The Reporter Who Made Himself King

THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING
Richard Harding Davis
The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one
who works his way up. He holds that the only way to start is as a
printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to
graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer
take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real
reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking
acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting
Police Captains.
That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way he was
trained, and that is why at the age of sixty he is still a reporter. If you
train up a youth in this way, he will go into reporting with too full a
knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions concerning it,
and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and justifiable
impression that he is not paid enough for what he does. And he will
only do what he is paid to do.
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does
not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his health,
his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and sometimes his
life, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only that men may have
light by which to read it. But if he has been in a newspaper office from
his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a reporter that this is not
so, and loses his real value. He should come right out of the University
where he has been doing "campus notes" for the college weekly, and be
pitchforked out into city work without knowing whether the Battery is
at Harlem or Hunter's Point, and with the idea that he is a Moulder of
Public Opinion and that the Power of the Press is greater than the
Power of Money, and that the few lines he writes are of more value in
the Editor's eyes than is the column of advertising on the last page,
which they are not.

After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long--he
finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasm
in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge, the
opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most
remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a
great fund of resource and patience. He will find that he has crowded
the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,
doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he has
learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved when
everyone else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; to
write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk with
authority on matters of which other men do not venture even to think
until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow
on the night previous.
It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what
manner of man young Albert Gordon was.
Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale
when his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train for
New York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of
the innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at
noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come,
to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reporters
hurried him to the office again with his "copy," and after he had
delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man in
Murderers' Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown
some international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he covered
a flower-show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent over
the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at the
losses to the insurance companies.
He went to bed at one, and dreamed of shattered locomotives, human
beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of cells, and banks of
beautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass band in
the gallery. He decided when he awoke the next morning that he had

entered upon a picturesque and exciting career, and as one day