Young fellows looking forward to a newspaper career often have in mind an editorship of some sort. They want to guide and instruct public opinion. The trouble is that the public doesn’t yearn to have its opinion guided and instructed. It wants to get the news and be entertained.
Consider who are making the real newspapers and magazines to-day. Not the grave and learned publicist who is giving advice on the state of the Nation from the seclusion of some hole in the wall; not the recluse with a bunch of academic theories.
It is the reporter with the nose for news. He is the only fellow who has any business around newspapers or magazines. In general his job is not to produce literature, but to do reporting.
Often a good pair of legs makes a good reporter. The newspaper man must always be on the job, always hustling, always ready to go to any inconvenience or suffer any fatigue to get the news. And above all, so far as routine reporting goes, he must be honest and accurate.
Charles Dickens, who was a reporter before he became a writer of novels, says of some of his experiences:
I have often transcribed for the printer, from shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.
The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which we “took” as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the country and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket handkerchief over my notebook after the fashion of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.
I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep--kept in waiting, say, until the Woolsack might want restuffing.