aining the reporter and the demands of academic
hours will interfere with sharing in the best of big stories.

=Aims in teaching the art of reporting=

Routine is the curse of the newspaper, and it is at its worst in
reporting. In its face the four hard things to get are the combination
of the vivid, the accurate, and the informed and the condensed story.
Equipped newspapers of high standards like the New York _World_
require recourse to reference books, the "morgue," and the files in
every story where details can be added to the day's digging in that
particular news vein. Condensation comes next. The young cub reporter
generally shuns both. He hates to look up his subject. He spreads
himself like a sitting hen over one egg. Both must be required for
efficient training. Compression it is difficult to enforce in a school
where paper bills are small or do not exist and the space pressure of
the large daily is absent. A number of dailies of large circulation
are cultivating very close handling of news and space for feature and
woman stuff with very great profit, and the schools give too little
attention to this new phase of the newspaper. In all papers, the old
tendency to print anything that came by wire is gone and mere "news"
has not the place it once had. In particular, local news was cut down
one half in a majority of dailies in cities of 250,000 and over from
August, 1914, to the close of the war. The small daily in places of
less than 50,000 and weeklies did not do this, which is one reason why
great tracts of the United States were not ready for war when it came.
Woe to the land whose watchmen sleep!

=The teaching of copy-editing=

Copy-editing is the next task in the training of the coming newspaper
man. On the small daily and weekly, there is little of this, but it is
practiced on the metropolitan daily. There ten to twelve men are
needed, doing nothing else but editing copy. In the office, two or
three years are needed to bring a man to this work. No school can
teach this unless its men give at least a full day to editing a flood
of copy that will fill a 12 to 16 page newspaper. Where the work of
the students runs day by day on the copy of one of the lesser dailies,
editing for that purpose is secured, but not the intensive training
needed to handle the copy-desk requirements of newspapers in a city of
1,000,000 population or more in its urban ring. Success in this field
is proved when men go direct from th