By Helen Gray Cone YES, you may build her again I know not how or when, VOL. XXII.-48 Somewhere she ranges free, Stately, a shape of light, Revisiting leagues of sea She hangs like a lucent cloud On the coast where her guns spoke loud, In the gates of the Moslem proud, Till the Crescent grew faint with fright. Tracing the course of the race Came down to the Stripes and Stars! Aye, the old pride stirs her still And she haunts the moonlit, seas Still the ghostly muskets rattle, Ah, never sailor-man Has seen her where she ranges, Clear, absolute, and free! Yet, some stern hour to be, When a fight is fought at sea, And the right of the fight is ours, And the cause of the right is failing, There shall rise a frigate sailing, A luminous presence paling Through the powder-cloud where it lowers; Pale smoke from her side shall break, Pale faces over her railing Shall frown, till the foemen shake Touched with a magic that heals, That the strong Dead fight behind him: "Tis the ghost of IRONSIDES, Come back from the tameless tides, From the ocean-fields unbounded, Complete with her scattered spars, (THE CONDUCT OF GREAT BUSINESSES-SIXTH PAPER) By J. Lincoln Steffens WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. R. LEIGH HE executive heads of some twoscore of the great newspapers in America, "talking shop" on a railway train last spring, spoke of their properties as factories, and when the editorial department was mentioned discussed "their traffic in news," and likened the management of it to that of a department. store. White paper was the raw material which was bought in bulk by the ton to be sold at a profit retail, and the price and quality of the several brands was the favorite topic of conversation. The machinery by which it was prepared for the market was interesting; circulation and advertising were fascinating subjects, too delicate and dangerous, however, for easy chat. Public ques tions were not once raised, and editorial policies might never have existed. These men were the publishers and business managers and proprietors of newspapers, not editors and writers, but they "ran" their papers; they represented "the press." Journalism to-day is a business. To write of it as such is to write of it as it is. ment store is borne out in principle and method. The managing editor aims to supply all the wants of all sorts of people, and the variety of interests handled there is divided into departments, each with a sub-editor : the foreign news, with a cable editor; the national and state news with a telegraph editor; the local news, with a city editor; and so on through the dramatic, the financial, the society, the exchange, the art, the literary, the sporting departments, with their expert managers and corps of assistants. "Extr', extree! just out." This may seem to the "constant reader" a rather brutal conception of the fourth estate, but it is the inside view, and Mr. Leigh, who has taken it for his illustrations, partly accounts for, if he does not wholly justify, it. His pictures of the press, composing, and stereotyping rooms, with their immense, complicated, delicate machinery look like glimpses of a factory plant. The paper on which the news is printed is the heaviest single item of expense; the man The man who paid the paper bill of $617,000 expended altogether that year more than two millions of dollars. He has a morning and an evening paper, and he employs 1,300 men and women every day in the year, besides twice that number who serve him at occasional critical moments. His stock in trade, the news, is collected from all over the world. The course of his business affects and is affected by every interest in the civilized world, and he has connections in two or three, often conflict- he is deficient in executive ability he has ing, capacities with all the businesses in the. community where his paper is published. To conduct such a business requires expert skill. The methodical expenditure of so much money is difficult enough, while to do it and make a profit is a financial operation of the first magnitude. It means that a multitude of complex problems have been solved, that all sorts of intricate, delicate transactions have been carried through in accordance with a well-studied plan and carefully defined principles. It means brains and character, such as were found in all the other businesses described in this series of articles. Now this whole article might be written to show this in detail. But the truth of the proposition is quite obvious in this case, and in the course of my preparation of material I came upon something better. I talked with the editors, proprietors, and managers of nearly a hundred newspapers, representative journals of New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco, Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, and of many cities, towns, and villages in between, and while they related their experiences, described their methods, and showed their plants, they disclosed, often unconsciously (which was best), their point of view and the direction they are taking. These bear on the future of journalism. The magnitude of the financial operations of the newspaper is turning journalism upside down. There are still great editors whose personalities make the success of their organs, but, always few, the number of them has not increased with the multiplication of newspapers, and even where they dominate they have to leave to others the mass of detail that has accumulated under and about the editorial chair. If the editor is the owner and has business capacities, he is attracted downstairs to the counting room. If to engage a man who has it, and the re- "What paper, sir?" Newspaper men see the drift of their profession into commercial hands. I found editors everywhere who deplored it as a fact, and business managers who rejoiced at it as a hope yet to be fully realized. The question that rises in the layman's mind was in theirs What is the business man going to do with the newspaper? When a commercial journalist sets out to build up a newspaper, he does not have an ideal before him. He does not say to himself that modern journalism is bad, that there is no paper in the world that is perfect, and that the way it ought to be is thus and so. I met a dozen men who had begun with their pa The raw material of the business. It is bought in bulk, by the ton. Delivered as shown in the picture it is unrolled, then rolled again on the press cylinder to be reeled off in newspapers in shape to sell. pers during the last fifteen years, some who had succeeded within five years, and their stories were all alike in essentials. They had picked up the business in the news or business departments. While they were doing that they were studying the field. Just as a thrifty grocer's clerk goes around, not with ideas of the sweetest but ter and the purest sugar in his head, but with savings in his pocket, and a clear notion of the peculiarities of neighborhoods, and picks out a vacant corner in a residence district, so the would-be newspaper publisher seeks a place. If there is a chance to open a store in Fifth Avenue, the young grocer may undertake to stock up with fine goods, otherwise he will be content to supply the Third Avenue trade. One of the most recent journalistic successes I inquired about closely was a onecent evening newspaper in Philadelphia which was established by a man who had gone to that city as the head of a subordinate department on a high-priced paper. He spent two or three years surveying the field. There were high-class morning and VOL. XXII.-49 evening papers, more than enough morning papers to satisfy all tastes, but among all the evening papers there was only one for a penny and that had no news. It had absolutely no telegraph service, and the local matter was cheap gossip. There was a vacant corner, he thought. He analyzed the demand he believed existed, talking with people he met wherever he went and reading the penny papers that were succeeding in other large cities. Then he bought a moribund two-cent evening paper. Feeling his way cautiously, he altered the sheet to conform to his empirical ideas and reduced the price to one cent. From 6,000 a day the circulation increased in a month to 28,000, in a year to over 50,000. In three years his paper was a paying property. Every city of the first rank has some such example of quick success, and the most recent are evening papers, showing that there has been a movement in that direction. The field has been neglected till the rise of the commercial spirit and the fall of the price of white paper opened it. The old journalist, though he valued his |