parodies, reviews and stage critiques, interviews and special
correspondence- to -day making acquaintance with a prima donna, to-morrow with a Cabinet Minister, and, in between , turning a ready hand to any trivial, dull little piece of drudgery which happens to need doing.” 20 But specialization affects the work of the reporter and not only divides it into the great classes of the general and the official reporter, but each class becomes specialized . The general reporter
develops into the one who specializes on financial news, or on reporting crime, or society news, or on the shipping trade, or any one of the multifarious activities and interests of a great city.
The specially able reporter may develop into a free lance and
without being attached to any special paper, may be sent out to get reports where special tact, knowledge, and experience are
necessary, and thus have a connection with all the papers in the community . All these changes in the work of the reporter are both a cause
and a result of the change in his social status. In 1808, the
benchers of Lincoln 's Inn adopted a by-law excluding all persons who had written for hire in the daily papers from being called to the bar, and while the other Inns of Court refused to accede,
and it was afterwards rescinded,21 it indicates probably only too well the early contemptuous attitude towards the reporter that prevailed in England. It was one of the guild who wrote that " newspaper men have a gipsy-like habit of shifting their quarters - they are veritable members of the ' tribe of the wandering
foot." "' 22
This reputation for uncertainty of tenure, whether
well or ill deserved, has long discredited their work . Even to -day , an English writer makes one of his characters , a conjuror, say, “ I have thought out everything by myself,when I was a gutter snipe in Fleet Street, or, lower still, a journalist in Fleet Street.” 23 In America, a prominent weekly can say, “ The type has become
fixed in common thought . . . [it] has become as definite as that of the stage Irishman ." 24 20 E . T . Cook , Edmund Garrett: A Memoir, p . 19. 21 Lord Colchester, Diary, II, 240. 2 D . Croal, Early Recollections of a Journalist, 1832– 1859, p . 26. 23 G . K . Chesterton , Magic, Act II. 34 “ The Man with the Note -Book ,” The Nation , February 19 , 1914, 98 :
