(2 of 3)
The Walker testament about himself, the newspaper business and his staff (which he considers the best ever assembled) appears currently in American Mercury. Excerpts:
"While natural economic forces are working, here are three suggestions for alleviating the present state of affairs and setting journalism on new paths of glory: 1) Let every editor argue persistently for fair pay and a reasonable future security for his good men. 2) Let every newspaper of any size either fire or pension the high-priced ornaments and incompetent fuddy-duddies who now clutter up the place. Replace them, if they must be replaced, with ambitious young men who will work. 3) Tear down most or all of the schools of journalism and set the inmates to studying English, history, literature, economics, foreign languages, law or beekeeping. . . .
"City editors in temperament range all the way from the savage old curmudgeons of fiction to the fumbling, frightened softies one so often meets in real life. . . . But whatever they are, none is really as good as he should be. The job is one at which a man may work at top speed 24 hours a day and still not get everything done right. . . . The most reasonable analogy that comes to mind is between a city editor and the manager of a baseball team. . . . Each knows the disappointment of seeing a presumably good man fall down on his job. and the thrill of a neat piece of work by a newcomer. . . .
"Lucky is the city editor or the baseball manager who can do his stuff without giving way to the jitters. He'd better be calm. If he isn't, sooner or later the city editor will be reading copy, probably in Pittsburgh, or helping somebody on a publicity job, or pasting up clippings and mumbling to himself; and the baseball manager will end his days as an umpire in the Three-Eye League or as the boss of a bowling alley in Peoria. . . .
"It is usually contended that even the second-and third-rate reporters of the Golden Age were superior to the best ones of today. Nonsense! The trouble with such fellows is that they have spent so much time listening to old-time romantics and incompetents describe the 'giants' of those days that they have come to believe it. ...
"New York news is not covered adequately. Too few men can deal with the glory, the debauchery and the complexities of that fabulous town. Bennett, Pulitzer, Dana and Greeley had the same complaint."
Flump
"Mrs. Brown Mehard Griffith, of Sewickley. Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, was found dead yesterday morning at the bottom of an airshaft in the Somerset Hotel, 150 West Forty-seventh Street. Although police investigated the possibility that she might have jumped through the window of her room on the fourth floor, they believed later that she may have fallen over the sill of the airshaft while moving about her room in the early morning. . . ."
Thus ran a routine news item in the New York Times last week. Thus have run countless similar items in every U. S. newspaper. To clear up the doubt which arises every time a person falls-or-jumps unobserved out of a building, two days later the Times made a suggestion on its editorial page. Taking the case of hypothetical Richard Roe, the Times said: