The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1903-09-09
PULITZER SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

One of the common remarks in the
press about Mr.. Pulitzer's $4,000 0'
school of journalism, is that the prop
er place to make newspaper men is il
newspaper office. This kind o
po3tulate once had a much wider ap
plication than it finds now. Time wa:
that the lawyer had no faith in Law
schools; the place to make an attorney
was in law office where young mar
would spend his time copying docu-
ments, trying small cases and ningling
in the hurly-burly of the courts. But
in due course the law schools wor
their way into high professional re-
spect. Doctors, too, thought the office
student would turn out better than the
youth who took a medical course
but there are few of that class of doc
tors to think SO any more. 1t is not
so long ago that circuit-riders, veteran
exhorters al camp meetings, sneered
at the term in theology; but where is
the influential pulpit that is now in
habited by the preacher whose only
'1arnin' was picked up on the road
Only in journalism, which should be the
most progressive of callings, does the
musty old prejudice against a special
school or collegiate course for news
paper-writers prevail.
Far be it from us to decry the value
of the training young man gets in a
newspaper office. True journalists are
made there. But the point is that a
newspaper office has other duties
than to educate boys and girls in the
details of it's business. It ought not
to be a kindergarten Or a common
school, When 1t is so the readers of
the paper upon which the tyros do their
practice work, have to take the evil
consequences in bad writing-which a
driven editor often has no time to re-
pair-in poor thinking, in damaging
inaccuracies. Every newspaper owes
its readers the best work of trained
give them the crude product of appren-
tices; yet almost every smaller news
paper is forced to teach some of its
staff the rudiments of their trade be-
cause it has no corps of graduates of
schools of journalism to draw upon.
Law, theology, medicine, teaching, the1
army and navy, all the intellectudlI
vocations, own schools of learning TO
recruit from; Journalism, which is vast
ly in need of special knowledge has
none.
What is this special knowledge? Po-
1iticaI history, sociology, laws of libel,
the doctrine of responsibility, the his
tory of journalism, business forms and
principles, the organization and ad-
of newspaper offices, pure
of copy" typewriting and the like
may be set down as part of it. These
things may be learned in schools. Why
not? Many of them appear in collie
giate courses now; and it is fact that
the most famous journalists of the time
spent the years in studying such things
which other young men passed wholly
in newspaper offices learning to be re-
porters all their lives and underlings
of the men who were college bred.
OF course the Office experience must
be had by the beginner with the press
as with the law; but it may be taken
as the sum of common experience that
the youth who goes to the office pre-
pared by competent teachers will learn
more there in two years than the office
bred youth has learned in his whole
apprenticeship and will. moreover. be
able to use what he has learned more
skilfully. There is no question about
that. Horace Greeley, the greatest of
the office-bred journalists insisted upon
having young college graduates about
him in the editorial positions of the
Tribune. He did not turn to the
prentice hands for help; instead he
drew about him men like Charles A.
Dana, Bayard Taylor, Whitelaw Reid.
DR.. Ripley and John Russell Young;
and these men were the beacon lights
of journalism until Joseph Pulitzer
came. And one of the first things this
great man does with his accumulated
riches is to give young men the chance
to enter journalism by a route which,
by that act, he confesses to be a wider
and a fairer one than that which cir
cumstances compelled him to choose
for his own.
-$
No doubt the ST. Louis fair authori-
ties want Hawaii to have a building
of it's own. The more buildings the
bigger the fair. Possibly Hawaii