History of Journalism in the United States/Preface
PREFACE
Man frequently knows little about the phases of existence with which he conies into daily contact. As frequently he is not even curious regarding them. He telephones for a taxicab, is whisked to a labyrinthine terminal in time to catch an express, which clanks across viaducts conjured up by engineering's sheerest magic—usually without query save that prompted by solicitude for his comfort of the moment. Man goes, comes, and eternally accepts, en route. His, for the most part, is a post facta viewpoint. Effect is what really concerns him. He is likely to be bored by those who expound cause.
Among the commonest and least comprehended ingredients of living is the daily newspaper. More powerful than public school or college, more vitally affecting destiny than all the churches of all the sects, it thrusts its well or ill conceived messages into the homes and minds of the millions. Coral like, it has reared itself into an all encircling reef, upon which beats the tidal wave of world politics or laps the insignificant ripple of village chatter. The roar of the tidal wave and the lap of the ripple are what men think they hear. Actually they do not. What one hears is the note of the reef—the newspaper. Wherefore let us consider its beginnings.
Never have citizens needed more urgently an understanding of the genesis and development of journals which—although they may deny it—shape their trend of thought, their ethics and tastes, and their interest in the matter of national honor. To review compactly the pedigree of American journalism, detachedly and simply, has been the intent of Mr. Payne. He has done it.
This book may well prove to be profitable reading for earnest and careless alike—both perforce are members of the great army of newspaper consumers. It will repay, amply, snatched perusal in the city room of any Park Row between assignments—how many reporters can pass a genuine test in the fundamentals of a profession into which they are putting even more of themselves than their fellows of the law and medicine? Finally, it will be worth a great deal to students in the schools of journalism, so rapidly increasing throughout the country. For seven years I have watched mature minded young men and women leave Morningside to help get and write the news you and I read. They and their sort must know the background of their craft. A decade ago one embarked upon a newspaper career in an almost jocund spirit of adventure. The jocund spirit and the flavor of adventure will persist, but let us carry with us the records and the maps—old fashioned though they be—of the pioneers, strong and weak alike, who made the newspaper of to-day possible.