Las Vegas optic., 1912-07-17
REALJOURNALISM
ASPICTURED BY
REAL WRITER
HEAD or PULITZER SCHOOL
TELLS PROSPECTIVE PUPILS
WHAT THEY NEED

new School Of Journalism at Colum-
bia. has given an Illuminating picture
OF the schools purpose in the current
issue OF the Columbia University Quar-
terly
The school OF Journalism" DE
Williams writes. lis notable for three
factors. It has received from the gift
of Joseph Pulitzer the largest sum
ever set apart by any man for profess
sional training in the calling to which
he himself belonged. 1t is the first
school of journalism to use a great
city as its laboratory for technical
training. 1t has the advantage Of be-
ing part of great university in a
great city; it has the university's re-
sources to draw upon to give depth,
variety and accuracy to its training,
"These advantages would not suffice
if the hour had not come for profes-
sional, as distinguished from office,
training in the calling for which it is
to prepare men and women. All call
ings begin with the practice of the yo-
cation itself as the best training for it.
Each. as it develops, ends with the
training of the school. The develop
ment of the law book, the code, the
digest and the increasing publication
of decisions.
GAS the part played by the two fac
tors of personal knowledge and mere
acquaintance with procedure diminish
ed, and the recorded share of law in
creased the law school grew, until
within the memory Of men now living
the school superseded the office. There
are a very large number of lawyers
who do not receive in year much
more than half the sum spent on their
eduaction, yet the investment is sound
because without it not even this in
come could have been earned
"Mr. Pulitzer, whose sheer genius
for the journalism of the many has
never been exceeded, had been for ten
years in the battle of daily journalism
and had become the proprietor Of a
newspaper when he deliberately adj
dressed himself to hard reading in the
fields of political economy and polite
al science. His own development, the
development and changes in the New
York World, led him, toward the close
of his career, to say with prescient in
sight that the time had come when
there was body of knowledge, of de-
finite training, and of acquired and
recorded fact which the journalist
ought to know and learn in a school,
just as the growth of similar bodies
of knowledge had brought profession
al schools in other callings.
Newspapers do not make events
and issues. Events and issues make
newspapers. The important thing
about a newspaper man. when he sits
down to write a report OF an editorial.
is not how he can write, but what he
knows. He is practicing an art, and
the first quality of an art is that a
man shall have an aptitude for that
art. If this inspiration, though it be
but single vital drop, be not in him
he will struggle in, vain to become
journalist because he is entering on
one of the great arts of expression
the capacity to focalize the floating
events of a day, not with reference
to the future. but to tomorrow; to feel
at midnigbt what men by the hundred
thousand will feel in the brief moment
they give to the newspaper at that
vivid instant between the rest of the
night and the work of the day.
This daily knowledge now comes
to the newspaper office not fortuitous-
ly, but organized. The business CT
gathering the, worlds news has been
put on as definite basis as the busi-
ness of furnishing food to a great
city. Accident has almost been elm
mated, and if for 4S hours the knowl-
edge Of a great wreck in midocean is
held back a whole people froths with
impatience.
This flood of news in a city of the
first class would fill, If published COM
plete, anywhere from so to 80 col
umns. The actual amount which can
be given to it by any ordinary news
paper will run from 20 to 40 columns.
Forty years ago newspaper printed
all the telegraph it got and pretty
nearly all the local news it could
gather. Today condensation has to
go on in both these fields at the scale
of always one in two or three, and
often in five or six.
"The School of Journalism has the
task af 14nfffuor fba fvogri,,er ~ boo1-.-