"That's clever," said Mr. Pulitzer, "but it's absolute nonsense, except about the editorial page. Have you got the clipping with you? I would like to hear what that smart young man has got to say about the other papers." I went to my cabin, got the poem, and read the whole of it to him--witty characterizations of The Evening Post, The Sun, The Journal, The Tribune, The Times and The Herald. As soon as I had finished reading, Mr. Pulitzer said: "The man who wrote those verses had his prejudices, but he was clever. I'm glad you read them to me; always read me anything of that kind, anything that is bright and satirical. Now, I'm going to give you a lecture about newspapers, because I want you to understand my point of view. It does not matter whether you agree with it or not, but you have got to understand it if you are going to be of any use to me. But before I begin, you tell me what YOUR ideas are about running a newspaper for American readers." I pleaded that I had never given the matter much thought, and that I had little to guide me, except my own preferences and the memory of an occasional discussion here and there at a club or in the smoking room of a Pullman. He insisted, however, and so I launched forth upon a discourse in regard to the functions, duties and responsibilities of an American newspaper, as I imagined they would appear to the average American reader. The chief duty of a managing editor, I said, was to give his readers an interesting paper, and as an angler baits his hook, not with what HE likes, but with what the fish like, so the style of the newspaper should be adjusted to what the managing editor judged to be the public appetite. A sub-stratum of truth should run through the news columns; but since a million-dollar fire is more exciting than a half-million-dollar fire, since a thousand deaths in an earthquake are more exciting than a hundred, no nice scrupulosity need be observed in checking the insurance inspector's figures or in counting the dead. What the public wanted was a good "story," and provided it got that there would be little disposition in any quarter to censure an arithmetical generosity which had been invoked in the service of the public's well-known demands.