The age-herald., 1900-10-14
NED BRACE TALKS ABOUT NEWSPAPER
 EDITORS AND BUSINESS MANAGERS

Did you ever edit a newspaper? No. Well, don't you ever do IL Be the business manager, He is the popular fellow. In the first place. the reporters and sub-editors and even the proof-reader likes him be- cause he never requires them to do any work and he pays them salaries every Mon day afternoon and congratulates them daily on the good paper, and advances them suits of clothes and the like. to come put of next weeks and the following weeks salaries. The editor is maigned by the staff be- cause he don't write everything himself and turn it over 10 the staff to be read in copy and edited at their pleasure. But the outside public is where the business managers popularity comes in. He tells the fellow who opens two-by-four shoe store on the corner of Pigtail alley that he shall have display write-up on the front page for his grea, enterprise in open ing an up-to-date bargain counter shoe store in Birmingham, and thinks the editor an ass because the shoe store write-up is thrown over under a one-line black head on an inside page to make place for a cable gram from China, giving an account of the capture of Pekin. He likewise thinks
 
 should go at the top of a page with Cor bettMcCoy prize fight story beneath it, and thereby makes himself popular with the druggist, while the reading public abuse the editor for not having a more extensive descriptive story of the capture of Pekin, and care not that such cable grams cost over two dollars word.
 
 The editOr neWSn9Der is never thanked for aiding in promoting a public enterprise or the upbuiding of a city. But let him criticise the adyisabllity of paving a street, or issuing a bond, or giving away a public franchise, and committee of in- terested citizens immediately call to con- vince him that they are acting not for themselves, but for the good of the com munity, and that his editorial utterances such lines calculated to work ma terial damage to the growth of the city Let him write about cheaper gas or electric lights or putting conductors on street cars or higher wages for laborng men, and he becomes an iconoclast, and one who seeks tc drive aw!N capital. He gets no credit from the othtNs, either. Let him say these things are all right: that cheaper necessi- ties, more public utilities and higher wages will come in time maturity is reached, and he is denounced as a purveyor of plu- tocra tic views. So be the trials of an edi- tor. But he has his pleasures. He can ride on some railroads and go to tie theatre free, or at the expense of the business manager if he will give said business man ager enough space from his news columns 10 print long railroad schedules which few read and advance notices about shows which nobody believes.
 These views may not be entirely accurate, but that's the way it strikes me in looking in upon the men who make newspapers in Birmingham.
 By the way I observed an experience of an editor of a Birmingham newspaper not many months ago. A tramp to all outward appearances walked into his office one after noon. The fellows trousers were frayed out at the point they reached midway between the knee and the shoe top. The coat, of a vintage of the sixties, was bespattered with mud and car grease.
 "I want job reporter editor or proof reader I know the newspaper business from top to bottom"
 "All right" replied the editor, "you are the man we are looking for. Go to Ensley and write that church fair story"
 Where is Ensley?" he asked. "I've just hit town.'
 Didn't you say you were a reporter?' asked the editor.
 Pardon me, sir" and he bowed out with the air of a Chesterfield.