"I am going to retire at once," Malcolm went on. "I"ve been at it nearly fifty years--ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I"ve been in charge there almost a quarter of a century. I think I"ve earned a few years of leisure to work for my own amus.e.m.e.nt. I"m pretty sure they"ll want you to take my place. Would you like it?"
"I"m not fit for it," Howard said, and he meant it. "I"m only an apprentice. I"m always making blunders--but I needn"t tell you about that."
"You can"t say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the question is not, are _you_ fit? but, is there any one more fit than you?
I confess I don"t see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the paper all of the best that there is in him."
"Of course I"d like to try. I can only fail."
"Oh, you won"t fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and Coulter--especially Coulter. In fact, I"m sure you"ll quarrel with them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you"ll probably win out.
Only----"
Malcolm hesitated, then went on:
"I stopped giving advice years ago. But I"ll venture a suggestion.
Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue.
Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don"t strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem of no consequence the next morning but one after the election."
"I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil, what you now put into words. But there is something in me--an instinct, perhaps--that forces me on in spite of myself. I"ve learned to curb and guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger, more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I should fail miserably. I should be lost, compa.s.sless, rudderless. I have often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad mess of my career."
As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms at "sentimental bosh." But instead, Malcolm"s face was melancholy; and his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just starting where he had started so many years ago:
"No doubt you are right. I"m not intending to try to dissuade you from--from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution, self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other side--these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action.
All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly.
Its folly remains its essential characteristic."
Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the _News-Record_.
His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting upon Malcolm"s advice, gave him a "free hand" for one year. They agreed not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.
The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the office, read among the "Incidents in Society:"
Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed in the _Campania_ yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport season.
XV.
YELLOW JOURNALISM.
While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three hundred thousand copies, the _News-Record_--the best-written, the most complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the most accurate--circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two other newspapers had almost half a million.
The theory of the _News-Record_ staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the _News-Record"s_ smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debas.e.m.e.nt. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.
Howard did not a.s.sent to these self-complacent excuses. He was democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of the "yellow journals" with the most intelligent, alert and progressive public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste.
He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of satisfying the demands of the public.
He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff.
But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose cooperation was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship one of the young reporters--Frank c.u.mnock.
He chose c.u.mnock for this position, in many respects the most important on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood and, finally and chiefly, because he had a "news-sense," keener than that of any other man on the paper.
For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. c.u.mnock persuaded Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days" work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer"s house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description c.u.mnock got upon the track of Thayer"s niece and her husband, found the proof of their guilt, had them watched until the _News-Record_ came out with the "beat," then turned them over to the police.
Also, c.u.mnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He found in the New England edition of _The World_ a six-line item giving an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City Editor to a.s.sign him to go there; and within a week the press of the entire country was discussing the _News-Record"s_ exposure of the barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and his keepers.
"We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news,"
Howard said to c.u.mnock. "They"ve put you here because, so they tell me, you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised.
And I a.s.sure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true?
Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?"
"Is that "straight"?" asked c.u.mnock. "No favourites? No suppressions? No exploitations?"
""Straight"--"dead straight"! And if I were you I"d make this particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If anybody"--with stress upon the anybody--"comes to you about this, send him to me."
Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.
"We look too dull," King began when Howard asked him if he had any changes to suggest. "We need more and bigger headlines, and we need pictures."
"That is it!" Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in perfect accord. "But we must not have pictures unless we can have the best. Just at present we can"t increase expenses by any great amount.
What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger headlines and plenty of leads?"
"I"m sure we can do better with our cla.s.s of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures."
"I hope," Howard said earnestly, "that we won"t have to use that phrase--"our cla.s.s of readers"--much longer. Our paper should interest every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper"s audience should be like that of a good play--the orchestra chairs full and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we"re not an "organ" any longer?"
"No, I didn"t." Mr. King looked surprised. "Do you mean to say that we"re free to print the news?"
"Free as freedom. In our news columns we"re neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing but the news."
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. "Hum--hum," he said. "This _is_ news. Well--the circulation"ll go up. And that"s all I"m interested in."
Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the "yellow journals." He wished to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria--the mad rush for sensation and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the paper look like a series of disordered dreams.
He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted, was--results.
The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six years, his weekly "night off" and his two weeks" vacation in summer excepted, had "made up" the paper--that is to say, had defined, with the advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous conservative. He believed that an editor"s duty was done when he had intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with Howard"s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.
"We"re on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the "yellow journals"
for the pennies of the mob," he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King, one afternoon just as Howard joined them.
Howard laughed. "Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in the gutter, actually scuffling."
"Well, I"m frank to say that I don"t like it. A newspaper ought to appeal to the intelligent."
"To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion, that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we"re intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they"re intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But let"s go out to dinner this evening and talk it over."