Many essential elements enter into
the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a
single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the
opportunity and give the final touch.
Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of
human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it
is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I known
some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.
The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been
the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were
journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in
kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in
New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had
led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many
things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very
successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea--a really
great, original idea--the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising
the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was
followed by Greeley and Raymond--making a curious and very dissimilar
triumvirate--and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and
Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer
and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a
wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of
letters and affairs.
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