The age-herald., 1900-06-03

| It is the clearing house of the estab itshment again, in that copy may anC l does come to the desk full of errors Of per | son, contradictions of fact and contraVen l tions of the rules of the office; but 1t mus l leave the desk devoid of these blemishes. Again 1t is the clearing house agains | which the account of all errors is laid | To correct the mistakes of correspondent. | requires telegraphic tolls; certain mistake! | of reporters are considered the excusabl,
 result of writing against time or the ec l centricities of a typewriter; the verba | ideas and instructions of the authoritte! | are intangibilties that suffer strange de 1 n',.,,a,i+ af ,.SShct with se - ai,> ti, | rnistol,es of tbs sSHspaper office, Dut siie l him in - ..le copy reader appear against | tho-.4 'tne accusing Dlack anu WHllS LII a.. printed paper.
 Altogether, considering that he Is sup posed to know as much of types as a printer, to be as correct as a chronometer made by Caesars wife, as expeditions as the growing of a scandal, as full of infor- nation as gray-haired librarian with lots of leisure, and possessed of memory as complete as Macaulay's, l am of the opin- ion that the copy readers lot is a cross between that of the policeman in "The Pirates of Penzance" and that of the Le- vite's goat turned into the scant browsing of the wilderness.
 The duties of the reporter have already indicated in a general way. Specifically, first, last and always, they are to get the news and write it.
 His requisites are as few and simple as the questions of a civil service examina- ton for a coal weigher. An alertness that knows no wane; the physical trim to work twenty hours out of the twenty-four; a nose for news as keen as that of terrier for a rat; good habits, good address, good tob verbal and the ability to write a column story in clear, swinging English in less time than it would take the superior liter ary gentleman to decide on the moods and leases of his opening paragraph.
 Oh, I know the old cry of reporter s English" It is true, of course, that the talk of the man on the street gets into his copy, that his grammar is sometimes slipshod, but the talk of the man on the street in time becomes academic, and grammar is only the logic of usage. It is true that one reporter did write a thrilling
 story of a maiden mother" and that an
 other spoke of the dry weather having Il
 dampening effect on the wheat market '
 but it is equally true that Thackeray for
 got the names of the people about whom
 he was writing; that some passages of Carlyle are unparsable and that some of
 Gladstones parentheses were larger than his main sentences
 And it is equally true that some or the
 reporters English Is as vivid in its descrip-
 tion any screams of Le Gallienne's, as classical in it's allusions as a speech of De pews and almost as epigrammatic as the
 last inoffensive thing by MT. Richard H
 Davis which reminds me that this same Mir Davis never did better work than wher he put his good reporters English into van Bibber:' that Tn the Market Place is full of the vigor of Harold Frederic's re- reDOrterS
 has given us Robert Shacketon's '"rwoo-
 mey and Captain Others" and Jacob A Riis's "The Other Half" that "Chimmit
 Fadden" was written by D. w. Townsend when he was a reporter, and that he ha: done nothing as good since that Pet' Dunn's reporters Irish has placed MT
 Dooley in the Hearts of his Countrymen;' that Pene du Bois translated the wit, wick | edness and wisdom of the French into re l porters' English; that John Mumford's re 1 porters English fills the gorgeous authorit. l on Oriental rugs; that it furnished Colone | Harvey his first start that it is reporter! English that has given us Roy McCardelfi
 poems, John R. Spears History of Oul