothing spreads a paper like private calumny and defamation." And the Rev. Lyman Abbott, in rebuking the sensational press, was moved to remark: "Is the defense of the newspaper that it must give the public what it wants a good one? Most certainly no!-no more than the selling of whiskey, opium, stale fish or decayed vegetables. The editor is or ought to be a public teacher." The popular taste that demands this sensational sort of newspaper stimulant attracted the notice of Lafcadio Hearn, who remarks: "Everywhere there is a public of this kind to whom lacrimose emotion and mawkish sentiment give the same kind of pleasure that black, red, and blazing yellow give to the eyes of little children and savages."

Conversely, the Christian Science Monitor is read by