“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that we’re free to print the news?”
“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing but the news.”
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. “Hum--hum,” he said. “This _is_ news. Well--the circulation’ll go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”
Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria--the mad rush for sensation and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the paper look like a series of disordered dreams.
He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted, was--results.
The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six years, his weekly “night off” and his two weeks’ vacation in summer excepted, had “made up” the paper--that is to say, had defined, with the advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous conservative. He believed that an editor’s duty was done when he had intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with Howard’s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.