GREAT CHANCE IN JOURALISM

The following article on modern journalism has been written for the CRIMSON by Burton Kline '06, editor of the Transcript:

"Only a few years ago Joseph Pulitzer left a sum of money for the establishment at Columbia of a institution whose usefulness, where it was not taken humorously, was regarded as doubtful. Today thirty-two schools of journalism are copying, with some degree of success, the original Pulitzer idea. For the real measure of the success of these schools we shall have to wait, of course, for the next generation of newspaper workers. But no one, within or without the newspaper office, who takes the newspaper seriously, can escape the hope that the greatest of public functions will be perceptibly improved."

"Capable and even great newspaper men will continue to come up outside of these schools. Indeed the great majority of recruits to the calling must continue to be drawn outside of them. Nor can the best of them make much of unsuitable material. The newspapers are constantly demanding the trained man; but after all the great, the only true, school of journalism is the newspaper itself, and the proper qualifications are more in demand than early training.

"Nose for News" Essential.

"The first of these qualifications is that magic faculty known to the craft as 'the nose for news.'-that is to say an unerring sense for the occurrence that is worth singling out for attention from the maze of everyday life. But almost as important as this qualification are the other ones, of good sense and high-mindedness. The nose for news is nothing if not accompanied by the capacity to discriminate as to what is fit news.

"With these primary elements in his equipment, the aspirant to success in journalism may have every other talent or specialty he pleases; and he cannot have too many of them. His strong point may be an intimacy with Greek, a knowledge of the fine arts, a business, a military, a legal training, a taste for books, a thorough grounding in economics or finance or sociology; or he may have all of these. The newspaper wants them all, and will afford ample scope for their exercise. The constant demand of editors is for reporters who know and who can think.

"They must be able, and willing, to think simply, directly, and accurately. All the graces of an elevated style may be asked of the man who rises to be an editorial writer, a reviewer of books or of plays and pictures and music. But in the beginning the reporter must be content and must be able to state plain facts in a plain way. The young man who expects to enter journalism must teach himself to do this. Flights of speech are out of place in the crisp and concise recording of the everyday facts in the burning of a house or the sale of a piece of property. First, last, and all the time, the beginner must write straight to the point. If he is satisfied that he has the capacity to gather the news, that of writing simply, quickly and accurately is the only deliberate training he need give himself.

"For the rest, he may cultivate his intelligence as widely or as specially as he pleases, with the assurance that it will count, all of it, in the general measure of his worth. The purely technical training, the proper way to spread the facts of a fire, of an election, of a wreck, he may obtain in any school of journalism, or under the eye of the editor who takes him on. A good many editors, perhaps all editors, have an ingrained prejudice for training their own men in the style which they prefer. It is certainly not a bad thing for the beginner to be earning money while he gains his training, or to be saving time in his advance in his calling.

Great Opportunities Opened.

"As for the opportunities in journalism, they are boundless. Any man, no matter what his profession, would be the gainer by two or three years' devoted service as a newspaper reporter. The experience he would amass, in quick thinking, in the power of swift and direct expression, in knowledge of men and affairs, he would find invaluable. Often, after a few years of work, a reporter, thrown into contact with lawyers or doctors or scientists or business men, discovers in himself an unsuspected aptitude for one of these other pursuits, and leaves his first choice for the new. But he carries with him an experience that he will never cease to value.

"If he remains faithful to the news, his rise rests with himself. For a number of years he may have to put up with comparatively small pay, for the best paid positions lie near the top. Admittance to them is open to all the alert and able and faithful, although the way is naturally shortened in the case of exceptional talent or exceptional opportunity. At the top, or at least at the base of the summit, the successful newspaper man has less ground for comparing unfavorably his income with that of the lawyer or business man; and in addition, because his work has always been in the public eye, he may have the compensation of an honorable repute which, whatever his modesty, he cannot fail to value and enjoy.