(Excerpt from The Young Man and Journalism
The new report...)
Excerpt from The Young Man and Journalism
The new reporter gets his fling at all of this kind of work. If he has the genuine newspaper spirit he is fascinated by his every experience. He searches the paper eagerly for the bit he has contributed. With a glow of satisfaction he contemplates his little record of a news event standing out in Clear type, and he reads it again with those shivery gusts of emotion some times called the thrill of authorship.
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This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Chester Sanders Lord was an American editor, journalist, and educator. He was a managing editor of the New York Sun from 1881 to 1913.
Background
Chester Sanders Lord was born on March 18, 1850 in Romulus, Seneca County, New York, United States, a seventh-generation descendant of Thomas Lord, emigrant in 1635 on the Elizabeth and Ann from London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, who took part in the founding of Hartford, Connecticut, under Thomas Hooker. His great-grandfather was Captain Joel Lord, veteran of Bunker Hill, White Plains and other Revolutionary War battles, whose wife was Jerusha Webster, daughter of Noah Webster. Chester was the son of the Reverend Edward Lord, Presbyterian minister and chaplain of the 110th New York Volunteers in the Civil War, and his wife, Mary Jane Sanders. Before Chester was a year old the family moved to Fulton, New York. His father's fervently patriotic sermons after his return from military service angered some of his congregation and brought about his resignation and removal to Adams, New York, when the boy was about fourteen.
Education
Lord attended the Adams Institute, where he was drummer in the Union Army recruiting band, and for short periods the Worcester (Massachusetts) Military Academy and the Fairfield (New York) Seminary. With the idea of following his father's profession, he entered Hamilton College in 1869 but withdrew after his first year because of limited means.
Career
Chester Lord went to work in 1871 for the Oswego Advertiser as associate editor. Attracted to New York in 1872, he persuaded Amos J. Cummings to give him a trial on the Sun at ten dollars a week. The Sun, which had been bitterly critical of Grant's administration, was then deep in the presidential campaign and studious young Lord, who hoped to prepare himself for editorial writing, soon was covering the speeches of Horace Greeley. His reports, which were clear and direct, attracted the attention of Charles A. Dana, who detected an executive talent in the new staff member and proceeded to guide him into administrative news work.
Beginning as suburban editor, in charge of a large corps of correspondents, Lord became in turn assistant night city editor, assistant managing editor, and on January 1, 1881, when only thirty years old, managing editor. Since Dana's Sun was the goal of ambitious newspapermen the country over, he had thus reached the journalistic pinnacle of the time after a singularly short apprenticeship. For the next thirty-three years, except for a very brief period, Lord's life was spent at the managing editor's desk of the Sun.
In 1877 he bought a majority interest in the Syracuse Standard, borrowing the money on notes. He antagonized the minority stockholders by attacking the "Canal Ring, " his notes were called, and he was forced out of the company at the end of six weeks, the minority giving him a bonus of $5, 000 upon his surrender of his stock. "The mildest, most unruffled of men, " he was affectionately called "Boss" Lord by his associates on the Sun in warm appreciation of his kindly, fair, and patient treatment. Selecting his reporters with scrupulous care, usually from college graduates, he built up a staff of brilliant writers who carried out Dana's specifications for clever, witty, vivid, concise reporting with particular emphasis on "human interest" features. But "making literature out of news" did not preclude Lord's solid presentation of facts or many a scoop.
He created for one night a worldwide news service when the Sun found itself in 1897 without the facilities of either the Associated Press or United Press after withdrawals from both by Dana over internal troubles. With only a few hours' notice, Lord calmly sent hundreds of telegrams and cables to correspondents and prospective representatives around the globe; so successful was he in producing a readable, adequate newspaper under those difficult circumstances that Dana enthusiastically called him "the John L. Sullivan of newspaperdom". Out of this independent news service came the Sun News Service and its competition with the Associated Press. Proud of being Dana's right-hand man for seventeen years, Lord continued as managing editor under the proprietorships of William M. Laffan and William C. Reick. Throughout he had for his night city editor, Selah Merrill Clarke; issuing "a newspaperman's newspaper, " they formed one of the most celebrated of editorial teams.
In 1921 he wrote a series of vocational guidance articles for the Saturday Evening Post, which were published in book form as The Young Man and Journalism (1922). He deplored the excessive sensationalism in much of the press, which, he said, produced "cheap mentality and consequently a cheap people. " Lord's career as an educator overlapped in part his journalistic career. Appointed a regent of the University of the State of New York in 1897, he served until 1904 and then after an interval again became a regent in 1909. Following periods as vice-chancellor and acting chancellor, he became chancellor in 1921 and held that office until his death. In these posts Lord was an important shaper and supervisor of educational policies in New York public schools and institutions of higher learning. Two of his special interests were the enlargement of high schools with particular emphasis on vocational courses, including agriculture, engineering, and nursing; and the elimination of inefficient one-room schools through consolidation of rural districts.
For many years he was chairman of the regents' committee on state libraries and museums. After his retirement as managing editor of the Sun in 1913, he devoted full time to his educational duties. He was also a founder of the Lotos Club.
Achievements
Chester Lord was widely appraised as one of the most influential of American editors, who developed many modern newspaper practices. Adolph S. Ochs said that the Sun under him was "a model of the highest class of journalistic work". His greatest single accomplishment was the foundation of the Sun News Service. He also organized a system of handling election returns which greatly speeded the announcement of results and his file of campaign data was so thorough that political leaders relied on it. Under his leadership, the Sun became a pioneer "school of journalism, " the graduates of which were accepted anywhere.
(Excerpt from The Young Man and Journalism
The new report...)
Membership
Lord was a member of many scholarly organizations, museum bodies, and clubs, including the National Institute of the Social Sciences, of which he was president, 1923-1925. He was an officer of the Lotos Club from 1894 to 1923 and the last four years its president.
Interests
Lord was a devotee of the opera and knew many of the scores; his vacations he spent fishing in Adirondack and Canadian streams.
Connections
His first wife, Katherine Mahala Bates, of Adams, New York, whom he married October 18, 1871, died in 1910. By her he had four sons, Chester, Edward Roy, Kenneth (city editor of the Sun, 1912-1922) and Richard Sanders, the last two surviving their father. His second wife, whom he married January 20, 1926, was Mrs. Elizabeth (Brown) Riggs of Forestville, Connecticut, widow of Edward Gridley Riggs, for many years the Sun's chief political writer.
