The Glut of Occurrences: To-Day's News and to-Morrow's Newspaper
EVEN in the complex society of to-day the function of the press differs little from what it was when the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, appeared on September 25, 1690. Benjamin Harris, the publisher, said in his first and only issue: ‘It is designed, that the Countrey shall be furnished once a moneth (or if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener,) with an account of such considerable things as have arrived unto our Notice.’ Harris promised a faithful relation of memorable occurrents of Divine Providence in order ‘that people every where may better understand the Circumstances of Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home.’ He also wanted to do something toward ‘the Curing, or at least the Charming of that. Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us,’ and which inevitably prevails where there is no newspaper.
Harris, in short, promised an accurate account of what was happening in the world — that is to say, news. So it has been in American journalism ever since, with variations in treatment and technique necessitated by changes in the social scene. Once the essential sameness of the newspaper’s task in any society has been granted, however, it is necessary to note that from time to time changes in the manner of performing that task become necessary.
In other words a newspaper, anywhere, at any time, is substantially the same thing. News is not.
I
‘This is the 124th day of the year 1935 and the 305th day of the 159th year of our independence. The moon was new on Thursday. Wednesday was May Day, dedicated to lovers and radicals. Maryland has been a State for 147 years on Sunday.’
With this paragraph the New York Sun recently introduced its weekly department, ‘It Happened This Week.’ This department, dating from December 26, 1931, is so far as I know the first of many signposts pointing toward the newspaper of to-morrow. Since then many others have appeared. For more than two years the Richmond News Leader, in Virginia, has abandoned its entire Saturday editorial page to an interpretive summary of the week’s news. Every week the Associated Press prepares a briefer review which may be found, for example, in the Sunday Kansas City Star. More ambitious, the New York Times began this year to give two full pages each Sunday to an illustrated non-interpretive summary of the week’s happenings, an example closely followed, though with a little more interpretation, by the Washington Post. And there are others. For the present, however, these ventures remain week-end adjuncts to the daily newspaper rather than models for it.
Meanwhile one continues to hear enthusiastic if not always well-informed criticism of the newspaper as it is. The complaints of scientists, professors, educators, and all sorts of observers of public affairs are well known. More significant is the fact that one hears the same thing from responsible editors themselves. At the 1934 meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, for example, J. Charles Poe of the Chattanooga News said the following, together with much more along the same line: —
‘Pick up the average newspaper and what do you read? We still find, in great abundance, items dealing with petty police court gossip, crimes of little or no moment, divorce cases, the doings of a movie star, town or county council meetings, ambulance runs, a Y. M. C. A. membership drive, a school commencement exercise, resolutions by women’s clubs denouncing war in time of peace and urging patriotism in time of war; the misadventures of a Senator, or the daily doings of an air hero, the debates over tariff or soldier bonus and a thousand and one other items no different from those of a hundred years ago. It is the mere surface of the stream of life and it is no wonder that Professor Gallup’s surveys reveal a distressingly low reader interest in such so-called news. . . .
‘Our own experience, after starting a page, one day a week, devoted to modern trends in education and science, shows by the fine reader response that the public is willing to read about the new movements in social fields treated as news and not as sensation or as stunts.
‘This and other efforts of our paper cause me to suspect that the press has been guilty of talking down to its readers. We have assumed that their intelligence averaged about that of a third-grader and printed a paper accordingly. Some say that the press moulds and leads public opinion, others that it but mirrors the life of its time. Sometimes I fear that in our news columns we do neither, but that we lag far behind in supplying that which the public is really capable of understanding and which, in its inarticulate way, it sincerely wants to get.’
Or again, as Stanley Walker put it, ‘Few students of the trends in news coverage of recent years have given credit to the changes, sometimes almost imperceptible to the general reader, which may be laid to the influence of the news magazine Time and to the New Yorker. These weeklies, although different in appeal, nevertheless have demonstrated what some people suspected all along — that facts, marshaled in smart, orderly fashion, can be charming. . . . The New Yorker . . . has made money by treating its readers, not as pathological cases or a congregation of oafs, but as fairly intelligent persons who want information and entertainment.’
At this point anyone who watched the citizenry eating alive the verbatim testimony of the Hauptmann trial while the President’s message on social security in the same paper went unread may pause, disillusioned. And yet, one is haunted by the possibilities: ‘The mere surface of the stream of life’ versus ‘ facts, marshaled in smart, orderly fashion.’ Suppose some publisher took his courage along while he went digging beneath the surface of the news. Suppose we found a way to abolish the headline heterogeneity of the American newspaper and printed instead a smooth, ordered story of the world each day. With what refreshment of spirit our congregation of oafs would beat a path to the news stands!
Small wonder, then, that since the war there has been recurring gossip to the effect that so-and-so was going to bring out a new newspaper, new not in being merely another added to the existing ones, but new in what it is and does. Though nothing ever came of it, at least one such project reached the stage of staff organization. And now new specifications for a newspaper with a wholly fresh approach to the age-old task of journalism exist.
II
In former days the method of presenting separate stories on the day’s happenings as they came along was entirely adequate, as indeed it still is with many an item to-day. Yet as the increasing complexity of the world becomes more apparent, as the reader finds that his own interests reach more and more out of the familiar circle of his daily life into the unknown fields of economics and the other social sciences, this method often leads to bewilderment.
Newspaper editors have recognized this, especially in the years since the war. They often summarize all the stories devoted to some big news event in front-page boxes. For otherwise, in the endeavor to give all the news, these stories are spread over so many columns, or even pages, that the reader, appalled, is likely to turn to his radio news commentator for relief. On page one of the New York Times on the morning these lines are written, for example, appears the news of Pope Pius’s warning to the nations against war. This was considered by the editors the most important article of a number all dealing with the same general subject — namely, the repercussions following Adolf Hitler’s denunciation of the Versailles military clauses. But, because these related articles were displayed on four different pages of the paper, there was printed immediately under the page-one headline on the Pope’s allocution a group of five bulletins summarizing as many stories on the general subject of the rearmament of Germany. Even so, four major news articles and five minor ones on the inside pages were omitted from the summaries.
A different use of the same principle may be seen in a bulletin from the front page of another issue, set two columns wide and headed ‘Results in Major Sports Yesterday.’ This summary tells under four subheads the news of tennis, rowing, baseball, and racing. Without it the reader would have to absorb the message of nine headlines over six columns of stories on four different pages before getting the same news. Even all this is inadequate, again, because about four pages of other sport news are not included in the front-page bulletin.
There is, however, more to this matter of smooth, ordered news presentation than mere summaries, mere boiling down. For just as there are signs that editors, in their week-end reviews, are feeling their way toward something new, so there are signs that readers want something new. They want, I think, far more than they now get of those twin imponderables familiar to newspaper men as background and interpretation.
How else can one account for the success of Time magazine, of the radio news commentators, of current-events lecturers, indeed for the rise of interpretive writers in the newspapers themselves? A news-hungry public apparently does not find what it seeks in its own news columns. As one woman’s club member recently told another on leaving a current-events lecture, — and this tale is not apocryphal, — ‘Well, now I won’t have to read the papers for two weeks.’
In its simplest form this factor missing from the news is something which the reporter tends to omit from his account because he knows all about it, whereas the reader does not. The point is made clear in a review of D. W. Brogan’s Government of the People, which says: ‘The interest in Dr. Brogan’s work is heightened by the fact that, writing as an Englishman for Englishmen about our outlandish political institutions, he has occasion to explain many simple features which our own people do not understand but which our own authors would be ashamed to explain in an adult work.’ Every day American reporters seem equally reluctant to include obvious but necessary facts in their stories. For example, an Associated Press dispatch before me, one of a collection made last year as the ideas here presented were growing, appears in the New York Herald Tribune under the head ‘ Pickets Awed, Permit Kohler To Enter Plant.’ The story begins: —
KOHLER, Wis., July 17. — The ill blast of strike winds swept to-day through this ‘ideal village,’ dedicated to an idyllic industrialism.
The situation was epitomized in the lonely stalking through lines of pickets to the administration of the Kohler Company of Walter J. Kohler, former Governor of this state and builder of the model places and village. He lives here and has been an intimate of many of the residents.
For seven more paragraphs the story runs on. It tells the details of Mr. Kohler’s lone parade through the picket lines to his office, and gives other bits of spot news. It even tells some facts about this unique industrial village, where labor troubles have been unknown for the twenty years of its existence. It tells everything, indeed, except the news, namely: How and why did a strike come about in this strikeless community?
Presumably no reader of that morning’s New York newspapers yet knows.
And not a day goes by but what not one but many stories like this are offered to American readers on the theory that they contain all the news that’s fit to print, rather than the mere surface of the stream of life. That is what I mean by saying that the reader often misses the element of background in the news stories he reads.
III
It also happens, however, that laymen miss interpretation in the news columns. And this, of course, is deliberately left out on suspicion that it harbors that antichrist of the newspaper man, opinion. Perhaps, therefore, it will help clear the way if we admit these two things: —
1. That it is the function of the reporter to tell what happened, and not what he thinks about what happened.
2. That even where opinion is admitted, as on the editorial page, fact is often more desirable than opinion. Thus it is better to scrap an editorial calling the mayor a liar and a crook, and to write another which, by reciting facts without using adjectives and without calling names, makes it obvious that the mayor is a liar and a crook.
Having admitted this, one must grant, further, that to write interpretation into the news means straying from pure fact into opinion. Yet this, I submit, is not so fearsome as it sounds. American journalism is conducted upon the assumption that news is fact and editorials are opinion, and never the twain shall meet. That this is infinitely superior to the Continental method of coloring the news to suit one’s fancy is not open to question. At the same time the absolute validity of the American doctrine is doubtful. The line between news and opinion is sometimes hard to draw. ‘The speech was enthusiastically received,’ records one reporter, while the man next him at the press table writes that it ‘received a fair scattering of applause.’ Again, the headlines on page one of the Times and Herald Tribune on stories dealing with the identical event began, last October 23, as follows: —
Times: HANKING LEADERS
RACK COOPERATION
WITH WASHINGTON
Herald Tribune: BANKERS FIRE
ON NEW DEAL
DESPITE TRUCE
Which was fact, and which opinion?
Possibly American newspaper readers unconsciously realize the difficulty of separating fact from opinion. Perhaps they are willing, the gospel of American journalism to the contrary, to swallow them both together. Indeed, I believe that they are ready to have editorials written into their news, without typographical differentiation or any other attempt to set one off from the other.
If any newspaper man is hardy enough to read beyond that statement, he will recall that most editorials fit into either of two classes, the explanatory and the argumentative. Explanatory editorials undertake simply to clarify some event the news reports of which have left the reader uncertain or bewildered. Argumentative editorials, by contrast, seek to induce the reader to be for or against something. Obviously, it is only the explanatory editorials which might be lifted from our editorial pages and written into the news. Surely this is not so radical as it sounds. It has been done since the year one in American journalism, by political reporters, foreign correspondents, Washington men, and a few other privileged creatures. Why confine it to them?
The thing may become clearer by citing an example. One of the many big news stories of post-war years which are noteworthy for the point under discussion is England’s going off the gold standard on September 21, 1931. Now this was news according to both the man-bites-dog school, which considers the unusual or spectacular as news, and a newer school which finds reader interest in the significance and meaning of an event. This newer school, of course, calls into question the classic dogma of newspaper men that the public will not read news merely because it is important. Certainly anyone who has written on current events has been appalled by the apathy with which the public greets the pearls he casts before them. Yet individual members of that same public, when they meet him, say, ‘Oh, you must know about this war (or NRA, or inflation) business. Please tell me what it all means.’ Perhaps, then, it is not the important news that is dull so much as the manner in which it is presented to the news-hungry reader.
So it was at the time of England’s departure from the gold standard. For example, the New York Times, always anxious to print all the news, gave this event fifteen stories covering more than thirteen columns on the day the news broke. But nowhere could the persistent reader, even though he staggered on down to the bottom of column thirteen, find a single unified, nontechnical, and full account of the news that ought to have been pretty well up in the lead of the lead story on page one, namely: —
1. How actually does a great nation leave a gold standard, and what is a gold standard, anyway? This is background.
2. What, according to the best of human experience and insight, does it mean? This, of course, is interpretation.
Most of the background facts pertinent to point one may be found in the Times of that day. The lay reader seeking quick access to the heart of the news could have made a good start, in fact, had he read the full text of a statement by the British Government announcing the suspension of gold payments, plus a quotation from the Gold Standard Act of 1925, both of which were on page one. But they were displayed as additions to the news rather than as its core, and so were not given space in the leading story.
To find an interpretation of the event the reader had to wait until the editorial writers, financial men, and specialists got on the job in subsequent days and weeks, although here again he might have made an excellent start by reading Mr. Noyes’s financial column in the Times the day the announcement was made. This essential material, however, was printed on page twenty-two rather than in the news on page one.
If this idea of interpretation in the news goes against the grain of the American newspaper man, who feels in his bones that editorializing must be left to the editorial page though the reader turn to the news weeklies, let him remember the individuals he knows personally as laymen and readers. They must remind him of Weber and Fields’s old story about the fact that barking dogs don’t bite: ‘You know that, and I know that. But the dog — does he know that?’ Just so reporters and editors know that news and editorial explanations should never meet. But does the reader, merely skimming the headlines and relying for information on the news weeklies, or tuning in on Boake Carter, act as though he knew it?
I believe that the traditional prejudice of newspaper men against interpretation in the news arose in part, at least, from the fact that it was built up to meet the needs of a simpler world. Did Tippecanoe and Tyler too get the nomination? Did Chicago burn? Did the banker’s son seduce a village maiden? To report these things meant simply to recite the facts. Anyone could understand them without help from Walter Lippmann. The only opinion that might exist about them was perhaps a disapproval of Tippecanoe, or of fire, or of the younger generation. It was on these things that what are called the editorial giants of those days let their emotions run loose, and it was better that the news was kept clear of it.
Nowadays, what with the alphabetical agencies, general strikes, Fascism, bank holidays, EPIC, wars that are not wars, Marxian dialectics, the Comité des Forges, silver nationalization, import quotas, code authorities, cosmic rays, European conferences, and work relief, news is different. There must be interpretation.
IV
The principal change from Tippecanoe’s day to this is that the frontiers of the average man’s life, even though he does not realize it, now reach beyond the uttermost horizons known to his fathers. The farmers and the business men of previous generations could carry on pretty much as they chose, subject only to near-by influences which they could know and see. But to-day the welfare of the Kansas farmer depends not only on the rainfall in Kansas, but on the AAA in Washington and on the rainfall in Argentina as well. It depends on the progress of collectivization and mechanization in Russia. This, with its counterpart in the industrial integration of the world, is an oft-repeated tale. There is no need to go into it, except to note that life is now more complex, more highly integrated with other lives out of sight and even out of ken, than ever before.
It is the effect of this that matters here, in that news sources have become infinitely more numerous and complex. The editor, of course, cannot go completely intellectual. He must still comb the streets for news, via the police, firehouse, hospital, and undertaker. He must assign the usual beats of courts, city hall, hotels, station, theatres, and so on down the line. But these no longer suffice. News now comes also out of laboratories and books. More disconcerting, it comes out of those human trends and tendencies in the realm of politics and economics and sociology which cannot be charted or measured, and which even the best reporters cannot interview. So it is that, while people still want to read about the big fire downtown and about the Smiths’ divorce, they also want to know if there is really anything to the current European war scare.
In sum, then, the journalistic formula being used in preparing the newspaper you will read to-morrow was developed by Pulitzer, Hearst, Stone, and Ochs a generation and more ago. It grew up with the horse and buggy. Once again it is time to redefine news.
Probably there are as many definitions of news as there are newspaper men. Nevertheless the reporters, copy readers, and editors of America are in substantial agreement as to what news is, for they all put pretty much the same assortment into their papers. And this uniformity springs from a conception of news as the unusual or the spectacular, with particular attention to that trilogy of human interest, action, sex, and money.
When the beginner can recognize this kind of thing he has a nose for news, and has made the first step toward becoming a newspaper man. Thus during my own first week as a reporter, in Springfield, Massachusetts, one of nine assignments on a given day was to cover a speech by an official of the near-by hospital for the insane. Pressure of other assignments kept me from hearing the whole talk, which appeared to be an objective summary of contemporary knowledge about, mental illness.
It happened that while I was listening the official said something to the effect that 400 persons at large in the county would be confined to the asylum within a year. Here was something spectacular. It was news, and inevitably it found its way into the lead of the story and into the headline over it. The city editor took occasion to compliment me, the beginner, on having a nose for news. And doubtless many a citizen enjoyed the item at breakfast next morning, perhaps commenting that Aunt Kate would surely be among the 400. The story was strictly accurate in fact, yet it was a distorted report of the speech. Because of its lopsided emphasis it gave an inaccurate picture of the event it reported. Not only that, but, granted the prevalence of mental illness in this society of ours, and granted the new things that are being found out about it every day, one wonders whether that news story, cast in the orthodox pattern of to-day, made as good reading as a more careful one which would have dug beneath the spectacular surface for the meat that was there.
For a demonstration of how much more readable background and interpretation can be than even spectacular spot news, one should turn to the files of the New York World reporting the life and times of Celia Cooney, the bobbed-haired bandit of 1924. Here was a sensational crime story, with a cumulative interest built by holdups, shooting, and mystery, climaxed by capture and conviction. Then came publication of a report by Marie Mahon, probation officer, on the young woman’s life. It consisted of facts, ‘marshaled in smart, orderly fashion,’ but facts dug out of the human depths so often passed by in the hurry for news. This report was background of the purest gold. On top of it came an editorial in the World written with a stinging realization of the significance of the girl’s sordid, tragic life. This was interpretation. Revealed in these three aspects — spot news, background, and interpretation — Celia Cooney’s career was more fascinating than the Hauptmann testimony, Father Coughlin, and the quintuplets rolled into one.
V
Omissions of real news like that, omissions prompted by respect for the news formulas of Dana’s day, may be found on almost any newspaper page. These omissions run from trivial ones to others whose ramifications touch obscure corners of modern life where even experts cannot penetrate. An example may be found in this story from the New York Times of June 20, 1934: —
LEAGUE GIVES LETICIA
BACK TO COLOMBIA
All Is Quiet in the Region Over
Which That Nation Nearly
Went to War with Peru
Special Cable to the New York Times
BOGOTA, June 19. — The League of Nations commission transferred Leticia to the Colombian civil authorities to-day in a brief ceremony.
Conditions in Leticia were reported to be normal and no trouble was expected.
By the Associated Press
BOGOTA, June 19. — The handing back to-day to Colombia of the jungle area of Leticia followed an agreement reached at Rio de Janeiro between representatives of Colombia and Peru.
The question of sovereignty over the region which had been administered by a League of Nations commission for the last year nearly caused war between those two nations.
The ceremony, as announced here, began at 10.30 A.M. and consisted of an exchange of speeches between General Ignazio Moreno of Colombia, Intendant of the Amazon Territory, and Commissioner Girahlez of Spain, on behalf of the League of Nations, followed by the signing of the act of delivery.
Presentation of this bit of news in two items, one a cable from the Times string correspondent in Bogota and the other from the Associated Press man there, offers an obstacle to the smooth absorption of the news by the reader. If the reader is to have first consideration, such items should be rewritten into a single story, without date line or indication of its source at all except the necessary credit to the press association, which might be decently buried in the middle of a paragraph. This is contrary to the usual press association rules. Yet, if the press associations are thus given credit for the news they transmit, surely they should not object to the rewriting of their dispatches to serve that sometimes forgotten man, their ultimate consumer.
If news were so rewritten, the event noted above could be transferred from the jungles of Leticia to the mind of the reader with less effort and more pleasure on his part. It is the news which interests him, and not the fact that the story came through the Times man or the Associated Press staff or both. Nor does he like to bite his news off in separate chunks, even though a copy reader has smoothed the way as best he may under the mores now in force on the desk.
Sometimes even to-day newspapers will let a rewrite man step in to smooth out the product of scattered reporters handling different angles of the same story. Thus on the morning of August 10, 1934, the New York Herald Tribune had on page one a story under a Sing Sing date line telling of the electrocution of Mrs. Anna Antonio and two accomplices for the murder of her husband. This story was jumped to the bottom of page nine, at the top of which was a separate story under an Albany date line, telling why Governor Lehman refused executive clemency. The New York Times, in spite of the fact that both reports must have come in by wire around midnight, apparently turned them over to a rewrite man, who wove them together into a connected story without any date line at all, simply telling all the news smoothly and intelligibly. It can be done. But these stories, alas, are conspicuous for their rarity rather than for their frequency.
More important than smoothness achieved by regrouping and rewriting, however, is the fact that the item on Leticia quoted above reports ‘the mere surface of the stream of life’ with a vengeance. The Leticia dispute had made big heads on page one in its day, when war threatened. That was the result of the definition of news as that which is startling and spectacular. But the humble formality of a peaceful transfer of sovereignty, so modestly displayed on an inside page, is even more important than the original threat of war. In a sense it is even more unusual. Throughout history states have gone to war over territorial disputes. Yet here is a territory being awarded to a nation, not after a military victory, but after peaceful adjustment.
Think of all the answers to What and How and Why which the item quoted does not give. Both background and interpretation are largely missing. Background would mean placing these little cables more in relation to the information contained in all the similar scattered items that had been published during the previous months of the dispute. To leave the item naked, not clothed in its historical environment, is to invite the reader not to read it at all, because it has little meaning for him. He sees a thousand such unrelated items. No wonder he is bewildered and indifferent. And no wonder he turns to his favorite sports columnist or movie critic for relief, for there he can find the news presented connectedly and intelligibly.
If this Leticia item was not placed in relief against its background of previous happenings, neither was it placed in perspective to reveal its significance. It is not only important that an international dispute, even though a minor one, has been settled peacefully. It is also important to tell why and how this happened, and what it means.
Another story from the Times offers some proof of the pudding. I refer to the Congressional investigation of the Wirt charges against the brain trust, from the issue of April 11, 1934. On page one is the news story beginning thus: —
WASHINGTON, April 10. — Dr. William A. Wirt, the Gary school superintendent who charged that ‘brain trusters’ within the government were plotting the destruction of the social order and that they had described President Roosevelt as ‘only the Kerensky of the revolution,’ who was to be kept in the White House ‘until we are ready to supplant him with a Stalin,’ to-day revealed the names of the ‘plotters’ to a special House committee.
On the editorial page, however, appears a story which — while the product of one man rather than of the research staff that consistent interpretation of the news would require — nevertheless does include both the background and the interpretation advocated here. I refer to Arthur Krock’s story on the Wirt investigation. It is unfortunately too long to be quoted in full, but some indication may be given by the lead, which says: —
WASHINGTON, April 10. — Representative Bulwinkle of North Carolina emerged to-day from the hearing of Dr. Wirt, over which he presided as Chairman, established as a strategist and man of the world. To him more than to any other factor it is due that the absurdities of the ‘brain trust plot’ against the President and the American social order were preserved from the lowest form of public burlesque.
The rest of Mr. Krock’s story continues to explain the significance of the event. It is full of such phrases of opinion as ‘the whole scene was laughable enough,’ or ‘what was left at the end of the Hoosier schoolmaster’s testimony was a lot of childish dinner talk from people with no governing responsibility or position.’ By present standards such statements are ruled out of the news columns. Yet are they not the very thing the reader wants?
VI
To print this kind of thing as part of the news, of course, would be to steal a valuable feature from the editorial page. But that is just what is needed. The whole newspaper ought to be one vast editorial page in so far as that page offers elucidation rather than argument. Editorial writers themselves have become a new type of reporter. As the news has become more and more complicated they have had to cease viewing with alarm and begin digging for facts in order to make interpretation possible. But the present editorial page, walled in away from the living news on page one, has gone unread by the masses. Take the interpretive editorials out of the splendid isolation of that page, multiply them freely, marry them to the news itself, and you will have new life and new color in the news pages. The news will become more intelligible, more readable. Sometimes the interpretation will even make news, as an occasional ‘dope story’ written under pressure from the dullness of the day’s news does now.
It does not answer, I think, to say that interpretation ought to remain divorced from the news, and embalmed in a separate editorial page plus perhaps a Sunday feature section. Readers do not make up their minds impartially on the basis of strictly factual news. They absorb the headline’s implication, and likely as not let the segregated editorial interpretation which might invalidate their snap opinion go unread. To-day’s news, or at least that part of it which comes from the socio-politico-economic front, is one whole with its meaning. You cannot cut the two apart into a news story and an editorial and have them remain alive.
Everything that is advocated here is in essence being done already by the American press. But interpretation and background now have to force their way in, through editorials, Washington or Wall Street gossip columns, features, interviews with a professor at the local university, ‘dope stories’ written in odd hours by the political man, or ‘situations’ mailed by the United Press man in Shanghai. What is needed is a newspaper which welcomes this whole trend and takes it for its own. The bits of interpretation now scattered through the paper must be synthesized into a whole. The paper must take the entire mass, spot news and dope together, and weld it into a connected, smooth-running, and living account of the day’s happenings.
To do all this is to put a new responsibility upon the newspaper. So long as it sticks to surface fact it dodges a measure of responsibility. As soon as it allows a staff of specialists to drag in background facts and interpretive opinion, it makes itself responsible for these highly interesting additions. Upon its shoulders rests the obligation not only to report that a noise was heard, but to determine and to say that this noise, though the great of the earth declare it to be the crack of doom, is only the sound of a popgun.
Under such a plan of action the newspaper would become, in a sense, a daily magazine. At least it would assume something of the responsibility which the magazine has already assumed. Long ago the weekly and monthly periodicals, hopelessly beaten in the competition for news by the telegraph, the linotype, the rotary press, and the other technical achievements of the daily paper, took refuge in the responsibility of interpretation. Here was something which no high-speed mechanical invention could give. It came instead from human expertness, and, so long as it was practised with integrity of motive, it gave the reader something he sought but could not often find in his daily paper.
Should we not admit that the important difference between news and opinion is a difference in motive rather than a difference in kind? The meaning of spot news in to-day’s sadly puzzled world is part of the news itself; and, so long as it is written with respect for the Fourth Estate’s obligation of objectivity, no newspaper man need fear it. So long as the newspaper does its news interpretation with clean hands and a pure heart, the resulting opinion will remain as untainted as the most superficial of to-day’s spot news stories.
To come at last, then, to a redefinition of news, we find that we must simply let the familiar quartet of what-where-when-why pursue their own way a little further into the roots of an event. News is the important, unusual, or interesting happening seen as a whole and not only on its surface. If the man bites the dog, that is still news. But so is a psychiatrist’s explanation as to why he did so.
One is reminded of a line from the Spewacks’ play, Clear All Wires. As I recall it, the sensation-seeking hero reporter is told by another character, ‘People are n’t interested in news any more. They want to know what’s happened.’