TRAIL OF THE REPORTERS
AS INDICATED elsewhere, actual objective reporting of news was in its infancy in Oregon in the 50's; and in what little local writing was done the emphasis was heavily political.
When the Weekly Oregonian boasted of having employed P. J. (Pat) Malone, recently arrived from California, to provide a shorthand report of the territorial legislature, the scornful Statesman of Salem insisted that the Oregonian's report was no better than theirs. Neither one had the space to make any very effective use of shorthand reporting; and a glimpse of Mr. Malone's shorthand reports indicates a considerable degree of boiling down into indirect quotes. This, however, helps to classify Malone as an actual reporter with some gift of editorial selectivity, rather than a mechanical stenographer.
When newspapers were giving as little as one column out of 28 or 32 columns of their space to local items, it didn't, perhaps, make much difference who was doing the local reporting; and the local reporter almost invariably went nameless and unsung.
Contemporaries of Malone seem to have paid less attention to him as a reporter than as an editor.
There were no "by-lines" (by Watt A. Newshound) for anyone in the 50's. For that matter, they were few and far between until the days of the bigger papers, and linotypes, and fast presses, and cheap paper—the days of the 90's. The Spanish War period brought in the by-line writers with a grand rush. But we are thinking now of those days of the Civil War period.
When George Himes arrived from Olympia in 1864 to become a compositor on the Oregonian, D. C. Ireland already had begun a career of close to half a century in Oregon journalism and was doing a combination job of reporting in the afternoon and setting up his gleanings in type at night.
DeWitt Clinton (better known as D. C.) Ireland was one of Portland's earliest regular reporters of local news. He was a contemporary and associate of several of the big men of nineteenth century journalism, including Horace Greeley and Harvey Scott.
Ireland's method was to pick up the market news and other local matter along the street and set it up in type from his notes, without transcribing them. Ireland was working for the Oregonian when Harvey Scott came on as editor in 1865 and stayed for some months later. One year (1865) Ireland covered the legislature, at Salem, for the paper. The next year he went up the river to Oregon City and started the Enterprise.
In the Oregon Daily Herald, published in Portland, under date
