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 dep............