JOURNALISM AS SEEN FROM THE INSIDE

Everyone is fascinated by the comprehensiveness and versatility of a metropolitan daily. How can so much news from all over the world, so many features, and such a variety of photographs be gathered together so quickly, arranged in such readable form, and sold on the streets for a few pennies? To the layman, such a feat seems almost as miraculous as a tale from the Arabian Nights or one of the fanciful romances of H. G. Wells.

No one volume can, of course, explain all of these things in detail. Schools of Journalism spend two years or more in teaching the art of publishing a newspaper. But Editing the Day's News gives one an interesting glimpse, if nothing more, into the inner workings of a daily paper. It is, as its subtitle truly says, "an introduction to newspaper copyreading, headline writing, illustration, makeup, and general newspaper methods".

Mr. Bastian, being a copyreader for the Chicago Tribune and a lecturer in news editing at the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University, has had every opportunity to make a careful study of his subject, and the result of his study is a compact and very readable book of interest alike to the student of journalism, the young journalist, and the layman who just wants to satisfy his natural curiosity as to what makes the journalistic wheels go 'round.

The book is written primarily with a view to being used as a text in a school of journalism. The newspaper profession nowadays requires men with specialized training, just as does the law, or medicine, or any other profession. Perhaps it might not be too irrelevant to remark, in passing, that one of the great needs of Harvard University is a school of journalism; one that could rank with those of Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But to return to the subject in hand. With a view to its use as a textbook, Mr. Basian's work is divided into five parts, dealing respectively with "Newspapers and News", "Reading Copy", "Headlines", "Makeup", and "Pictures, Sunday Newspapers, and Routine". The text, in true journalistic style, is clear, compact, and interesting. Every point made is carefully illustrated by examples, chosen with great care from leading American papers or written by the author on the basis of his wide experience.

Of particular interest to the layman are the chapters on "An Analysis of News", "The Copyreader at Work", "Makeup", and "An Outline of Newspaper Routine", for, without being too highly technical, they answer many of his questions about the how and the why of the profession that makes possible the reading at his breakfast table every morning of the latest reports from Washington and Wales, Tokio and Thibet, Somerville and South Africa.

"Newspapers," wrote Charles Lamb, "always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." Here is a book that will satisfy that curiosity and give the reader an explanation of his disappointment in laying down a modern newspaper.