The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the onewho works his way up. He holds that the only way to start is as aprinter's devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, tograduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographertake down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a realreporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speakingacquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even exceptingPolice Captains.
That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way he wastrained, 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 toofull a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusionsconcerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen andjustifiable 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 doesnot work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, hishealth, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, andsometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises onlythat men may have light by which to read it. But if he has been in anewspaper office from his youth up, he finds out before he becomes areporter that this is not so, and loses his real value. He should comeright out of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" forthe college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work withoutknowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's Point, and withthe idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power ofthe Press is greater than the Power of Money, and that the few lines hewrites are of more value in the Editor's eyes than is the column ofadvertising on the last page, which they are not.
After three years—it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long—hefinds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasmin exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge, theopportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and mostremarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and agreat fund of resource and patience. He will find that he has crowdedthe experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that hehas learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved wheneveryone else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; towrite as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk withauthority on matters of which other men do not venture even to thinkuntil they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbowon the night previous.
It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand whatmanner of man young Albert Gordon was.
Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yalewhen his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train forNew York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of theinnumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office atnoon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come,to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody ofconsequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reportershurried him to the office again with his "copy," and after he haddelivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French