ing editor, news
editor, city editor, Albany correspondent and political man, from
among the printers he had known on the New York _Tribune_. In ten
years these were succeeded by college graduates, and the _Sun_ became
a paper whose writing staff, as a whole, had college training, nearly
all men from the colleges.

College men were in American journalism from its early beginnings;
but, speaking in a broad sense, the American newspaper drew most of
its staff in the eighteenth century and in the first half of the
nineteenth century from among men who had the rough but effective
training of the composing room, with the common school as a beginning.
When the high school developed from 1860 on, it began to furnish a
large number of journalists, particularly in Philadelphia, where the
Central High School manned many papers. By 1880, college men began to
appear in a steadily growing proportion, so far as the general writing
staff was concerned. If one counted the men at the top, they were in a
small proportion. In journalism, as in all arts of expression, a
special and supreme gift will probably always make up for lack of
special training.

Between 1890 and 1900, the American newspaper as it is today was
fairly launched, and Joseph Pulitzer, the ablest man in dealing with
the journalism of and for the many, was the first conspicuous figure
in the newspaper world to see that the time had come for the
professional training of the journalist, the term he preferred to
"newspaper men." Neither the calling nor the public were ready when he
made his first proposal, and with singular nobility of soul and sad
disappointment of heart he determined to pledge his great gift of
$2,000,000, paying $1,000,000 of it to Columbia University before his
death and providing that the School of Journalism, to which he
furnished building and endowment, should be operated within a year
after his death. This came October 29, 1911, and the school opened the
following year.

=Journalism today requires general and technical training=

The discussion of the education of the journalist has been in progress
for twoscore years. In 1870 Whitelaw Reid published his address on the
"School of Journalism" and urged systematic training, for which in the
bitter personal newspaper of the day he was ridiculed as "the young
professor of journalism." In 1885, Mr. Charles E. Fitch, but just gone
after long newspaper service, delivered a course of lectures on the
tr