THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING




The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter
is the one who works his way up. He holds that the only way
to start is as a printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn
in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a
stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at
public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter,
with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking
acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even
excepting Police Captains.

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