That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way he was
trained, and that is why at the age of sixty he is still a reporter.
If you train up a youth in this way, he will go into reporting with
too full a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions
concerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and
justifiable impression that he is not paid enough for what he does.
And he will only do what he is paid to do.
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does
not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his
health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and
sometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only
that men may have light by which to read it. But if he has been in a
newspaper office from his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a
reporter that this is not so, and loses his real value. He should come
right out of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" for
the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work without
knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's Point, and with
the idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power of
the Press is greater than the Power of Money, and that the few lines
he writes are of more value in the Editor's eyes than is the column of
advertising on the last page, which they are not.
After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long--he
finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his
enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge,
the opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most
remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a
great fund of resource an patience.
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