Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/283

 him, the small trifling items that make a paper gossipy and readable.

If you are a newspaper woman born, you will succeed in your home town, I do not care what the size of the paper. You will create a demand for your services. If you cannot please the editor there, if you cannot induce your neighbors to give you news, what do you expect to do in a strange city with women to interview who place implacable butlers between you and the news you would learn?

By all means beg the editor of your home paper to try you out; and then make yourself invaluable to him before you try your wings in the great city.

You may have influential letters, you may have diplomas and pretty frocks and a prettier smile, but in a great city where you think there must be hundreds of openings you will find other girls with the same influential letters, good frocks, and pleasing smiles already on the ground, a hundred to every opening. And when you tell the city editor that you have had no experience but are willing to learn, he will inform you that he does not run a kindergarten for reporters.

Get your training near home, if you have to work months for nothing. I did this, and I have never regretted it, and just to clinch my argu-