1897 Question: Do Typewriters Lower the Literary Grade of Work Done by Reporters?

 

Chicago Daily News stenographer at her typewriter in 1922.
Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum, Library of Congress

Journalism historian W. Joseph Campbell noted that among the issues to be discussed at the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association annual meeting in New York in February 1897 was: Do typewriters lower the literary grade of work done by reporters?

By that year, typewriter models had become easier to use and were gaining favor with reporters. But not everyone welcomed the new technology.

“Just as some journalists expressed skepticism about the Internet,” wrote Campbell, “some veteran reporters in 1890s resented the noisy, intrusive typewriter.” They still preferred to write their stories by longhand.

One Mobile Register reporter, George Jeremiah Flournoy, looked on the typewriter as his mortal enemy.

At age 13, Flournoy, who had been given the nickname of “Gummy” because of his fondness for chewing gum, was a scorekeeper for the Mobile’s amateur baseball games in the late 1880s. He also wrote accounts of the games for the city’s newspapers.

Although his formal schooling ended at the third grade, Flournoy landed a job as a copy reader for The Mobile Item. He worked until 2 a.m. each morning, caught a couple of hours of sleep in the press room and then carried newspapers to subscribers. With a bit of hustling he could earn about $23 a week.

In the 1890s, Flournoy went to work as a police and society reporter for The Mobile Daily News. By 1897, he had switched over to gathering news for The Mobile Herald. Flournoy worked again for the Item after it was acquired by the Register in 1916.

Fellow newspapermen called Flournoy “the best leg man in the business,” a term applied to reporters who used the telephone to call in their stories to the “rewrite man.” The rewrite man actually wrote the story from the notes the reporter gave over the telephone.

Flournoy never mastered the use of a typewriter, or the English language for that matter. He either phoned in or handed most of his material to the rewrite man. He let the copy desk worry about grammar, style and punctuation while he turned out the news.