condition of the newspaper. The early reporter who once gathered the city news and turned it in to be put into type and made up by the foreman,—often also, owner and publisher, in a sheet as big as a pocket-handkerchief, is as far removed from the men who share in the big modern daily, as far as is the modern railroad man from the rough, tough individual proprietor and driver of the stagecoach, though the driver of the latter was often a most original character, and a well-known figure on the highway as railroad men are not.

of the pro

fession of

As this change in the American newspaper came between Evolution 1860 and 1880, the public demand came for the vocational training of the journalist and experiments in obtaining it journalism began. When Charles A. Dana bought the New York Sun in 1868, he made up his staff, managing editor, news editor, city editor, Albany correspondent and political man, from among the printers he had known on the New York Tribune. In ten years these were succeeded by college graduates, and the Sun became a paper whose writing staff, as a whole, had college training, nearly all men from the colleges.

College men were in American journalism from its early beginnings; but, speaking in a broad sense, the American newspaper drew most of its staff in the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century from among men who had the rough but effective training of the composing room, with the common school as a beginning. When the high school developed from 1860 on, it began to furnish a large number of journalists, particularly in Philadelphia, where the Central High School manned many papers. By 1880, college men began to appear in a steadily growing proportion, so far as the general writing staff was concerned. If one counted the men at the top, they were in a small proportion. In journalism, as in all arts of expression, a special and supreme gift will probably always make up for lack of special training.

Between 1890 and 1900, the American newspaper as it is today was fairly launched, and Joseph Pulitzer, the ablest man in dealing with the journalism of and for the many,

Journalism today requires general and

technical training

was the first conspicuous figure in the newspaper world to see that the time had come for the professional training of the journalist, the term he preferred to "newspaper men." Neither the calling nor the public were ready when he made his first proposal, and with singular nobility of soul and sad disappointment of heart he determined to pledge his great gift of $2,000,000, paying $1,000,000 of it to Columbia University before his death and providing that the School of Journalism, to which he furnished building and endowment, should be operated within a year after his death. This came October 29, 1911, and the school opened the following year.

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The discussion of the education of the journalist has been in progress for twoscore years. In 1870 Whitelaw Reid published his address on the “School of Journalism" and urged systematic training, for which in the bitter personal newspaper of the day he was ridiculed as the young professor of journalism." In 1885, Mr. Charles E. Fitch, but just gone after long newspaper service, delivered a course of lectures on the training of the journalist, at Cornell University. Two years later Mr. Brainerd Smith, before and after of the New York Sun, then professor of elocution in the same university, began training in the work of the newspaper in his class in composition, sending out his class on assignments and outlining possible occurrences which the class wrote out. This experiment was abruptly closed by Mr. Henry W. Sage, Chairman of the Cornell Board of Trustees, because the newspapers of Minneapolis inclined to treat the university as important, chiefly because it taught 'journalism." Mr. Fred Newton Scott, professor of rhetoric in the University of Michigan in 1893, began, with less newspaper notice, training in newspaper English, continuing to the present time his happy success in teaching style to his students.

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In 1908, Mr. Walter Williams, for twenty-four years editor, first of the Boonville Advertiser, and then of the Columbia, Missouri, Herald, became dean of the first school of journalism opened in the same year by the University of

Missouri. This example was followed under the direction of Willard G. Bleyer in the University of Wisconsin. By 1911, nearly a score of colleges, universities, and technical schools were giving courses in journalism.

By 1916, the directory of teachers of journalism compiled by Mr. Carl F. Getz, of the University of Ohio, showed 107 universities and colleges which gave courses in journalism, 28 state universities, 17 state colleges and schools of journalism, and 62 colleges, endowed, denominational, or municipal.

The teachers who offered courses in journalism numbered 127. Of these, 25 were in trade, industrial, and agricultural schools, their courses dealing with aspects of writing demanded in the fields to which the institution devoted its work. The number of students in all these institutions numbered about 5000. This gave about 1200 students a year, who had completed their studies and gone out with a degree recording college or technical work in which training in journalism played its part. With about 40,000 men and women who were "journalists " in the country at this time, there are probably - the estimate is little better than a guess about 3000 posts becoming vacant each year, in all branches of periodical work, monthly, weekly, and daily.

The various training in journalism now offered stands ready to furnish a little less than half this demand. I judge it actually supplies yearly somewhat less than a fourth of the new men and women entering the calling, say about 750 in all. As in all professional schools, a number never enter the practice of the calling for which they are presumably prepared and still larger numbers leave it after a short trial. In addition, training for the work of the journalist opens the door to much publicity work, to some teaching, and to a wide range of business posts where writing is needed. No account also has been made here of the wide range of miscellaneous courses in advertising provided by universities, colleges and schools of journalism by advertising clubs, by private schools, and by teachers, local,

Development of

schools of journalism

lecturing and peripatetic. It will take at least ten years more before those who have systematic teaching in journalism will be numerous enough to color the life of the office of the magazine or newspaper, and a generation before they are in the majority.

But numbers are not the only gauge of the influence of courses and professional study on the calling itself. The mere presence, the work, the activities, and the influence of professional schools raise the standards of a calling. Those in its work begin to see their daily task from the standpoint which training implies. Since the overwhelming majority of newspaper men believe in their calling, love it, rejoice in it, regret its defects, and honor its achievements, they begin consciously to try to show how good a newspaper can be made with nothing but the tuition of the office. Inaccuracy, carelessness, bad taste, and dubious ethics present themselves at a different angle when judged in the light of a calling for which colleges and universities furnish training. A corporate spirit and a corporate standard are felt more strongly, and men who have learned all they know in a newspaper office have a just, noble, and often successful determination to advance these standards and endeavor to equal in advance anything the school can accomplish. This affects both those who have had college training and those who come to their work as newspaper men with only the education of the public schools, high or elementary. More than 1000 letters have been received by the School of Journalism in Columbia University, since it was opened, asking advice as to the reading and study which could aid a man or woman unable to leave the newspaper office to study to improve their work. College graduates, in particular on newspapers, begin systematic study on their own account, aware of an approaching competition. Definite standards in newspaper writing and in diction begin to be recognized and practiced in the office, and slips in either meet a more severe criticism.

Newspaper associations of all orders play their part in this spontaneous training. Advertising clubs and their

great annual gatherings have censored the periodic publicity of the advertising column as no other agency whatever could possibly have done. How far this educating influence has transformed this share of the American periodical in all its fields only those can realize who have studied past advertisements. Every state has its editorial association. These draw together more men from the weeklies and the dailies in cities under 50,000 of population than from cities of more than 500,000. These associations thirty years ago were little more than social. They have come to be educational agencies of the first importance. They create and assert new norms of conduct and composition. The papers read are normally didactic. All men try to be what they assert they are. From the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, bringing together nearly 1000 of our leading newspapers to meetings of the weeklies of a county, a region in a state, a whole state, sections like New England or the Southern States of particular classes of periodicals, these various organizations are rapidly instituting a machinery, and breathing a spirit whose work is a valid factor in the education of the newspaper man. Not the least influence which the schools of journalism exert on the active work of the calling is through these associations, particularly in the states west of the Mississippi where, at the present stage of journalism in this region, state universities can through schools of journalism bring newspapers together at a newspaper week."

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The rapid growth in students registered in "journalism courses did not gauge the demand for professional teaching in the craft of the newspaper or the magazine. A large share of the " journalism" taught consisted simply in teaching newspaper English. The college course has been no where so vehemently and vigorously attacked as in the training it gave in writing English. Few were satisfied with it, least of all those who taught it. At least one college professor, whose method and textbooks were launched thirty years ago, has recanted all his early work in teaching composition and pronounced it valueless or worse. The col