But his chief task is to be found in the collecting and writing of so-called local news. The very life of his sheet depends on this information. To gather it involves constant, painstaking toil. He has to hunt for it, has to mingle with the people in the search for it. The measure of his success as an editor may be found in his ability to recognize what is news and what is not. This is an editorial accomplishment that may be enriched by study and observation. Let him seek to know what will interest his reader, what his constituents are thinking about and especially what he can print that will set them to talking. To make the paper interesting, to make it talked about, should be his constant anxiety.
The mission of the village sheet is to amuse, to gossip, to reflect community life rather than to educate. The editor lives in close intimacy with his people and if he be wise he will assume the attitude of making their interests his interests. He will make elaborately long accounts of their public meetings, the social gatherings, the ball games, the school contests, the things the people do. His constituents may know of world-wide events from the city papers but they cannot read about themselves anywhere else than in his paper. Thousands of Americans never see their name in print except perchance in the village newspaper and they are grateful, indeed, to see it there.
The village newspaper should not seek to imitate the city sheet. Its editor should devote his energies to the rural needs and the rural activities of his five thousand or ten thousand constituents. Let them get their outside information from the city dailies or the periodical press.
And our provincial editor’s acute temptation will be to imitate--to make his sheet like his neighbor’s sheet. He will be tempted to save time and study by stealing the thoughts of others. He wants a leading editorial article. What so easy as to rewrite one from the columns of a distant daily changing not the form of construction or the argument or the conclusion--changing nothing but the wording. This is a common practice of the lazy editor. I hope to be forgiven for so constantly referring to it as a repressive influence, as a serious detriment to the progress of American journalism. It easily becomes a habit. Its practice is alluring for, if it produces a more thoughtful article than the editor is capable of writing, the people praise it thus giving to the editor the most subtle of all flattery, the flattery that is undeserved, the flattery that attributes to a man something he does not possess. The editor enjoys it overmuch.