A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [78]
“He looked me up and down, scanning my poor apparel, and then he threw his head back and laughed.”
“What are you?” the editor sneered.
“A carpenter,” Riis answered.
The editor turned on his heels. When he heard Riis following him, the man stopped.
Riis recalled, “I stopped too, shook my fist at him, and vowed then and there that the time would come when the Express would be glad to have my services.”
The editor broke into a hearty belly laugh. “That editor’s laugh has been ringing in my ears ever since,” the great social reformer and muckraker wrote in his memoirs.
Newspapers were called rags in those days, not necessarily due to their scurrilous editorial content but because a sheet of newsprint had the consistency of a coarse dishtowel. It was an era of spirited newspaper wars and pugnacious newspapermen who appreciated the value of a good row with the competition, even if one had to be cooked up. One night a journalist afflicted with writer’s block was at his desk, drawing a blank: “I wonder what I will write about tonight?” Then it struck him: “I believe I will have a controversy with the Troy Times!”
In the 1880s, top reporters made about $15 a week for six days of work. The Courier, owned by Grover Cleveland’s great friend Charley McCune, was the city’s leading newspaper—high-toned, leaning Democratic, and set in its ways.
Edward Willis Scripps and his half brother James Scripps were in the early stages of building their newspaper empire, having founded The Detroit News in 1873 and the Penny Press (later renamed the Cleveland Press) in 1878. Ed Scripps had one simple rule for decorum in the newsroom: “No man shall dress worse or get drunker than I do.”
The Scripps brothers had been keeping a hungry eye on the Buffalo marketplace for several years. They settled on booming Buffalo for their launch of another penny publication, with delivery timed for the afternoon and early evening when folks at home could relax with the local newspaper. In 1880, the brothers went to Buffalo, looked at some real estate, bought office space at 153 Main Street, and declared that in a few weeks a new daily called the Evening Telegraph would begin rolling off the presses. Edward H. Butler, proprietor of the rival Buffalo Sunday News, had also been thinking about coming out with a penny afternoon paper, and the announcement by the Scripps boys accelerated his plan. Getting a jump on Scripps, Butler published the first issue of the Buffalo Evening News on October 11, 1880, selling it at a penny a copy when most Buffalo papers cost 2¢ or 3¢. The Evening News was a big hit; it sold 7,000 copies that first day, and circulation soon ballooned to 20,000.
Nineteen days later, the first issue of the Evening Telegraph was published; the weighty event was modestly noted in James Scripps’s diary: “The Telegraph, our new Buffalo paper, made its appearance today.”
Buffalo had not seen anything like the Evening Telegraph. Like its distant cousin the Penny Press, the Telegraph was edited to contain “not a line of uninteresting matter.” News was conveyed in nuggets, boiled down to its essence; some stories got just a single line. Brevity was key to making the paper an easy read, but human-interest stories and exposés were given plenty of room to breathe. Like other Scripps publications, the Evening Telegraph was meant to appeal to all classes and political persuasions. As Ed Scripps once put it, “We have no politics.... We are not Republican, nor Democrat, nor Greenback, and not Prohibitionist. We simply intend to support good men and condemn bad ones.”
Ed and James Scripps were absentee owners; Ed lived in Cleveland and James in Detroit. A guiding principle of the Scripps chain was that local editors knew their city best and had to be given autonomy to run the newspaper as they saw fit.