The correspondent, his enthusiasm gone and his pride hurt, doesn't know what to make of it all.
His long stories of happenings of events of purely local importance disappear in the editor's wastepaper basket, or are boiled down to a para graph, rewritten and mutilated until their author never recognizes them as his own.
"That editor doesn't know what he does want," muses the correspondent.
But the correspondent doesn't know what the editor wants. He doesn't know or appreciate news values. It isn't to be expected that he should.
But if he perseveres he learns. And just about the time he is becoming of real value to the paper, he moves away or gives up the correspondence because it doesn't pay enough, and the Northwest editor must needs do it all over again breaking in a tyro.
No matter how kindly disposed the Northwest editor may feel toward his staff of correspondents, no matter how much leeway he would like to give them; or how much of their "news" he would like to use, he is bounded by strict limitations. The publisher is watching the telegraph and telephone bills, and the monthly payroll. The editor must keep them to a minimum, and at the same time get all the news. It's as disastrous for him to be scooped as it is for the police reporter on the city staff to fall down on a big story on his beat.
Often, too, with his northwest news already in type and ready for the forms, the makeup man, pressed for space and looking for something to leave out, picks on the country correspondent, and at the eleventh hour, press time, the news from Sweetpea Center meets its fate in the "hell box."
The Northwest editor is blamed by the correspondent though he is doing his best. The editor realizes that though he cannot expect to cover all of the local happenings of every village and town in his jurisdiction he must make a showing, for his own reputation, for the pleasure of the out-state subscribers, and to keep his correspondents interested enough financially so that the correspondents won't fall down on the paper when something big does "break".
All country correspondence must be read very carefully for spelling, punctuation, grammatical construction, newspaper "style," and libel. Some correspondents use typewriters with more or less success. More of them do not. Their copy comes in longhand, all styles, sizes and shapes—a nightmare to desk men and printers.
The financial remuneration to the country correspondent at best is small, not enough really to pay for the effort, so the correspondent who stays with the game and does the best he knows how usually does so for love of the work, for the satisfaction of seeing at least some of his efforts in print, and for the prestige his newspaper connection may give him in his home town.
In the daily-paper communities, with wider news sources to draw from, and with experienced men to handle the work, the monetary emoluments are more worth while, and for more than one aspiring newspaper man patch out his local paper salary to a very fair wage.
But the problem of the real country correspondent remains for the northwest editor.
