A great newspaper is more than a garbage can liner . . . more than a fish wrapper . . . more than a paper doll . . . more than a child's kite.
It would be hard to find fault with any one of the propositions advanced by the San Francisco Chronicle in a series of promotion ads. But the Chronicle was unable—or unwilling—to go one long step farther, to spell out what a great newspaper is, rather than what it is not.
Many newspapers and many newsmen have tried to define greatness, and all their efforts only show a wide disagreement on where greatness lies—or even how to get there. William Rockhill Nelson, founder of the Kansas City Star, took an alimentary approach. "God's great gift to man is appetite," he said. "Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it." Wilbur Storey of the Chicago Times (now the Sun-Times) once classified a newspaper's highest duty as "printing the news and raising hell." Thomas Gibson, who established the Denver Rocky Mountain Herald in 1860, defined a great newspaper as one "untrammeled by sinister influence from any quarter—advocate of the right and denouncer of the wrong—an independent vehicle for the free expression of all candid, honest and intelligent minds."*
Markedly Unsuccessful. Some such proud creed ripples from dozens of newspaper mastheads, nailed up—but seldom nailed down—by high-minded publishers. Dozens of other mastheads support unvarnished claims to greatness, as if the quality were something that has merely to be claimed to be possessed. The Chicago Tribune, for example, has been the "World's Greatest Newspaper" since 1911, when Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, the paper's founder, unilaterally decided that the description fitted. Whatever tie the Tribune may have had to the title was ruptured by the colonel's death in 1955.
Extramural attempts to define greatness by ranking the U.S. press in order of merit have been markedly unsuccessful. Since 1952, Publicist Edward L. Bernays has solicited U.S. daily-newspaper publishers three times to nominate the country's ten "best" dailies—a superlative that Bernays does not define. All three ballots have shown such consistency of choice as to support the suspicion that the publishers have been picking papers mostly from habit. Over a span of ten years (1952-62), twelve names sufficed to fill all three lists. And by most journalistic standards, the invariable third choice, the Christian Science Monitor, cannot properly be considered a daily newspaper. The Monitor's editorial policy is subject to the precepts of the Church of Christ, Scientist, which owns it. Nor does the paper bother to pay much respect to the despotic deadlines that rule the rest of the daily press.
One in Eight. Journalism schools preserve a cautious silence on the subject of journalistic greatness. Last spring, when Dean Edward Barrett of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism let slip the opinion that there were only 18 "good" U.S. dailies, he was immediately asked for their names. Barrett declined the invitation. Said he: "You don't think I'm going to get trapped into saying that, do you?"