The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reporter Who Made Himself King, by
Richard Harding Davis

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Title: The Reporter Who Made Himself King

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Release Date: January 22, 2008 [EBook #407]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING ***

The Reporter Who Made Himself King

by

Richard Harding Davis

The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one
who works his way up. He holds that the only way to start is as a
printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to
graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer
take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real
reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking
acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting
Police Captains.

That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way he was
trained, 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 too
full a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions
concerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and
justifiable 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 does
not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his
health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and
sometimes his life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only
that men may have light by which to read it. But if he has been in a
newspaper office from his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a
reporter that this is not so, and loses his real value. He should come
right out of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" for
the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work without
knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's Point, and with
the idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power of
the Press is greater than the Power of Money