The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918O'Brien, Frank Michael
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The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918
O'Brien, Frank Michael
Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833)
In other words, don’t loaf, don’t cheat, don’t dissemble, don’t bully,
don’t be narrow, don’t grouch. Mr. Dana’s maxims were as applicable to
any other business as to his own. In a lecture delivered at Cornell
University in 1894--three years before his death--Mr. Dana uttered more
maxims “of value to a newspaper-maker”:
Never be in a hurry.
Hold fast to the Constitution.
Stand by the Stars and Stripes. Above all, stand for liberty,
whatever happens.
A word that is not spoken never does any mischief.
All the goodness of a good egg cannot make up for the badness
of a bad one.
If you find you have been wrong, don’t fear to say so.
All these maxims were quite as useful to the merchant as to the
newspaperman. They related to the broad conduct of life. They
counselled against folly, so far as the making of newspapers was
concerned, but they did not convey the mysterious prescription with
which Dana revived American journalism from that trance in which it
had forgotten that everybody is human and that the English language is
alive and fluid.
If there had been rules by which a living newspaper could be made
from men and ink and wood-pulp, Dana would have known them; but there
were none, nor are there now. The present editor of the _Sun_, E. P.
Mitchell, who knew Dana better than any other man knew him, said in an
address at the Pulitzer School of Journalism a few years ago:
Mr. Dana used to lecture on journalism sometimes, when he was
invited, but in the bottom of my heart I don’t believe he had
any theories of journalism other than common sense and free
play for individual talent when discovered and available.
And I do remember distinctly that when he sent Mr. Joseph
Pulitzer, then fresh from St. Louis, on to Washington to
report in semieditorial correspondence the critical stage of
the electoral controversy of 1876, Mr. Dana did not think it
necessary to instruct that correspondent to assimilate his
style to the _Sun’s_ methods and traditions. Never was a job of
momentous journalistic importance better done in the absence
of plain sailing directions; but that, perhaps, was due partly
to the fact that Mr. Pulitzer was somewhat of an individualist
himself.
For the ancient common law of journalism, as derived from
England, and perhaps before that from away back in Bœotia, Mr.
Dana didn’t care one comic supplement. If anybody had asked
Mr. Dana to compile a set of specific directions for running a
newspaper, his reply, I am sure, would have been something like
this:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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