CHAPTER VIII

THE VILLAGE NEWSPAPER’S IMPORTANT PLACE IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM

The young man about to start on a journalistic career should give long thought to the village newspaper. Our schools of journalism are graduating thousands of boys who intend to be editors. A few of them only can be taken on the big newspapers for their staffs are full to overflowing always. It is difficult, indeed, for a young man to get a place on a big city newspaper and the prizes are few if he does get it. Let us see what the small town newspaper offers.

In the big cities nearly all writers are employees. The managing editor is employed to direct the staff and to carry out the owners’ policies. Editorial writers are employed to write. They have no pecuniary interest in the property. In small cities the editors are part owners frequently; in the villages they are the full owners almost always.

For the so-called great newspaper the staff writes to order. The subjects are assigned and the treatment is indicated by the editor. The policy of the sheet toward the important questions of the day is understood126 and respected by all. Independence of thought is not supposed or permitted to disport itself from that policy. All articles are closely revised by some one else after the writer has finished with them. They are made to conform to established policy, precedent and practice. This tends to routine treatment rather than to bursts of originality. It influences to dull writing. The knowledge that his work is to be revised is repressive rather than stimulating to the writer. If changes in his article are frequent he chafes and frets, imagines that injustice is being done to him, gets discouraged and unhappy.

The personality of the general writers for the press in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, is known to a few of their associates only—is unknown to the general public. Indeed, it would puzzle even newspaper men to name the editors in chief and the managing editors of the morning and afternoon sheets in New York City, although many of them, of course, are known to almost everybody.

In the small cities, and especially in the villages, these conditions are in exact reverse. The editor owns his newspaper. He is known personally or by reputation to almost every member of the community. He may write as he pleases on any topic, about anything, about anybody. He may praise his friends or lambaste his enemies; may be brilliantly original or stupidly conservative or hopelessly imitative. He is of great community influence and importance. Not even the village clergyman is more so. He is made much of at127 all gatherings and is welcomed wherever he goes. The huntsman brings him bags of game; the gardener refreshes him with the earliest tender vegetables; his table is spread with the choicest of juicy fruits.

The writers for the big newspapers discourse on topics of national importance—topics that are supposed to interest the masses. Rarely do they write about people they know or have met unless they are doing reportorial work. The village editor busies himself chiefly with matters of concern to his community alone. His references to national topics may be few. Of his own people he may write with a sympathetic personal interest born of close contact with them, with knowledge of their whims, their excellences, their deficiencies, and their wants. His purpose is to interest them. He knows that they are more interested in themselves and in each other than in anything else.

A considerable proportion of village folks and farmers now take a daily paper from the nearest city of size. This daily sheet covers national and world-wide topics so completely that the weekly cannot compete with it advantageously in these lines. But the daily sheet cannot compete with the weekly in the printing of those delicious little intimacies of village life that most of all do interest the villager. The oft repeated assertion that the daily newspaper is running out the weekly is untrue.

If the village editor chooses to do so he may achieve a supremely satisfying influence. He is the spokesman of the community, voicing its sentiments, explaining its128 needs, defending its rights. He may render it extreme service by appealing to outside interests in praise of its enterprises, its attractions, its prosperity. He may assist it immeasurably by helping to organize and sustain its protective associations, its commercial leagues, its welfare organizations, study clubs and charity circles. He may encourage community pride. If he praises Deacon Stevenson for the beauty of his lawn and floral effects the deacon’s neighbors are sure to make rival lawns. The editor may urge to clean village morals as well as to clean streets and tidy door yards. He may create public sentiment and ripen patriotic spirit and be the moral and the intellectual force of the region. He may lead in all things.

The village editor may make himself beloved by his people. His relation to them is that of close intimacy. He may print the good things they say, may reproduce their ideas as well as describe their doings. He records the important events of their lives, the details of their successes, the parts they take in public affairs.

He welcomes the babies as they are born and wishes them their full share of all the good things this Jolly Old Earth has to give. He joins in congratulations, felicitations and joyful vociferations to bewildered brides and grinning bridegrooms. And when the hand of death is laid, he reverently and tenderly recalls that the summons must come to all sometime; and he sorrows and grieves with those on whom affliction has fallen.

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The city newspaper is heartless when domestic scandals or business irregularities are under public consideration. It has no thought of lessening personal sorrow. The country editor reasons something like this: “I do not pretend to print all the news of this community. My readers are all known to me and are personal friends. They help me in my business. Why should I print stuff that will give them pain or sorrow? I am under no obligation to print anything about anybody. My newspaper is conducted as a business proposition. I am responsible for what it says and it is not any one’s business what I print. I am personally interested in community interests and I wish to advance them always; but I do not care to mix in my people’s personal quarrels or their domestic affairs unless community interests are involved. Why should I? Some people seem to think that I should print everything about everybody—except themselves. There is a certain element in every community that rejoices in other people’s discomfiture and I do not wish to cater to that feeling.”

Not only does every one in the community read the community paper, but every young man and every young woman brought up there subscribe for it when going to live elsewhere. It comes as an intimate letter from the old home, and nothing can be too trivial or too unimportant to interest them so long as it relates to somebody or something they have known in the days of their youth—the bursting of the old dam, the fall of the old chimney, the burning of the old130 academy, or of the old mill, the marriages, the deaths, the activities of former playmates in political, business or social life, anything pertaining to the old home town, anything that recalls the scenes of childhood, the memories of youth—all are of absorbing interest.

Not long ago the editor of the Fulton (N. Y.) Patriot made a big hit by getting a lot of the people who had moved away to write reminiscences of their early life in Fulton. Almost all of the writers were remembered by the home readers and the letters made much talk. Every error was pounced on and letters of correction started controversy. People involved in the talk were pleased. Members of the human family like to see their names in the newspapers.

But the editor should have ambitions and missions far beyond mere village gossip. The small towns of the Eastern states have become centers in which endless varieties of manufactured goods are turned out, and it is up to the editor to exploit every new thing connected with the raw material and with the making and the marketing of the product in which the community is interested. The middle-state towns are given largely to manufacturing on a larger scale, to coal and coke and oil industries, to steel, to the making of machinery. The editor should furnish all possible information. The South with its cotton, sugar, and tobacco is an especially interesting field for community specializing.

But greater than these is that vast industry spreading from the Atlantic to the Pacific in which one half131 of the nation’s population is interested because dependent on it—agriculture. Now, of the sixteen thousand weekly newspapers printed in the United States more than ten thousand are published in rural communities—in villages where the prosperity of doctors, lawyers, merchants, tradesmen, schools and churches depends on the prosperity of the farmer. Nearly every farmer takes a journal devoted to agriculture; but farming conditions vary greatly in different regions, and the village editor who can furnish real information to the farmer of his immediate neighborhood will perform the most valuable sort of community service. The average man is more interested in his business than in anything else. He delights to read about it.

The editor’s greatest concern should be to serve the interests of his parish. The people look to him for leadership and help. They want the community exploited. They want their share of everything going. They want the prices of their products kept up and their taxes kept down. They want good roads, good schools, good markets, attractive churches. And they appreciate an excellent newspaper. There are hundreds of villages and hamlets, especially in the South and in the West, that are far removed from any large city. Their inhabitants lose interest in the doings of the great outside world, but their own needs are sensed with no shallow understanding.

Village life throughout our country is taking on the attractions of intellectual uplift and refinement that long have been the pride and the boast of New England132 communities. The New England village, made attractive by its imitation of the beautiful village of Old England, has spread far across the continent. Poets and story tellers have idealized its shady streets, gilded its church spires and praised its intelligence with every felicity of language. It has its libraries, its study clubs, its improvement associations, its lecture courses, its high schools, its churches, its every facility for liberal education. Usually there is a college close at hand.

It is something of a fad at the moment for our young writers of novels to exaggerate the repulsive features of the American village, to magnify its unpleasant aspects, to ignore its excellences. But just as the measure of a man’s greatness should rest on his highest achievements rather than on his lowest, so should the beauty of a village be judged by its tidy lawns, its fragrant flower gardens, its artistic vistas of shaded streets, instead of by its back yards, its ash and garbage heaps, and its dumps for old tin cans. The degree of its intelligence and refinement should include the people of education and culture in the measurement as well as the louts, the clowns and the vulgar ignorant.

The modern village has many of the essential advantages possessed by the city: facilities for the development of intellectual life, for study, for personal ease and comfort, for the enjoyment of social life. You have a more wholesome existence; live a little nearer to nature; your friendships are finer and more133 lasting. Your very environment persuades to a greater appreciation of community comradeship.

Printing a newspaper here offers a fascinating and a fairly profitable career to the young man just quitting his studies. Electricity and gasoline have greatly increased the pleasures of village life, have literally transformed rural regions by giving quick communication with business and social and intellectual centers. Modern devices have bereft life there of much of its old-time drudgery. The people are wide awake. Their general intelligence is quite equal to the general intelligence of city people.

Likewise, the newspapers are much improved. Modern printing machinery and facilities have removed irksome processes. Editorial associations and the technical newspaper press have inspired to higher ideals. The business has become standardized on a higher plane of excellence. Many of our high schools and almost all of our colleges have courses in journalism. Their educational influences are reflected already in the country newspapers, especially in the West. The state universities of Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota, for instance, have sent hundreds of young men back to their villages to do journalistic work. The leaven of preparation is working wonders.

Moreover, success in village or small town journalism frequently leads to success in big cities. The editors of big city newspapers are overwhelmed with candidates for a place on the staff, but the applicants usually are unknown beginners, and they are rejected. But134 the village editor of real ability cannot hide his light; his good work attracts attention. The managers of the great journals seek men of superior quality and ask them to join the newspaper staff. Hundreds of the finest editors in this country started or matured on our rural newspapers. Good newspaper work, whether in city or country, attracts attention and is sure of reward.

The village editor’s task is not easy. He writes almost all of the edition and conducts the business end as well. His editorial page may reflect his fancy for little or much comment, but he naturally will have one article in each edition on a subject of national importance and two or three relating to community interests. He will compile from the daily sheets a column or two of the most important news of the world and will clip from the exchanges interesting miscellaneous matter, paragraphs and articles. He will encourage his readers to write letters to the editor for publication, and these he will revise and prepare. He will have a news correspondent in every neighboring hamlet, and this news must be revised and made ready to print. His neighborhood news is of vital importance for his villagers know almost all of the inhabitants for miles around.

But his chief task is to be found in the collecting and writing of so-called local news. The very life of his sheet depends on this information. To gather it involves constant, painstaking toil. He has to hunt for it, has to mingle with the people in the search for it.135 The measure of his success as an editor may be found in his ability to recognize what is news and what is not. This is an editorial accomplishment that may be enriched by study and observation. Let him seek to know what will interest his reader, what his constituents are thinking about and especially what he can print that will set them to talking. To make the paper interesting, to make it talked about, should be his constant anxiety.

The mission of the village sheet is to amuse, to gossip, to reflect community life rather than to educate. The editor lives in close intimacy with his people and if he be wise he will assume the attitude of making their interests his interests. He will make elaborately long accounts of their public meetings, the social gatherings, the ball games, the school contests, the things the people do. His constituents may know of world-wide events from the city papers but they cannot read about themselves anywhere else than in his paper. Thousands of Americans never see their name in print except perchance in the village newspaper and they are grateful, indeed, to see it there.

The village newspaper should not seek to imitate the city sheet. Its editor should devote his energies to the rural needs and the rural activities of his five thousand or ten thousand constituents. Let them get their outside information from the city dailies or the periodical press.

And our provincial editor’s acute temptation will be to imitate—to make his sheet like his neighbor’s sheet.136 He will be tempted to save time and study by stealing the thoughts of others. He wants a leading editorial article. What so easy as to rewrite one from the columns of a distant daily changing not the form of construction or the argument or the conclusion—changing nothing but the wording. This is a common practice of the lazy editor. I hope to be forgiven for so constantly referring to it as a repressive influence, as a serious detriment to the progress of American journalism. It easily becomes a habit. Its practice is alluring for, if it produces a more thoughtful article than the editor is capable of writing, the people praise it thus giving to the editor the most subtle of all flattery, the flattery that is undeserved, the flattery that attributes to a man something he does not possess. The editor enjoys it overmuch.

The village editor usually is deep in local politics. Quite as much as any one else does he help to name the town officers, the county rulers, the man to the legislature, the congressman. Frequently, indeed, he is called to these posts or to the higher honors of the State. He sits on governing boards and he is a delegate to all sorts of conventions. He is big in public affairs.

This kind of newspaper life is entirely different from that of the city. It is a life that may be made exceedingly attractive and that may be enjoyed to the uttermost because of its independence, its great influence, its close intimacy with the people and its opportunities for wholesome service. What the editor137 writes is read by everybody, the children as well, and we all know how a child is influenced by what it reads.

Some one has said of the village editor: “He comes pretty near being the boss of the entire town.”