Thursday, April If." 1940 THE DAILY NEBRASKAN-
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He knew vhcrt they'd ind in
Shaf eld cowhide trunk
YOUNG HEIRS MIGHT BE SUPRISFD-but he
knew the fortune that was paid the Hawkins
when the railroad came through in 78 and how
they never spent or banked a cent of it.
The old-time country editor wai like that. He
knew his county like the back of his hand, from the
secret thoughts of the supervisors to the last thank-you-marm
oa a dead-end road.
He knew every man, woman, and child and their
Great-Aunt Nellie who ran off with the lightning
rod agent He knew the story of every yellow old
record io the courthouse and what the boys were
laughing at in the livery stable last Sunday. He
knew what chance the town had of getting that
button factory, and why the parsonage would have
a new tenant sooa.
The people he' wrote for were nut as much an
open book to him as the news he wrote for them.
He wasn't being quaint when he put the results of
the school spelldown on page one, or filled five
pages with country correspondence. That was meat
and drink to the folks out on the R.F.D. routes
far more important than the Doer War of wa
silver at 16 to 1-and he knew it.
That old-time country editor had trP com
plete, integrated understanding of all the newt
of his locality, and the whole of the mind for
which it was written. And his formula, "the nearer
the news, the bigger," was essentially the formula
of all old-time journalism in the big cities, as well
as in the county seats.
But when Dewey entered Manila Day and boy
in bicycle'shops began tinkering with the front
ends of buggies, the old order began to pass away.
The great, complex world forced itself into the
affairs and thoughts of easy-going, tarn-of -century
America.
Economics, world politics, finance, industrial man
agement, material resources, labor, social theory
they all began to matter somehow. They got you
into wars and strikes and hard times. Science be
gan to matter when diphtheria and t.b. were found
not to be acts of God. Art began to matter when
your daughter came back from Paris or Peoria call
ing you a Philistine.
America's mind, stretching, pushing out its ho
rizons, called for more news . . . more kinds of
news... news from beyond the railroad depot. And
the news poured in from the just-hatched wire
services, from specialists of all kinds, from the
syndicates, the feature writers, the correspondents.
Soon the old one-man grasp was gone. The tor
rent of news was too great and too swift, its sources
too many and too remote, for any one man to han
dle and absorb it all.
And if the editor was swamped, the reader was
drowned. In self-defense, he learned to pick his way
about his newspaper, snatching a bit here and a bit
there, mostly according to the ingenuity of the
headline-writer. Often he missed news of impor
tance; often he failed to see what a series of day-by-day
stories adkd up to in
the end.
There was a crying need
for a new experiment in
journalism. A need for some
body with n national view
point free from the pres
sure of daily and hourly
deadlines to bring the news
together so that the intelli
gent reader could get its es
sentials, grasp them, make
them his own.
That somebody turned out to be The Weekly
Newsmagazine. With its advantage of time for re
flection and discussion, the Newsmagazine made
this task its single-minded purpose. It set out to
do the country editor's job with a world-wide
scope and on a national scale.
. . .To take all the week's news and make the pic
ture make sense to the average intelligent Amer
ican. To set it against a fully comprehended back
ground. To write it vividly, compactly, forcefully
. . . with full appreciation of the mind for which it
is intended . . . with the touch of human under
standing that brings people and events to moving,
breathing life.
The Newsmagazine is written by experts, but
never for experts. No story in TIME can go gallop
ing off on a hobby; it must be paced firmly and
smoothly to the brisk stride of the whole magazine,
whether the subject is world affairs or politics, or
business or finance, or medicine, religion, or th
arts.
That is why TIME smt to be written by one
man, who knows TIME readers as the old-time coun
try editor knew the folks in his county. That is
why the average TIME reader starts at the begin
ning and goes through to the end, feeling that
every line gives him something that he wants and
needs and can use.
This il one of a seriei of ndvenijemenu in
which the Editors of TIMS hope to give Colle k
Students a clearer picture of the world of newt,
gtthuring, news-writing, arul news-reading and
the part TIMS plays helping you to grasp,
meaiure, and uie the history of your lifetime as
you lire the story of your life.
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