ties such as Gilbert Farrar and John E. Allen are predicting even larger type in the paper of the future. How to get it and still crowd in the news, together with all the other encroachments on newspaper space, is an unsolved question. Condense, condense, condense, is the cry; but if a little condensation is good, more is not necessarily better. Overelimination of detail must mean reduced interest—which is not good for the paper. Anyhow, larger type sizes, more legible type faces are in use than in the early newspapers, and the result is easier read ing for a reader that's harder to hold than the pioneer for whom reading had less competition.
The papers contain more news, better handled, now than ever in their history; and this is easily illustrated in the newspapers of Ore gon. If yesterday was the age of the editor, today is the day of the reporter. Old-timers who took the Oregonian turned to Harvey Scott's editorial page first; the younger readers are not likely to turn first to anyone's editorial page. Like it or not, that's the situation. But what has happened, is that the improving work of the reporters, here and abroad, has made the news so interesting, has covered vital situations so well, that there is an aroused interest, a hunger for interpretation and for opinion—which some daring innovators want given in the news story itself but which conservative editors want retained on the editorial page, fearing to trust interpreters not to vitiate the facts themselves. Reporters have built up, in the last forty or fifty years, an ability to get and to handle detail that has made reading of their news a thrill. How to save such detail in the reduced-sized papers for which there is so much clamor and so much cost-pressure is a present problem.
Frankly, in pioneer Oregon there were no real news-reporters. They came in, slowly, with D. C. Ireland, and Pat Malone, and Urban Hicks, and some of the others of the fifties and sixties. They felt their way toward form. Chronological approach, starting at the very beginning, when someone turned in the fire alarm, was their only known method of handling a story of any length. Early-day news stories reeked with the reporter's reckless comment, revealed his inability or unwillingness to gather detail or to get names or do any of the things on which the city editors of the last fifty years have more and more insisted. In those days the readers bought the paper for the political editorials, for the news from the East, for every thing but the story of what was going on in town. That was to develop. No one then was using the now overworked illustration of news interest by picturing a pebble thrown into a pond, with the surface less and less disturbed as one got away from the point of impact. Newswriting was getting better in the seventies; newsgathering was much improved in the eighties without much advance in the writing; the nineties were approaching more recent standards.
Sports writing (see chapter VII) was practically non-existent in
