Existing comment:
Studying the People:
Cuban revolutionary and correspondent Jose Marti filed hundreds of stories from New York in the 1890s. "TO get to know a people," he said, "you have to study them." Marti died in Cuba fighting Spain for independence. Radio and TV Marti, US government broadcasts aimed at communist Cuba, bear his name.
Formula for News:
In 1892, a Chicago Globe editor told cub reporter Theodore Dreiser that the first paragraph of a news story must reveal "Who or what? How? When? Where?" Ten years later, British author and poet Rudyard Kipling added "why" when he wrote:
I keep six honest server men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Power in the Press:
French novelist Emile Zola protested in an open letter to the president of France the treatment of military officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly imprisoned for treason. Zola's 1898 article for the French newspaper L'Autore is one of news history's most potent political commentaries. The headline was the now-famous phrase "J'Accuse" ("I accuse"). |