The Changing American Newspaper
by
[Columbia University Press, $1.50
IT is trite to say that America will get ‘better’ newspapers only when their readers ask for them. Mr. Brucker, assistant to the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, apparently bases his book on that belief; he has written his brief 96 pages to describe major newspaper deficiencies and to outline remedies.
His opening chapter (a revision of his article in the Atlantic for August 1935) describes the ‘glut of occurrences’ in twentieth-century life that has rendered inadequate the standard journalistic techniques based on objectivity, exclusion of everything but overt events, avoidance of explanatory material as though it had the smallpox.
Chief among deficiencies he places the hodgepodge manner in which American newspapers are put together; the failure of newspapers to staff themselves with editors who can not only edit but also analyze, interpret, and illuminate; and the slavish adherence to forms of news display, headline writing, and news story construction that today often serve more to confuse than to enlighten.
That these faults are remediable not only Mr. Brucker but also the handful of newspaper editors whom he uses as models do not doubt. The time-honored forms of news and headline writing are already being modified in favor of methods that present the news in clearer, more interesting, more significant fashion. There are even newspapers that have staffed themselves with men qualified for the kind of reporting, editing, and rewriting that Mr. Brucker desires.
One might wish that Mr. Brucker had talked more directly to newspaper readers — an approach that would probably yield more immediate and influential demands on the newspapers than any amount of gratuitous suggestion. He has chosen, instead, to talk to newspaper men, for he employs journalistic jargon and assumes thorough understanding of the journalistic problem.
But the hook is one of broad interest nevertheless. The several newspapers whose practices it cites furnish plentiful evidence that its author is writing of no fantastic optimum, but of practicable methods of suiting 1938 daily journalism to 1938 circumstances and the needs of 1938 readers.
MITCHELL V. CHARNLEY