"
"I hope," Howard said earnestly, "that we won't have to use that
phrase--'our class of readers'--much longer. Our paper should interest
every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper's
audience should be like that of a good play--the orchestra chairs full and
the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we're not an 'organ'
any longer?"
"No, I didn't." Mr. King looked surprised. "Do you mean to say that we're
free to print the news?"
"Free as freedom. In our news columns we're neither Democrat nor Republican
nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We
are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing but the news."
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched
fingers. "Hum--hum," he said. "This _is_ news. Well--the
circulation'll go up. And that's all I'm interested in."
Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of
exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his
changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him
a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted.
He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men,
their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to
improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which
raged in the offices of the "yellow journals.
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