Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/414



Charles Anderson Dana, so long editor of The New York Sun, died on October 17, 1897. The paper which he had guided for nearly thirty years told of the occurrence in these two lines:

Charles Anderson Dana, editor of The Sun, died yesterday afternoon.

There were no inverted column rules, there was no long article in praise of the deceased editor. The announcement in fact was typical of the editor whose death it recorded. For a short time after his death, The Sun was edited by his son, Paul Dana. Later, E. P. initials which in The Sun office stand for Editorial Page Mitchell became its editor.

Mention has already been made how, in the handling of news, Dana wielded a tremendous influence, for he made The Sun a sort of school of journalism in which he trained bright young college men who had the itch, or, to use a more academic word, the urge to write. Dana saw no reason why the news column should not be as well written as any piece of literature, for to him reporting was an art. He also insisted that the headlines of the newspaper should have some sort of literary form, so that The Sun in time shone not only with a literary finish in its news columns, but also in its still larger rays in the headlines. Dana liked to quote Dickens as being a great police-court reporter; and pointed to the Bible as a place where stories were boiled down, the story of the Crucifixion, for example, being told in six hun- dred words. The making of a newspaper in all its phases re- quired, so he asserted, the skill of an artist in every department, and when he came to put into a book his ideals about the editing and publishing of a paper, he called it "The Art of Newspaper Making."

CHANGES IN CHICAGO

The Herald has been unusually popular as a name for a news- paper. On March 11, 1881, The Herald appeared in Chicago. It had obtained the Associated Press franchise of The Telegraph, an old organ of the Greenback-Labor Party, and had no con- nection with two other papers of the same name whic