Adding booksmarts to street-smart journalism
Medill School at Northwestern was started to merge one with the other
When Margery Swett stood in line to register as the first student of the Medill School of Journalism, newsmen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were polishing the street smarts they would write into “The Front Page.”
Their play celebrated an era in Chicago newspapering when chutzpah was the prerequisite for reporting. A college degree was decidedly optional. The name of the game was to be the first to get a story into print, as Hecht and MacArthur knew from editors’ screams.
The play and its film adaptation are set in the press room of Chicago’s criminal courts building. All the reporters are men. “Yeah — I don’t let my own wife come in here,” one reporter says. Another reporter hides an escaped prisoner in a roll-top desk so he can phone the scoop to his editor while his rivals are out chasing the story.
Northwestern University’s journalism program was more forward-looking. Also in line with Swett that day on Jan. 19, 1921, was at least one other female student. (It would take Hollywood two decades to gamble on a remake of Hecht and MacArthur’s play, “His Girl Friday,” in which the quick-thinking reporter is a woman.)
While the Medill School would provide a formal education in newspapering, it wouldn’t be hopelessly academic like Columbia University’s journalism program, Joseph Patterson promised at the school’s dedication a century ago on Feb. 8, 1921. Patterson, co-editor of the Tribune, was speaking on behalf of the newspaper, which played a significant part in the school’s founding.
What did Patterson mean, exactly? “The new school did not, among other things, propose to rear reporters who, if you sent them out to get a photograph of a prominent safeblower (who cracks safes with explosives) came back with a three column article on the industrial situation in New Jersey,” the Tribune explained.
That promise was affirmed by a lecture series that marked the Medill School of Journalism’s inaugural year. Among the speakers was Max Annenberg, the Tribune’s circulation manager.
Today, a circulation manager works with algorithms. In Annenberg’s day, the work involved sabotaging other newspapers’ delivery trucks.
He seemed to have the grit for the job. Annenberg landed himself in legal hot water when he shot at a mob that chased a Tribune photographer out of a gambling den. A jury found he had acted in selfdefense.
As the Tribune noted of a story Annenberg told the Medill students, he was a proud alum of the school of hard knocks.
“Once a pompous pundit at some scholastic function said, ‘And you are a university man, Mr. Annenberg?’ ‘Well, professor, I went through Harvard one Sunday afternoon.’”
During its second year, Genevieve Forbes, a Tribune reporter, spoke at Medill. She was asked: Was there a real place for a woman at the paper or was she someone simply to be tolerated?
She replied that many of her assignments were “feminine subjects,” implying that the school’s female students would face similar stereotyping.
“But let her beware, let her beware, as she sits down to the typewriter, of the nemesis which pursues women writers — that of writing like a woman,” she said. “Have a woman’s viewpoint but a man’s pen point.”
On Northwestern’s Evanston campus, the Medill School was housed on the third floor of the Mineralogy Building; students had to climb a fire escape, often while bracing themselves against winds off Lake Michigan, to get to class. But its quarters had the feel of a real newspaper office, including a time clock students punched in and out of, according to Northwestern professor Roger Boye, who has been at Medill for half a century as a student and educator.
The curriculum kept their minds from wandering into lugubrious abstractions.
As the Tribune reported, students learned the first beatitude of a newsroom: “Blessed is a copy reader who makes one word do what two did before.” They were taught how to set type by hand, which made professors of traditional disciplines worry that the university had taken in a trade school.
In fact, the school was the brainchild of a star Tribune reporter, Edward Doherty. “Department stores had schools for their clerks,” he recalled in his memoir “Gall and Honey.” “Why couldn’t the Chicago Tribune start a school for its reporters?”
Doherty got the OK to pursue his project from Patterson, who realized that newspapers had to change with the times.
Patterson and Robert R. McCormick were cousins and co-publishers of the Tribune, despite distinctly different lifestyles. McCormick was a conservative socialite. Patterson was a socialist who dressed down and wrote for the Hobo Review.
Armed with his boss’s blessing, Doherty took his idea to Northwestern University President Walter Dill Scott. Fortunately, Scott’s academic field was applied psychology, Boye said in a recent interview by phone.
“Scott wrote a book about advertising, so he was acquainted with newspapers,” Boye said. “If he’d been a professor of chemistry or Greek, he might have said, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’”
Instead, Scott decided there was no reason to limit the program to Tribune staffers, and so the Medill School was born. It was named for Patterson and McCormick’s
grandfather, Joseph Medill.
The Tribune pledged $12,500 annually to support the Medill School’s first five years, with no strings attached. Or as President Scott reportedly put it: “I’ll take your money, but not your advice.” Doherty got a $1,000 bonus.
When Medill’s classes at the Evanston campus began in September 1921, McCormick welcomed students with a warning: “To be a good reporter it is first necessary to perceive. The commonest mistake is to call upon the imagination to supply what the eye has not been able to take in. A reporter should be all perception.”
Accordingly, one of the school’s course offerings was a series of lectures on how a newspaper is made. They were presented on the university’s Chicago campus at Lake and Dearborn streets, where they could be delivered by working journalists from the nearby offices of the city’s papers. Other lecturers came from distant papers.
The director of the University of Wisconsin’s journalism program urged Medill’s students to avoid flippant jargon like what audiences of “The Front Page” were destined to hear. “It’s not a game,” he said. “Don’t speak so of our profession.”
Another speaker advised never ignoring a tip: Shortly after the SS Eastland began turning over in the Chicago River, a message came over the wires. The tip came at an hour when a newsroom is usually quiet; acting on it “gave the Tribune a running start” on covering the tragedy.
The editor of the Christian Science Monitor decried crime stories in his talk, and a Tribune staffer revealed that the want ad was the protector of a free press because it generated revenue that made a paper unbeholden to special interests.
Students must have gotten something out of the lectures and those of subsequent decades. Over the course of its first century, the Medill School of Journalism has produced 40 Pulitzer Prize winners.
Among its alumni are R. Bruce Dold and Jack Fuller, former Tribune editors; Laura Washington, former editor of the Chicago Reporter; Ben Burns, founding editor of Ebony and Jet; sports journalists Ira Berkow and Brent Musburger; Judy Baar Topinka, former Illinois treasurer; and a host of reporters and editors who keep us informed and our politicians honest, more or less.
And that young woman who was first in line to register for classes 100 years ago? She became a poet and, under her married name, Margery Swett Mansfield, published such verse as:
If I had the feet to dance before the holy arc,
Or could let loose a flock of homing birds, I would not trust to anything so dark As words.
Editor’s note: Thanks to professor Roger Boye for suggesting this Flashback.