Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/33

 store management and merchandising, bakery management, restaurant management, laundry management, banking, insurance, dairying, contracting and building, coal distribution.

The average intellectual probably does not care to be professionally employed by any radical movement; he may desire to serve some one of them voluntarily as the opportunity arises.

Editor's Note: The Cooperative League of America, 167 West 12th Street, New York City, Dr. James P. Warbasse, President, is the foremost educational body in the country devoted to the interest of consumers' cooperation.

The All American Cooperative Commission, 806 B. of L. E. Building, Cleveland, Ohio, gives considerable attention to producers' as well as consumers' cooperative enterprises.

The American Federation of Labor also has a committee on cooperation.

How long would it take to become a labor paper editor?

To be a good one, about four years. Two to learn the newspaper job; one to learn the economics of the trade you propose to labor in and to serve; one to learn how to work with leaders.

Four years looks longish to the youth of twenty-one; would it be worth while? Don’t judge wholly by the present perspective. The day of the labor editor is just commencing.

Newspapering is a trade. Avoid the set schools of journalism, training for the commercial press. Get job after job as reporter or copyreader on six or eight papers and one news agency in as many cities, including a metropolitan paper, a big small-town paper, and one in a state capital or in Washington. Learn something about the business office—the advertising revenue and circulation—and about the printing plant of each paper you work on. Study the news agencies. Your ambition is to lose your job the minute you have made good on it. Good reporters can bum it from desk to desk as successfully as good plumbers.

In these two years you will happen on your quota of labor stories to cover. The machinists, the railroaders, the miners, the printers, or some one piece of the trade union movement gets more and more of your interest. Put on overalls, break a bone or two, live lean and fight around inside your fellows' union. Beside observing what they don't read, you will learn what men live for and what little they work for.

It will take six months to study hard the economics of one or two of the great industries, yours among them; for the news of your future career is largely a new kind of news.

With trade union status, you will be leaving the local union in the direction of your real job—the labor press—probably via the road of publicity man in a strike, or in an organizing