ministry as a whole that tremble before the editor and owner of a string of newspapers.[1]
The editorial has thus seemed to be drawn in opposite directions; one set of influences has tended to minimize its importance while another has given it a standing and a power it has never had before. It is the part of the historian in his use of the newspaper to weigh the influences behind the editorial and to measure its importance in his own work.
Yet when all has been said in regard to the declining influence of the editorial, it must be remembered that there is much to be said on the other side and that it is more nearly true to say that the position of the editorial has changed, and that its influence is being felt in new and other ways. The editor of the old school was born, not made, and, like the doctor and the lawyer, he believed that a person could learn the secrets of the profession only in a newspaper office. The editor of to-day has had a college or a university training; he probably was connected with one of the college papers, and he may have had the added training of a school of journalism. If he may not technically fulfil the specific requirements for an editor prescribed in a recent press law promulgated in China,—that he must be over thirty years of age, suffer from no nervous disease, been undeprived of civil rights, belong neither to the military nor the naval professions, and be neither an administrative or a judicial officer, nor a student,[2]—he conforms to them in effect. Maturity of years and of judgment, mental balance, upright character, freedom from official entanglements are the qualifications everywhere to-day demanded in an editor. Moreover, the individual editor is to-day not infrequently merged into an editorial board,—a change advocated in influential circles as assuring complete independence and impartiality in editorials, but by no means universally commended.
The country editor is changing as well as his city brother.[3]
- ↑ Cf. A. G. Gardiner, "The 'Times' and the Man who makes it," Atlantic Monthly, January, 1917, 119: 111–122, and Norman Angell, "The Problem of Northcliffe," New Republic, January 27, 1917, 9: 344–347.
- ↑ Special correspondence of the New York Evening Post, May 13, 1914.
- ↑ Some of the early country editors were pamphleteers rather than editors. F. W. Scott cites the case of J. B. Turner who in 1843 edited the Illinois Statesman. The Quincy Whig commented jocosely on one of his thirteen-column editorials and was gravely told in reply that the actual length was only eleven columns.—Newspapers and Periodicals of Illinois, 1814–1879, p. lxxiv.
