298 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
sion. They insist that the only way to become a newspaper writer is to "go through the mill." According to these critics, journalism has no clearly defined, conventionalized technique analogous to that of law or medicine. The general principles of newspaper work are mere empty platitudes apart from the con- crete, ever-changing problems of the daily press. All that the university can hope to do for the newspaper man is to give him a general training in languages, literature, history, economics, and the other social sciences, as well as some knowledge of the world of nature. The rest must be left to the office, where by a painful process he learns to utilize his resources and to transform his literary style to meet the peculiar needs of the modern paper.
There is much plausibility as well as a great deal of sound sense in this position of experienced newspaper men. It is always a thankless, and even a presumptious, thing for an academic person to question the dicta of hard-headed, practical men as to the fields in which they are experts, but the writer believes that something is to be said and more to be done for another kind of university training in journalism. He proposes therefore to describe an academic course which recently reached its cul- mination with the publication of one number of a modern city daily, written and edited by a class of university students organ- ized as an editorial staff.
During the last three years the writer has conducted at the University of Chicago a course entitled "The History and Organization of the American Press." This class meets four hours a week for three months. The work falls into two parts : (i) historical or descriptive, and (2) practical or technical. The first division includes the development of the American press, through the colonial and revolutionary period, into the partisan press of the early nineteenth century; thence into the period of "enterprise," the telegraph press, and the Civil War period, to the contemporary press. The great papers and the famous editors of the era of personal journalism are treated in some detail. The story of the rise of press associations and the history of the Asso- ciated Press also receive attention. Copies of old newspapers, facsimiles, etc., are used to make the historical descriptions more
