St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1918-03-13
A COUNTRY NEWSPAPER.

a while ago we knew n young man
who came up into New England to
enter the newspaper business. He was
n bright young man. He was full of
enthusiasm and pep and an idea that
he was going to revolutionize the
country press. For assets he had some
money left him by a relative, q jour
naliStic education secured on the big
city papers and a wife who thought
him che brainiest thing that ever
hitched up the knees of his trousers
The young fellow bought out a little
New England weekly and started out
to be a power in the community. He
worked early and late; so did the wife.
he spent his legacy unstintingly to re-
nOvate the property; ne spared no
effort to make it one of the leading
weeklies of his commonwealth. Every
last ramification of the city training
vent into boosting the acquisition and
making it over into something Of
which the community might be proud.
But he didn't make it one of the
leading weeklies of his commonwealth.
The community did not respond. 1t
failed utterly to take the pride in his
paper taken by the boy and his wife.
In a year he had spent the money and
Il lot more he had borrowed. The adj
vertising he had secured stayed for
him only so long as he kept after it
with a deadly instrument. He was
doYn and ont, discouraged and dis
gruntled, penniless and almost friend
less,-mOst of all he had lost confidence
III himself and though his young wife
didn't reprimand him, her silence was
worse than blistering acid. He sold the
plant for what it would bring. He
went back to the city and took a job.
= "I'm glad Pm going" he declared III
boyish anger. New England is dead;
hopelessly dead--but doesn't know it.
1t doesn't want progress. It dosen't
want hustlers to come to her COM
munities and make things hum. 1t
wants to be left alone. 1t wants to
work out Ms problems in its own time
and way. There's enough moss III
New England to stuff all the mattresses
in the mid-Atlantic states
The young men returned to his job
and the cynics of the business said:
"Another newspaper funeral! IF my
boy ever was to become a newspaper
man, I'll buy a gun and shoot him"
The episode is a closed book excepting
for the lesson it teaches and the truths
it proves. And this is the lesson and
these some of the truths:
The trouble wasn't with New Eng
land; it wasn't with the town i'll which
the boy located or the people with
I,o InC %
was with himself. Although he had q
city training second to none, after all,
the lad didn't know his business-or
he didn't know human nature, which is
saying the same thing.
He didn't know, for instance, that
while country boy can start his career
on a country sheet and graduate i'll a
big berth on a city paper and make o
big success of his profession, that it
is rarely successful to reverse the pro
cess. 1t takes as many brains to run
a little country paper successfully, as
it takes to run a big city paper. But
it takes a different kind of brains; it
takes something that the city chaps
sometimes fails to recognize; know
ledge human nature, a knowledge
plain, ordinary men and women,
their likes and islikes, their joys
and sorrows, their struggles and per-
plexities, their .hopes and aspirations.
Until man does know these things in
some measure, his success as a country
publisher cannot be called established.
To run little paper in snail town
like the community in which this par
ticular young man settled-which is the
counterpart of hundreds of American
towns and wherein is to be found the
average stock that makes up the real
America-does not require a city train
ing; indeed city training is more of
a liability than an asset. The young
man tried to apply city methods to a
little country town and he failed miser-
ably. For the country is not the city
and the city is not the country and
never the twain shall meet-not in the
newspaper business.
Running big paper in a city is 6
matter of stereotyped principles. A Ger