"I WANT TO BE AN EDITOR."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 127, 8 October 1875, Page 14

"I WANT TO BE AN EDITOR."

2fEXT to a taste for brandy and billiards, the most ruinous idea a, young man, or an old one, can get into his head is that he was born to be an editor. If we were to print the letters we receive in a year from young men afflcted with this mania, it would be a saddening sight. A lad with no particular ability and with foolish parents, has been kept at school till he has grown to manhood, and is then ashamed to learn a trade or to begin life as an office-boy, or even to look for a situation as a salesman. He thinks he must be an editor. Another youth of the same mental calibre is sent to college and breaks down, either for want of money or brains, before half his term ig expired ; he, too, falls back on journalism as just the profession he was created to adorn. We notice, .indeed, that most of the young men who want to be editors are those who have had a year or two of college life, and no more. A scissors, a pastepot, and a facility for stringing words on a line, are supposed to be the entire stock-in-trade of an editor. We know quite a number of men who started, and a large number who want to staTtfc&s editors on this capital ; and the poor fellows who tiled have long faces and empty pockets, as those about to try will have next year. To such people we venture to make an arguineuHmad crurnenam — and also ad igOorantiam — which, however, we fear will have little effect. A newspaper directory for 1875 (Rowell's) has just appeared, and it teaches a harsh lesson. In cold figures it shows that starting newspapers is one of the most common yet disasti'ous speculations in this country. During the past twelve months over one thousand American newspapers haoe failed ! involving a loss to publishers of more than 8,000,000 dollars ! Among those who went into the newspaper business during the year and lost heavily thereby, were 275 merchants, 375 school teachers, 57 lawyers, 4 blacksmiths, 33 plasterers, 10 farmers, 200 fanatics of various classes, 100 visionary young men who drew iipon their fathers and thus suddenly exhausted large margins of the paternal capital, and 6 lottery men. Are those dead papers warning enough ? If not, turn to some of the living ones and complete the lesson. Every one of those papers could be made successful, if the editor were only a journalist. Instead, he is one of those who have mtore words than ideas — who writes his four-column editorial and sends it off to prey on his subscribers like a night-mare. Experience generally teaches even, fools ; but there is some folly so dens© that experience strikes it as a razor would a mile-stone — and of this sort is the belief that ( conceit and pretension and gab can make a successful newspaper — 'Boston Pilot/