INSTRUCTIONS TO REPORTERS

When you go after a story, make sure that you get all of it.

Drill yourself into searching for facts; almost anybody can write a story—it takes real brains and resourcefulness to get one.

You are urged to call the city editor for instructions whenever in doubt, and it is a good idea to call as often as possible to keep the office informed and also to get any information on your story that may have come in from other sources.

Before you write or telephone your story, make sure that you have all your facts marshaled in your own mind. A good reporter usually plans his story, lead and details in his head on his way to the office.

NEVER GUESS.

KNOW WHAT YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT.

When you turn in a story KNOW that everything in that story is true—and if you feel there is a statement you can not prove, call your city editor's attention to it.

To color or fake a story is not newspaper work—it is prostitution of the profession of journalism.

Be sure of your sources of information. Never take anything for granted—find out for yourself. You will discover that many persons talk convincingly about things although they have no actual knowledge of the subject under discussion.

Remember always that a newspaper has to prove what it says—and any decent newspaper is eager to.

If you don't know, tell the city editor you don't know. To guess is criminal because nobody can guess with any consistent degree of accuracy. And accuracy should be your guide.

Reporters should study their stories after they are printed, with the realization that any changes made in them were made to better them. Ask why your stories have been changed so your next story will be better through avoidance of the same mistake.

Never be afraid to ask anybody anything.

The mainspring of a good newspaper man is a wholesome curiosity.

The essentials of newspaper writing are accuracy and simplicity. The newspaper is no place for fine writing. Simplicity means directness and conciseness in telling the story as well as an avoidance of hifalutin phrases, obsolete words and involved sentences.

Walt Whitman wrote: "The art of arts, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity—nothing can make up for excess or the lack of definiteness."

Every worker on a newspaper knows the value of accuracy. Accuracy is the god before whom all newspaper men bow. If one could analyze the effort put forth in one day in this office, one might discover that perhaps a third of that effort was in an attempt to obtain accuracy. The city directory is the newspaper man's Bible because accuracy is his deity.

The hardest lesson the journalist must learn is the development of the impersonal viewpoint. He must learn to write what he sees and hears, clearly and accurately, with never a tinge of bias. His own views, his personal feelings and his friendships should have nothing to do with what he writes in a story.

The ideal reporter would be a man who could give the public facts about his bitterest enemy even though such facts would make the man he personally hated a hero before the public.

In journalism more than in any other profession does the advice hold good: "Beware of your friends; your enemies will take care of themselves." By this is meant: Learn well the code of ethics which governs your profession, and when any man in the guise of friendship asks you to violate that code, you may say to him, "If you were truly my friend, you would not ask me to do this any more than you would ask a physician as a matter of friendship to perform an illegal operation, or a lawyer to stoop to shyster practices."

Supplying his editors with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is the only mission of the reporter, and any man who asks the reporter to deviate from that principle asks that which is dishonest.

BE TRUE

Thomas Carlyle: To every writer we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.

. . . VOICE OF THE LOWLY AND OPPRESSED . . . ADVOCATE OF THE FRIENDLESS . . . RIGHTER OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WRONGS.