Mister Pulitzer And The Spider Modern News From Realism To The Digital Kevin G Barnhurst

Mister Pulitzer And The Spider Modern News From
Realism To The Digital Kevin G Barnhurst
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Praise for this book:
“Everyone has a theory about what’s gone wrong with the news business. Kevin
Barnhurst’s explanation is original, elegantly presented, and potentially useful both to
journalists and to citizens trying to decide which version of the news is worth paying
attention to.”
—James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic and author of
Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
“With unparalleled scholarly precision spanning more than 200 years, Kevin Barnhurst
chronicles the tumultuous evolution and revolution of news—how it’s created and
consumed. Through his panoramic lens, Barnhurst reveals a macro and micro focus
on why today’s newspapers are thinner, broadcast sound bites shorter, and news
often skeletal on the facts, the result of technology developing shorter attention spans.
Spoiler alert: Mister Pulitzer and the Spider leaves us with a glimmer of hope.”
—Roberta Baskin, former investigative reporter for 20/20 and 48 Hours
“Over the years, I’ve found few scholars whose work is as original, insightful, or
readable as Kevin Barnhurst’s. Mister Pulitzer and the Spider exceeds even that lofty
expectation. Barnhurst’s story of how the hierarchy and meaning of reporters’ five
Ws have changed since the late 1800s explains more fully how the news has shaped
society, and been shaped by it, than any book I’ve read. If your nightstand, classroom,
or personal library has room for only one book on journalism, make it this one.”
—
Thomas E. Patterson, author of Out of Order: An Incisive and Boldly Original Critique
of the News Media’s Domination of America’s Political Process
“Kevin Barnhurst’s methodical analysis of the forms in which journalistic expression
has developed deserves study by anyone interested in public knowledge in an age of
expanding communication technology.”
—Bill Kovach, former New York Times Washington bureau chief and coauthor of
The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect
“Kevin Barnhurst’s tour of a century of American news draws on an imaginative
blend of empirical content analysis and cultural criticism. Mister Pulitzer and the Spider
explores how news evolved from the realism of storytelling to the modernism of
interpretation and is full of interesting surprises for anyone who cares about the future
of news in the Internet age.”
—David Nord, author of Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers
and Their Readers
“Far-reaching in its scope and provocative in its claims, this is a work of brilliant
originality.”
—Stephen Coleman, coauthor of The Media and the Public: “Them” and “Us”
in Media Discourse
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Mister Pulitzer and the Spider
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The Histommunication
Robert W. McChesney and John C. Nerone, editors
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
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to press with a grant, fairplay
Figure Foundation
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Mister Pulitzer
and the Spider
Modern News
from Realism
to the Digital
Kevin G. Barnhur
st
Unsity of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
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The quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 on page 1 is reprinted by
permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 1953, renewed 1981
by Ray Bradbury.
© 2016 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937571 isbn 978-0-252-04018-4 (hardcover) isbn 978-0-252-09840-6 (e-book)
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For Alina and a future of good news
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Contents
Pr xi
Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism from Machine to Digital Times
1. Industrial News Became Modern 3
2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter 13
3. Longer News Turned Elite 29
Part 2. “Who”—People Disappeared as News Expanded
4. Gr 45
5. Authorities Replaced Others 54
6. News Gained Status but Lost Touch 64
Part 3. “What”—Events, the Basic Stuff of News, Declined
7 Ev 77
8. The “What” Waned in Broadcast News 86
9. Modern Events Resumed Online 100
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Part 4. “Where”—Locations for News Grew More Remote
1 Local Lost Ground to Distant News 111
11. Newscasters Appeared Closer 121
12. News Traded Place for Digital Space 130
Par
t 5. “When”—The Now of News Pursued Modernism
1 T 141
14. Newscasters Seemed More Hurried 151
15. News Online Reentered Modern Time 161
Par
t 6. “Why”—Against All Odds, Interpretation Advanced
1 T 171
17. Broadcast News Became Less Episodic 181
18. Online News Reverted to Sense-Making 191
Par
t 7. Nes Transformed: So What and Now What?
1 Social Values Enabled Change 205
20. Modernism Exposed the Flaws of News 214
21. Realism Could Rekindle Hope 224
Notes 235
Bibliography 261
Index 281
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Preface
A
current commonplace is that the world has changed in the digital era, but how
to understand what happened? To answer, technologists and scientists focus
on the technical, sociologists on the cultural, political scientists on government,
parties, and voters, and communication experts on media and interpersonal chan-
nels, while historians and philosophers wait for the dust to settle. Journalists have
taken the earliest and riskiest look at the changes, reassessing the spider-
web-like
digital networks even as colleagues lost jobs in the roiling shifts underway. In news coverage the keyword media entered flux; “the media” became “legacy media,” and personal interactions mutated to add “social media.” New terms place com- munication at the center of whirling change, with news in its eye, but not because of the usual explanations. New technologies alone do not account for the move of “scavengers from the press,” in the words of sociologist Max Weber more than a century ago, into “the salons of the powerful on this earth.”
1
Neither economic
competition nor rivalry among news outlets can fully explain the move, nor can the occupational ambitions of news practitioners.
The bold claim here is that texts as conveyors of ideas produced the modern
world of the twentieth century. First, ideas in the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the next formed “the journalist” through two strains of modernism. Realism of the nineteenth century and American modernism of the twentieth cen-
tury found full expression in news of a particular kind. “News” settled into cultural imagination and remained fairly stable as a way to see the world, even though the content, technologies, practices, and cultural conditions continued changing. But
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xii • Preface
beliefs about what news is began to contradict what news became, so that by cen-
tury’s end practitioners misrecognized what they were producing and audiences
grew dissatisfied with what they were receiving. News occupations, audiences, and
businesses finally reached crisis in the new century, despite a concerted industry
effort to adapt. The crisis mystified observers and policymakers who, unaware of
the internal contradictions, focused on competition from the web.
Of course “the world” has not changed everywhere or in concert, but even areas
largely disconnected from the outside have altered some ways of living. Through new technologies, “communication” has morphed into activities unthinkable a few decades ago. In parts of Africa, mobile phones now operate as a local scrip used in small exchanges, usurping national currency and credit.
2
One might see the
big picture through many such small instances, a massive task to encompass the deep and uneven alterations across human societies. Or one might instead look at the always-
peculiar USA, where widespread changes have emerged and seem to
concentrate without the oversight or control attempts found in places like China or the European Union.
To understand digital transformations, the United States provides a key setting,
and news is a central case. Societies have viewed their communication systems through the lens of news at least since the eighteenth century, when several writ- ers about the British Parliament called the gallery of reporters the “fourth estate.”
3

Understanding recent changes requires going back to the great social transforma- tion underway by the 1880s, when Mister Pulitzer began to imagine modern news, one bookend here. The other bookend is the twenty-
first-century web of networked
communication, where “man bites dog” sits equally alongside “dog bites man,” opening new possibilities while upending modern news.
4
But historians will find
the history here a mere sketch. Other areas of scholarship receive their similar share of abuse. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists will want more focus on the data, technology scholars more on technics, especially recent social media, and cultural studies theorists more critique. My project proposes that from a baseline in long-term content analysis, one
can read out the sociological conditions of the journalist occupation and explore cultural studies of the context. But the main work to understand recent change is historical and philosophical. History can sketch out how surrounding groups view the content of news media and explore competing ways to explain contradictions between what news contains and what practitioners and audiences believe about and expect from it. Philosophy can dissect how modern news sets up, reproduces, and changes the terms and conditions of knowledge. The main themes for under- standing the changes—nineteenth-
century realism and twentieth-century mod-
ernism—come from the arts and humanities, with their interest in peculiar cases
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Preface • xiii
that illuminate the general, and so require patience from scientists. And the main
insights, with due apologies, come from a duffer’s bag of philosophy.
Here the parts on “who,” “what,” and “where” present a kind of ontology, the
persons, places, and events that modern communication creates and sustains. One example is the “public,” which philosopher John Dewey identified as the product of interactive communication (not of earlier kinds of public opinion or later poll- ing techniques). The initial parts here examine aspects of knowledge such as how best to containerize information, the status of the persons involved, the type of occurrences deserving attention, and the locations worth including. Two further parts elaborate a rough-
and-ready epistemology. A part on “when” examines the
periods appropriate for knowledge, outlining some aspects from the philosophy of time. And a part on “why” explores the level and aims of explanation on offer, summarizing how modern communication makes knowledge from the raw mate- rials of occurrences.
For a shortcut through the text, review the logic of the argument outlined in the
table of contents and read the introductory chapter before jumping to the conclu- sion. Specialists might concentrate on one part, such as historians on the “when.” Each part moves more or less in chronology from print to broadcast and then digital news, and so another path could lead through each part’s chapter on a particular medium. The digital chapter ends each part with a discussion of the main philo- sophical viewpoints that help make sense of recent transformations, an avenue through the book for anyone interested mainly in theory and ideas.
News turns out to be a knowledge system, its content expressing practitioner
ideas about what is knowable and its audiences interacting in the production of a particular kind of knowledge in culture. Viewed through the amalgam of these ideas, the journalist, which began as an occupation, appears to have moved into creating knowledge over the past century, producing the perspective on knowledge called journalism. During the American century known for specialist knowledge, journalism has made one of the most central if tacit claims of producing general knowledge.
But its practitioners will no doubt dislike the idea. Research on news is about
as useful to journalists “as ornithology is to birds,” in the words usually attributed to physicist Richard Feynman.
5
Academics have little to offer the practitioner of
digital or legacy news. One I interviewed objected to my studying without ever hav-
ing worked in news. I may not be a musician, goes the old saw, but I play the radio, and I have tried to listen, watch, and read with empathy. Mine is the perspective of an audience member, but one equipped with data. After inspecting the graphs of the results, another practitioner I interviewed dismissed them as “just statistics.” News insiders are smart to resist mere data, especially charts that give only a quick
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xiv • Preface
picture of the overall trends. For further detail on the methods and data behind the
illustrations, the original peer-reviewed studies are available online.
Brief versions of the main parts of the book have appeared elsewhere: part 1
as “When Faster Takes Longer: Length, Authority, and the Fate of U.S. News,” in Leonardo Almanac; part 2 as “Ideology and the Changing Representations of Per- sons in U.S. Journalism,” in Form and Style in Journalism; and part 3 as “The Problem of Realist Events in American Journalism,” in Media and Communication. Part 4 is forthcoming as “The Problem of Modern Locations in U.S. News,” in Journal of Media and Cultural Politics. Part 5 appeared as “The Problem of Modern Time in American Journalism,” in KronoScope; and part 6 as “The Interpretive Turn in News,” in Journal- ism and Technological Change. A longer version of chapter 20 appeared as “Paradoxes in News Epistemology” in Media, Culture, and Society.
6
I news biased me toward storytelling over other kinds of information. Recent news stories can be deadly dull to read or hear, despite the splashy packaging. Every assistant involved in the coding complained of boredom, even those enjoying the luxury of print or audio editions. The complexity of recent reports makes them difficult to recount. Turning to the older content, coders dreaded the prospect of scrolling through transcripts or microfilm. But the stories were riveting. Coders retold favorites and made copies to pass around. Consider one about an 1894 fire in Milwaukee in which nine firefighters died:
It was a few minutes after 5 and the firemen were pouring great streams of water
on the burning roof and the water was beginning to trickle through into the theater
below, when the entire roof over the theater part of the building suddenly began to
sink and in an instant dropped to the floor, fifty feet below. The ill-
fated firemen had
not a moment’s time to think of the possibilities of escape. A cry of horror went up from the firemen who saw the awful catastrophe. The people from the hotel, who had left their rooms, knew nothing of the frightful tragedy that was taking place in the theater. The crowd of onlookers who saw it knew nothing of the disaster until the firemen who had escaped with blanched faces ran to the street and tremulously told of the sad fate which had befallen their brave brothers, who were buried beneath the burning girders, roof, and floors in the theater.
7
P
local history buffs might have known its background, but readers in 1894 learned
none of that. Instead the story tumbles out without a pause. Reading passages
like this, we researchers shook our heads in disbelief—could the story be true?
Modern journalism would call the story poorly attributed, the details fabricated,
and the context lacking. Reporters today use slices of life to introduce their longer
reports, vignettes that rarely stand alone. Small stories like the one about boys
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Preface • xv
hiking together, which a reporter describes in an interview here, can leave the
reader to ponder timeless themes. They settle on the mind and lead to an under-
standing of others. But news has become something else, bigger stories that convey
an abstract, predictable meaning. Simple stories demand active listening, but news,
supposedly all about stories, has turned away. “The art of storytelling is coming
to an end,” wrote the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s.
“It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our pos-
sessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”
8
M -
rytelling gave U.S. Americans a sad parade of stereotypes, bad for women and former slaves, and unhealthy even for the advantaged few.
9
My hope for stories
told fairly and with care may be just the pipedream of an audience member. For audiences the story presents a concrete way of thinking that has value in everyday life. Hearing of my project, a colleague in Italy shared an apocryphal story: In an encounter with a famous journalist, a pedantic critic said, “Please excuse me, but the phrase ‘an aching void’ does not seem very apt.” “Why?” asked the reporter. “Because an empty thing cannot be painful,” replied the critic. “Oh, that depends,” said the journalist. “You never had a headache, did you?” The story uses down-

to-earth language, but the joke is a complex play of categories (the critic’s head
as one of the empty things, the critic as one of the reporter’s headaches). Modern news uses concrete images to present abstract patterns that have more value for insider one-
upmanship or policy debates than for everyday life.
Being a member of the audience helped me spot the interpretive news trend in
the 1980s, an idea I first presented as a fellow at the Columbia University Media Studies Center. But my essay in a literary journal missed researchers’ attention.
10

After I shared my observations at Columbia, political scientist Diana Mutz men- tioned the trend in a convention talk in 1991. It generated so much argument and questioning that she returned to our shared office to ask, “Where’s the data?” She suggested we test my hunch together. Our article became a cause célèbre when the Journal of Communication accepted it but then delayed publication over objections to its first line, “Shit happens, but that is not necessarily news.”
11
People considered
two assistant professors crazy to insist that Oxford University Press publish the phrase, but it fit our argument and the earthy stuff of news.
That study grew only slowly into a larger project. The list of colleagues and stu-
dents who helped out grew from study to study and appears in each one. I thank them all. Communication historian John Nerone has been an inspiring figure whose insights weave throughout my and others’ work. I owe him a debt of grati- tude and friendship. Articles with other colleagues also helped me understand the “long news” hypothesis, its forms in different media, its misapprehension among those working in news, and its part in the transforming the past century. A 2001
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xvi • Preface
Shorenstein fellowship at Harvard supported the first studies of the trend online.
A 2009 sabbatical from the University of Illinois at Chicago opened perspectives
from abroad, including feedback from hosts at the universities of Copenhagen and
Tampere, Finland, and questions from colleagues in France, Holland, Italy, Norway,
and Switzerland after my talks.
A 2015 study leave from the University of Leeds supported manuscript comple-
tion, and half of that time, spent at the University of Munich, helped me recon- ceive the book in light of detailed and thoughtful feedback that publishers solicited from eight anonymous reviewers. At the University of Illinois Press, acquiring edi- tor Danny Nasset gave steady support. Series editor John Nerone read the entire manuscript. At Leeds, Stephen Coleman did the same, and so did Jay Blumler. I appreciate their suggestions, which led to big changes. Expert copyediting, design, and production at the press added further improvements.
But I could not address all the criticisms. Instead of amassing more data, I
supplemented the widely spaced measurements by looking at crucial historical periods, especially at the beginning of Mister Pulitzer’s modern dream that news can be enlightening instead of debasing or a thing to resist, and at the ending with modern news ensnared in a digital web, its troubled state providing insight into the current century. For more periods and countries, other scholars have begun testing the interpretive trends.
12
Practitioners objected that the argument hits when the
journalism occupation is down, eroding its ability to supply public information. The complaint first came in 2001, when an acquisitions editor objected that the long-
news hypothesis was “too far out” and inimical to then-embattled National
Public Radio (NPR). While working in a journalism department, I thought stu- dents might benefit more from outsider questions than from the settled answers that industry insiders supplied, a possibility that seems firmer today. Doubt about what journalists do is good for their product: news.
A final note regards the Five Ws, which title the parts and are a tribute to the
realism and enthusiasm for broad learning of the late nineteenth century. The Chautauqua movement and Sunday-
school teaching of practical wisdom helped
shape the emerging occupation of the journalist. The Five Ws drew from classical rhetoric, especially Aristotle’s Four Causes, and retain a faint echo of his attention to oratory as an act of public information and persuasion. As a heuristic device, the Five Ws took more elaborated form in Burke’s five keys of dramatism, and they tackle fundamental philosophical questions including ontology, epistemology, and ethics. The status of persons and places, the existence of things, the dimension of time, and possibility of explanation are fundamental questions with a history of fruitful discovery in the social sciences.
13
R Just
So Stories, calling them “honest serving-men / (They taught me all I knew).” The
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Preface • xvii
young Kipling had worked as a journalist in India, and his story is an allegory for
news. In the long ago before elephants got their trunks, an Elephant’s Child full
of curiosity begins asking too many questions. Ostrich, Giraffe, Hippopotamus,
and Baboon each spanks him for his impertinence. When he dares to ask aloud
what the Crocodile eats for dinner, everyone gasps and then spanks him “for a
long time.” Instead of sating his curiosity, their reaction sends him on a journey
to find answers. The inevitable happens when he meets the Crocodile and sur-
vives only with the help of the Bi-
Colored-Python-Rock-Snake, who coils around
the elephant’s legs as an anchor to the shore. Afterward the Elephant’s Child sits dejected on the bank, waiting for his nose to shrink back, and the snake helps him adjust by pointing out all the “’vantages” of a long trunk. Returning across Africa, the elephant uses his trunk to whisk flies, pick fruit, and trumpet in song, arriving rambunctious: “Then that bad Elephant’s Child spanked all his dear families for a long time.
. . .” The other elephants make a pilgrimage “to borrow new noses from
the Crocodile.”
14
New fulfillment as well as deferred satisfaction. The accepted response to questioning is rebuke, because breaking with taboo is inherent in reporting news. The hero’s companion, a loquacious and dangerous snake, saves the day and then signals a way back home by suggesting the broader view central to modernism. A growing nose alludes to Pinocchio, born twenty years earlier to tell stories with a complex relation to truth. But the journey yields a peculiar tool useful for handling everyday demands, for issuing calls heard far and wide, and for subduing troublemakers. All those tropes and the families’ continuing astonishment track with the course of two modern literary achievements, the novel and the news.
Kipling was a product of imperialism and its values, not a figure easy to admire,
but the Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake is the model for this troublesome aca-
demic companion to news practitioners and their publics as we journey into a life with mobile social media. Kipling’s story ends with everyone else getting that same tool the Elephant’s Child first acquired, a condition that foreshadows the practice of news today, which has spread across and so illuminates the current state of technological society.
Stoddard, New Hampshire, USA
November 2015
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Part 1
News Pursued Modernism
from Machine to Digital Times
Picture it. Nineteenth-
century man with his horses, dogs, carts,
slow motion. Then in the twentieth century
, speed up your camera.
Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. . . .
Speed up the film. . . . Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here,
There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What,
Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom!
Digest-
digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column,
two sentences, a headline. Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl
man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands
of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge
flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!
—Ray Bradbury
, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
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Chapte
Industrial News Became Modern
T
he nineteenth century began with the slow-motion technologies Ray Brad-
bury lists in Fahrenheit 451, but by 1900 the industrial era had reached its height,
and concepts of time, place, and society had transformed. Avant-garde artists
adopted many-sided views of persons, natural and social scientists saw machine-
like progress in events, and trains and steamers were making remote places seem
like neighbors. Philosophers found a multitude of perspectives on time, and the
closing of the American frontier and the success of worldwide exploration made
it seem possible to explain everything. An older way of crafting stable personages,
places, and performances gave way to a new factory metaphor for imagining the
changing social and physical world.
1
U emerged to embrace a machine understanding of the world. It adopted the lat-
est techniques and shared a kind of realism with science and the arts of the time, marking the shift to the industrial news era. Newspapers pioneered the sensational, some as a way to activate reform, preparing the ground for progressive news of the twentieth century. The rhythm of machine printing pumped out a flow of multiple editions that reached the street with breaking stories about real occurrences. News offered a cornucopia of tales hawked in the streets for avid buyers, and those stories went “viral” through the government-
supported system of press exchanges and
story reprints around the country.
2
So many stories manufactured like widgets required a new occupation, the
journalist—part collector of flotsam from the flow of urban life and part worldly
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4 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
naturalist sorting actions and their actors into categories and types.
3
The occupa-
tion fused mental work and mechanical labor, aligned with the ideas of individual
minds from newly invented psychology as well as with the machine age. Occur-
rences stamped into news stories drew from all kinds of people located at street
addresses, but the high-
speed production involved a rough kind of brainwork that
divided the miscellany of life into departments, such as another invention: pages for sports, society, radio, and the like. In an explosion of innovation, the press cre- ated entertainments like comics and crosswords but at the same time imagined a reader also capable of interpreting the contents of an entire daily edition. U.S. news took on a particular character, famous for being brief but aimed at telling the truth. The amalgam of industrial facts with individual intelligence promised to inform a wider public and foster progress.
Modern news was a masterful creation of its era, bridging between ideas and
practical inventions. Two examples can illustrate its global and virtual ambitions. Timely updates from the telegraph connected humanity in a global network, and breathless stories from the wire added a kind of commotion to news pages, which expressed urban jostling and the hubbub of mass production. The factory meta- phor could connect places through systems like mass transit and could organize the processing of people, such as the “masses yearning to breathe free,” from the sonnet gracing the Statue of Liberty. Immersive experiences also arose, ranging from tourism of world expositions and big-
game hunting to patronizing nearby
popular destinations like amusement parks and movie houses. The invention of grand department stores promised a kind of virtual reality, an experience of great wealth made available in print by perusing display advertisements. The physical technology of cast-
iron construction allowed emporiums like the Marble Palace in
New York, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, or Marshall Field’s in Chicago to display goods behind enormous plate-
glass windows. The invention of window-shopping
had its parallel in newspaper ads, and the vast array of daily news matched the abundance available in stores for consumers.
4
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the press had added to its physical
roots in American realism of the nineteenth century by deepening its intellectual dimension, absorbed from the emerging movement called American modern- ism. Technical change also anticipated the shift. The electric dynamo fired the imagination of Henry Adams and others in the era. Street lighting and electrified transportation seemed to ease the process of urbanization. Industrialization moved into electric technologies that let industry reimagine factories from scratch. At newspapers the telephone was giving reporters faster access to new content, and rotogravure images made Sunday supplements startling. But electrified life held hidden complexities that required new ideas to sustain the hope for progress. One was corporate organization for the growing mass media, designed top-
down to
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Chapter 1. Industrial News Became Modern • 5
supply authoritative content to tame the modern world. News became a product
best served fresh for the widest consumption, spreading even wider as consumers
adapted to the idea of technologies from radio sets to airplanes.
5
T- paper covers were full with small ads, so that readers started in the center pages and read the newest news from the inside moving out, and advertising was a kind of wrapper left for reading last. The modern paper distilled its form in something new, called the front page, which used the cover to announce events in priority, top to bottom, mapping the social, political, and economic landscape. The Front Page became the title of a play that made news flesh in the idealistic young reporter, the acerbic editor, the corrupt cop or politician, the innocent bystander, and a cast of other stereotypes. That iconic picture of news permeated media culture of the twentieth century, illustrated in comic books, movies, and television series, and had its real-
world parallels. From progressive muckrakers to the Watergate inves-
tigators, the popular and romantic picture of the journalist settled into the public and practitioner mind.
6
T punchy, a quality that influenced all the other aspects of the content. Persons were the main attraction, including ordinary and working folk as well as the rich and powerful. Experts and commentators were rare, organized groups hardly appeared, and politicians stuck mostly to politics. What happened to persons mattered most, and a multitude of items told their stories. Names alone could identify them, but they lived at particular street addresses, often at or near the scene of the action. The main geography was local, but events from afar lent urgent and exotic appeal. The now of news stories was current, the latest update available at press time, mere
hours before an edition hit the streets. There was little time for or patience with a history lesson or future prediction, except in the newfangled horoscope. But all the small bits of news added up to more than the sum of the parts, so that a whole edition in a succession of days made sense of the city, the nation, and the globe. The news relied on the distributed native intelligence of its readers.
7
Fast-fo By the year 2000, the spider’s web of digital connectivity was reaching its span, and concepts of time, space, and society had again entered flux. Persons adapted to an unstable system of privatized and mobile life, and audiences fragmented into malleable “users” able to disrupt politics and business as “flash” or “smart” mobs. Artists made works that viewers could change or carry away, undoing the art object. Place warped into digital space, collapsing positions into video chat windows containing both there and here. Quarks and strange or charmed matter challenged Newtonian notions of time, and multitasking melded private into public moments and play into work, in a digital web that imposed tighter temporal coordination.
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6 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
Chaos and the butterfly effect in mathematics undermined the concept of linear
change or progress, as what philosophers had called “irrealism” overturned older
ways of explaining daily life.
8
Obse had occurred a century before. It caused upheavals throughout society. Flextime and telecommuting arose, rearranging work patterns, and e-
commerce caught
and ate up brick-and-mortar operations. Bookselling and reading went digital,
remaking the circulation of ideas. On social media, politicians arose outside party structures and business kept clients under closer surveillance. Once-
stable pur-
poses for large industrial sectors fell into doubt. The spider of digital media sent images on paper into retreat, leaving printing in disarray. Paper manufacturing went into a decades-
long decline, buffeted by “winds of global, social economic and
political change” that pushed beyond “the mass production paradigm to another, as yet uncertain, one.”
9
How did it look for news? At first the prosperous media businesses embraced
change, fielding centers and projects for “mediamorphosis.” Captains of industry pointed to the failure of U.S. railways to recognize they were in the transportation business, and news executives proclaimed they were in the information—not the news—business. But digital competition contributed to a growing crisis. Craigslist absorbed swaths of classified advertising, once a mainstay of newspaper profit- ability. Display advertising and commercials moved online, where the prices that advertisers would pay per viewer were closer to the levels of junk-
mail flyers. Crit-
ics called the old outlets “mediasaurus” and predicted the quick demise of “legacy media.” Print and broadcast news organizations pushed forward online in a mix of aggressive competition and passive reservation as their incomes fluctuated and declined.
10
New boards of the early 1900s or later on lighted ticker displays outside press offices, systems under press control and pushing viewers to the newspaper or newscast. There the consumer paid little but lent more eyeballs to the circulation or ratings for news, sold in turn to advertisers. Page views and clicks on free strands of web platforms escaped press control, and so news websites added the logos and links for social media, making matters worse. Later, in the first decade of the twenty-
first
century, business models that had placed news among the most profitable of indus- tries broke down, and investors panicked, driving down the market value of media properties. Some news operations closed their doors and others cut back, leaving thousands of workers out of a job. Once-
comfortable outlets had to streamline,
including the New York Times. After the venerable Times-Picayune of New Orleans
reduced its paper edition from seven to three days a week in 2012, its online, tablet, and mobile editions generated “softer, less-
well-sourced, poorer quality news.”
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Chapter 1. Industrial News Became Modern • 7
The solution, news leaders proposed, was a return to quality content to attract
followers.
11
T but professed to shield the news side of its operations from circulation and rat- ings data that the business side held. Eye-
tracking research in the 1990s, which
showed readers are active and selective in skimming information, got pigeonholed as merely about design. Online, reporters and editors could see for themselves the traffic for their stories, and the measurable clicks revealed how little attention audiences paid to most news content. Instead of intelligent agents in search of facts to sustain political engagement, citizens seemed to require prodding to eat the bitter spinach of public information from legacy media. Editors who had long known of the problem could no longer ignore it when reporters could see audience activity online.
12
Sear newsy. For one thing, it seemed much longer, and the observations turned out to be measurable.
13
From the 1880s through the 1990s, newspaper stories did grow
longer. The change occurred in small city papers as well as regional and national outlets across the country. The items in the late nineteenth century were so short that more than fifty would fit on the typical front page. By the second half of the twentieth century, only a handful would fit, and they had to jump onto inside pages. After television began broadcasting the first report of events, stories on national network news grew longer through the quarter century beginning in 1968. Com- mercial competition was increasing and visual images becoming more prominent in print and TV, but the same trends occurred without commercials or visuals on National Public Radio (NPR) from the 1980s to the early years of the 2000s. The trend ran deep, affecting the coverage of persons ranging from U.S. presidents, the ultimate insiders, to outsider groups such as gays and lesbians. And although the internet brought expectations for change, online news reversed course only briefly before returning to the growth in length, even as news organizations struggled financially. Research confirmed the surprising discovery that news stories grew longer from the 1880s to the 2010s.
What occupied the added words in longer stories? Across the coverage of natu-
ral, human, and social topics, the content and its visual presentation changed how news presented people, events, and places (the “who,” “what,” and “where”). The treatment of time (“when”) and processes and explanations offered (“how” and “why”) changed even more dramatically.
14
The impact of longer news on con-
tent was also counterintuitive. Instead of “human interest” growing, ordinary and working-
class people disappeared from news, replaced by groups, officials, and
experts. Stories had fewer—not more—events. Although audiences presumably preferred local stories, locations moved away from the street address, as references
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8 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
to faraway places expanded. Communications speeded up, but the time dimension
of news added to the now by expanding to the past, the future, and trends over time.
And news no longer aimed to report events-
as-they-happened for the public to
process. It explained larger problems or tried to make sense of issues, aiming to interpret events.
What can explain so dramatic a change? In trade publications going back to
the nineteenth century, industry insiders point to technology as a force.
15
They
also report experiencing greater rivalry with others producing news, and industry managers had to adjust to markets crowding with news and entertainment outlets. In interviews, practitioners with experience going back to the 1950s described adjusting their routines through waves of change. The competition from insider rivalry and newer technology and for greater profitability deserves attention. But a strange contradiction remains: most industry sources have tended to see mar- ket, technical, and practical influences having little impact on the core substance of quality mainstream news.
The difference between what news practitioners say and what the research
shows about news content suggests another explanation. When social actors overlook documented results or hold counterfactual views about their activities, ideological processes may be at work. Under one definition, ideology is any set of beliefs that obscures the power relations of social groups, which well-
meaning
elites may unwittingly encourage with the effect that other groups stay under elite domination. A kind of false consciousness leads the poor and disenfranchised, for instance, to participate in keeping themselves under hegemonic control. But in other cases, ideology may serve particular sectors by expanding the power of some occupations. Beliefs in the stability of news could be part of a social process that serves unrecognized occupational ambitions. That ideological dimension of news practice also matters and deserves attention.
16
But p and easily identifiable thing, and so the ideological explanation may go beyond occupations. Reification is the way cultures turn abstractions into social facts, with
consequences for concrete lived experience.
17
Studies show that audiences expect
old media to remain as they always were, and the reliable newsboy hawking in the street, paper whopping on the front stoop, and voices of newscasters droning in the background seem like certainties. The wide acceptance of the idea of short, people-
filled, event-centered, and local U.S. news suggests that the abstraction
“news” solidified in the culture. Continual critiques about the lack of the back- ground that publics need and the insufficient explanations in news do the same. Other studies show that ordinary U.S. Americans think of news in much the same way and see similar rewards and challenges as do career news practitioners. The misrecognition of what news has become seems to extend widely.
18
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Chapter 1. Industrial News Became Modern • 9
Broader historical work can look at the characteristics of cultural products to
discover what preceded them, when they emerged and evolved, and how the ideas
surrounding them changed. Insider and critical explanations require some explor-
ing, but the main subject here is a current in U.S. culture when news emerged:
modernism. News is a record of and a case study in the history of the modern idea,
how it expanded and then seemed to falter. News makes an ideal case because the
relation of news to modernism seems inadvertent, remaining unobserved in much
of news practice and the industry. Unlike art or literature, where modernism is
central, news is an emblem if low culture, cousin to word of mouth and the object
of ridicule. Its unlikely success in the past century is a rags-
to-riches story. That
it seems to have fallen victim to the spider’s web of digital times can illuminate the paradigm shift underway and the fate of the modern today.
What is modernism? Its ideas have a long history but tend to focus on the pos-
sibility of human progress, especially through technical invention, extension, and adaptation, including new ways of building an ordered society.
19
Some philoso-
phers say that modernism first emerged in Greece, with the invention of concepts to replace older habits and fantasies about the world. Instead of basing writing on pictograms to show objects, for instance, the Greeks took up a Phoenician inven- tion, letters abstracted to stand for sounds of speech. Greek ideas ranged from cartography to map the inhabited world and democracy to organize it and extended to philosophy to make thought systematic and several of the sciences to make it effective in practice. Human progress may have inspired later works, such as the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, with friezes spiraling up to convey the history of Rome in the monumental medium of the age.
Communication has played a central role in the modern idea and its relation
to knowledge. The invention of new kinds of media seems to give modernism its spark. Although feats of stonework served to bring Neolithic people together at Stonehenge for feasting rituals that disseminated ideas throughout the British Isles, the early modern era began later, when printing burst upon Europe of the fifteenth century.
20
The printing revolution made it possible for scientists to compare each
others’ work and for religious reform to spread. It also shifted the terms of power, overtaking the potentates’ ceremonies that once established accepted meanings for events. Newspapers, the first manufactured medium to circulate widely, were also a product of modern ideas in Europe and a principal organ sustaining early forms of public life.
In the course of the modern, tension has emerged between idealism and real-
ism. Idealist philosophy, which may have ancient roots but became prominent in the eighteenth century, asserts that the most important aspect of human reality is mental experience. Realist philosophy, which emerged in the ancient world and
advanced in Scotland and America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
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10 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
asserts the existence of reality in the external world, accessible to humans through
physical experience. Modernism has nineteenth-century roots in realist works
such as the writing of Émile Zola and the paintings of Gustave Courbet, as well as the grand architecture that made Paris modern in the mid-
nineteenth century.
21

In realist movements, words, images, and things (such as newspapers) assert the theory that honest depictions of details from lived experience expand knowledge and can open a deep understanding of the world. But realism in U.S. news also turned reader-citizens into reader-purchasers, making the commercial even more
central to the general circulation of ideas.
American modernism as it emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century
was idealist, seeking precision and brevity in literature and an escape from slavish realism into the beauty of the abstract in art. It took inspiration from artists such as Paul Gauguin, who offered, “Some advice: do not paint too much after nature. Art is an abstraction; .
.. think more of the creation which will result than of nature.”
22

The modern conception for words imagined a spare and clean language to con- trast with Victorian excess, presented in a typographic object as understated as a simple “crystal goblet” designed to let the content shine. Of course every container influences the reception of its content in some way. Abstraction, simplicity, and clarity turned out to be friendly to the belief in business efficiency and endured in corporate architecture throughout the century. Modern news fused those quali- ties with the excitement for the new in a product replenished daily and remod-
eled periodically, one of the first things of modern culture to introduce rapid style obsolescence, a precursor to the throwaway society.
The real and abstract continually interact in the modern. Both aspects rejected
the romantic and historical arts of the previous century, which had responded to industrialization and urbanization by seeking escape into fantasy or the past. Realism sides with common sense in philosophy and with everyday life in the arts. Its bottom-
up representations stand opposite the top-down deductive forms
in the strain of modernism that followed. But in words, images, and things, both strains jostled side by side. In the early twentieth century, the Ash Can School of art asserted realism even as modern idealism advanced. Most of the Ash Can artists had worked on the staff of Philadelphia newspapers, and so the realist attitude of the press fed back into art.
23
Both strains also embraced communication, com-
merce, and contraptions, often in conflicting ways but to pursue positive change. A vital instance was photography, which could capture the modern “big picture” while recording exact details of “the real thing,” fusing the sharing of ideas with a saleable product. And photos seemed to have clarity and simplicity, in contrast to the decorated and posed drawings of the Victorian press.
The historical process of modernism is visible in news content, which is
continuous and comparable over time, where other artifacts are lumpy and
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Chapter 1. Industrial News Became Modern • 11
incommensurate. For instance, new technologies that seem capable of changing
the world may instead become trivial or precious. The poet, tinkerer, and Harvard
medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in 1859 foresaw stereographic pho-
tography ushering in a “new epoch in the history of human progress” that would
be apparent “before another generation has passed away.”
24
By divorcing the form
of things from their material substance, photographs made “matter as a visible
object .
.. of no great use any longer.” Images reproduced on paper and viewed in
stereo seemed poised to make seeing the original unnecessary. One could simply travel no farther than the nearest stereographic library. But by the 1960s the ste- reoscope lived on mainly in the View-
Master, which the company Fisher-Price
continues producing for toymaker Mattel. Unlike news technologies, news content is perennial.
In hindsight Holmes was wrong in focusing on the detail of tools but right about
the general transformation in his era. Machine-age inventions eased the burden of
labor and promised a better world.
25
The Linotype, for instance, removed typeset-
ting from human hands, automating the painstaking process of setting each metal letter in place for printing. Mass production of words on paper seemed capable of widening engagement in democracy. But the ensuing century saw entire occupa- tions such as Linotype operators vanish in the face of photographic alternatives. Hand typesetting and letterpress printing managed to live on as fine-
art graphics.
The original object fell out of everyday use when first photo reproduction and then digital type generation of took its place. But the ideal of setting the news into type, a practical activity with a civic purpose, lives on in news content.
To understand the transformations underway in the digital era, media content
can provide a jumping-off point. As devices and their operations change, words
and images endure. What happened to content over the twentieth century provides continuous traces of social and technical upheaval because words and images are comparable across platforms. Close attention to content reveals how news produc- ers presented the world to their audiences, which in turn allowed my interviews with producers to explore how generations of media makers envisioned their own practices. Understanding the dialogue among practitioners next required looking beyond the texts to the conditions that produced them. The contents and practi- tioner experience, the context of history, and some attention to audience responses together can shed light on the history of the surrounding society in broad strokes and help illuminate the era of spidery connective webs.
What makes the text, praxis, and context most interesting is the view of knowl-
edge they propose. Academic research and business R&D speak to specialists. Governments, schools, and churches speak more broadly but mostly codify and inculcate existing ideas. News is a prime space for making and disseminating knowledge for all. In an era of identity politics and mobile private society, general
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12 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
meaning is a territory under siege. But beliefs about news have resisted cultural
change, even as its contents and practices have transformed over more than a cen-
tury. A contradiction so weird—and maybe worrisome—is worth probing, even
though the importance of journalism has tended to go unrecognized alongside the
usual suspects: capitalism, socialism, and other “-
isms.” But the case of U.S. news
encapsulates the American century and illuminates the current state of general knowledge.
Its state of crisis appears to emerge from modernism and the tensions between
its principal strains, which New York street photographer Robert Englebright cap- tured in his worm’s-
eye perspective on the Rockefeller Center.
26
One grand tower
looms above, its windows obscuring any sign of human activity in a pattern of rectilinear facets—a monument to the purity, precepts, and power of American modernism. The pale stone converges in one-
point perspective at a mast extend-
ing from the building below. Its surface, by contrast, looks compressed, its one clear facet marking a pathway to a dark, rectangular base. There, a fragment of bas relief sculpture suggests a roiling mass cast in metal, where human forms confront the weight of institutions and manage to survive and resist—a monument to the heroism, humanity, and fidelity of downtrodden realism. As modern news grew to influence the powerful at the top, what it became may not matter because U.S. Americans managed to steer a course despite its flaws.
27
But in another sense what
happened to news matters a great deal because its realism made the frailties at the political and social pinnacles knowable from below. Both strains of modernism endure and have continual consequences for knowledge in the digital era.
Views of what and how one can know—or epistemology—are also what dis-
tinguish the captains of older media from the young Turks of newer media. They squabble over every conceivable terrain, as things ranging from refrigerators to paper—even the physician’s touching of the human body—become connected in digital networks. Modern news allowed practitioners to ride the crests of techni- cal change, but realism is what could rivet readers of print yesterday and blogs and social media feeds today. Has the spider of digital networks entrapped legacy media and their workers? The answer, which can shed light on recent social and technical upheavals, starts from a question of form: How long should a news story run?
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Chapte
Stories Only Seemed Shorter
R
ealist news was mainly short when the occupation of journalist first emerged
in the nineteenth century, and everything in the modern world has seemed
to go only faster for more than a century. First radio picked up the pace and then
television followed, requiring shorter attention spans. Along came faxes, then
electronic mail, and now video messaging. MTV made images move faster, televi-
sion commercials got shorter, and online ads shrank to a few seconds. Critics call it
sound-
bite society or McDonaldization, reducing information to nuggets. Over the
past century, has daily news gone along with what seems like the modern trend?
Some insiders say yes and point back to the impact of USA Today. Science writer
James Gleick, in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, summa- rized the view: “USA Today caters to your more modern reading habits by keeping copy short. Other newspapers have catered to them by going out of business.”
1

Observers point to the shrinking of sound bites on television newscasts by the end of the twentieth century and to the rise of images everywhere. Critics say these two trends are related: as pictures became more prominent, they squeezed out words. In magazines, according to the New York Times, “the 4,000-
word article has
become a relic, first replaced by the 800-word quick take and then further boiled
to a 400-word blurb that is little more than a long caption.” Following the trend in
magazines, insiders say, daily news has become shorter.
Others are less sure. Jon Franklin, in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review,
says that long-form writing has waxed and waned in news. He began working as
a journalist in 1959 for the Navy magazine, All Hands, and then spent a couple of
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14 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
years at the Prince George’s Post, in the Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., before
joining the Baltimore Evening Sun. He remembers being “constrained by the hoary
old rules of ‘real’ journalism” in the 1960s. “If we ran longer than 20 inches, our
endings were subject to arbitrary amputation.”
2
He then describes a scene in the
early 1970s, when managing editor Phil Heisler changed the rules at the Sun: “I will
never forget the day Phil came out, plopped down on the edge of the city editor’s
desk and announced in a voice loud enough to carry halfway across the newsroom
that all important stories would henceforth be at least 50 inches long. He sat there
for a few moments, listening to the silence crackle, and then he got up, marched
back into his glassed-
in office and closed the door. . . . Similar scenes were being
played out across America.”
Franklin became something of a specialist in long-form news. He won a Pulit-
zer Prize for feature writing—the first ever given—for his 1978 article “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” an extended close-
up of how a neurosurgical operating room works. He
later won the first Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing. At the Sun he remembers “taking two to three months to do a story,” a long time for a newspaper reporter. Explanation serves the modern urge to make sense of and give order to informa- tion, along with the quick clarity or gestalt that overarching structures supply. The pendulum swung back to brevity in the 1980s, Franklin says, when long stories fell out of fashion. Industry research showed at the time that readers would rarely stick with a story once it jumped to an inside page, and so the era “ended by thousands of managing editors popping out of their offices and announcing that, henceforth, no story would jump off the front page.”
Trends in news recur about every twelve to fifteen years, Franklin quips, “cal-
culated by the periodic rediscovery of the killer bees story.”
3
The cycle began again
in the mid-
1990s, he says, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors pub-
lished a new study showing the value of longer stories to readers. Five years later, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University began sponsoring an annual confer- ence on narrative journalism. The grand scale of modernism that lent importance to art and design seemed to apply to news. But then American Editor magazine, in a theme issue on “Writing Long,” began to question the “mistaken belief that the more important a story, the longer it must be.” By then, long stories had reached another peak.
Andy Glass remembers it another way. His career as a reporter, editor, and col-
umnist began in the mid-twentieth century. At his first job with the New Haven
(Conn.) Journal Courier in the 1950s, news came into the newspaper office on a
teleprinter hooked to a teletype machine that set the type and justified it in col- umns. “It was virtually impossible to edit,” except by snipping from the bottom, he said in our interview: “I remember once there was an execution that occurred in California at two in the morning our time, which was eleven o’clock at night
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 15
in California. It was a sensational execution in 1957. So I had to change the tense
of the story because the prisoner died literally on—not on deadline, but on press
start in New Haven. So I had to go into the copy and actually edit the copy. And
I remember that because it was so rare that we changed things.”
4
Glass invokes a
common explanation about news, that technology is in control, and concludes that
“stories tended to be longer” back then. “You couldn’t go in and cut a paragraph,
other than to go to the stone and physically throw the type away after it had been
set.” Reporters wrote about two stories a day, he recalls, and the general rule they
followed was, “Tell the story in as much length as you need to tell it properly and
then stop.”
He joined the New York Herald-Tribune in 1959 and landed an assignment with
the Washington bureau in the early 1960s. During that time, he says, “I cannot remember any prolonged or any sustained discussions about story length. It liter-
ally never came up.” In the late 1960s he moved to the Washington Post, then under the editorship of Ben Bradlee. Glass says his work began to have an impact when he broke the story in the mainstream press about CIA connections to the student movement. A few years later he left the Post, and after a stint on Capitol Hill as a press secretary for Sen. Jacob Javitts (R-
N.Y.) and executive assistant for Sen.
Charles “Chuck” Percy (R-Ill.), he returned to news at the National Journal, a maga-
zine publishing pieces as long as twenty-five thousand words.
In 1974 he joined the Cox newspaper chain, where he became the Washington,
D.C., bureau chief and a columnist, moving away from the kind of reporting that he remembers for its length. He recalls “editors generally pressuring the bureau to keep it short: ‘You’re writing too long.’” During the 1990s the Cox newspapers went through major redesigns, with more graphics and new layouts and type that intro- duced more white space, what editors call air. The formats of the papers changed, re-
webbed in the jargon, so that “their physical size went down by 15 to 20 percent.”
Glass invokes another explanation common among practitioners, the influence of visuals and design, and says that conditions created “a direct—not implied, but a direct—demand,” passed from the top editors through the news editors, “to keep the story short.” In sum, Glass remembers technical limitations keeping stories long in the 1950s and 1960s, and then: “What I have felt as a manager is strong pressure for shorter stories, consistently since the nineties.” Technologies and then publishing decisions from the top seemed to push change.
Others I interviewed or talked to casually tell similar stories. What they see
depends at least partly on their job titles. Editors and producers, who have to manage the demands for space in the newspaper or for time on the air, pressure reporters to be concise. If editors are succeeding, news is getting shorter, and they remember their success. Reporters may sense that the demand for briefer stories has been waxing and waning. The best articles—writing that attracts the attention
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16 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
of colleagues, has a political impact, changes things, and wins Pulitzers—tend to
be long, but reporters see long pieces as the exception. They think of their writ-
ing as short, and that makes sense. Realist practice of the late nineteenth century
defined news as brief, and the idea stuck despite a century of modern influences.
Everyday experience pushes reporters to write and editors to edit shorter. It should
come as no surprise that they see the trends the way they do. If they had to place
a bet, insiders would likely put their money on the idea that daily news—on the
whole—has been getting shorter along with everything else.
But they would lose the wager. Editor and commentator Michael Kinsley, a
notable figure in magazine (The New Republic), television (Crossfire), and online (Slate.com) circles, was onto something when he surmised that “newspaper arti- cles are too long” and so “seekers of news are abandoning print.”
5
A series of studies
shows that news has been getting longer, moving away from brief realist descrip- tions of stand-
alone events and aligning with modern impulses toward big-picture
explanation. The trend occurred across legacy news media: newspaper reporters writing longer, television reporters speaking more, and even reporters on public radio, the home of extended news, talking more in longer stories. First consider newspapers. In three different papers with different circulations geographically dispersed in U.S. cities of different sizes, news articles grew longer. The growth is clear (figure 2.1).
At the New York Times and the Portland Oregonian, the length of stories doubled
over a century. The Chicago Tribune stories ran longer, too, although growing not as much. Stories about three different topics—accidents, crime, and employment—all went up, which reveals a general climate for news at work, instead of the particu- larities of different content. The changes are substantial, overall and also for each newspaper and for each topic. That is, stories grew longer, at different newspapers, for different topics, and in different places across the United States.
Compared to a one-paragraph New York Times story that sticks to the realist facts
of factory jobs in 1894, a 1994 story on employment on Staten Island runs twenty-
seven paragraphs of modern context and structure, elaborating on a theme, the
revival of the port. A typical crime story from the Chicago Tribune of 1894 ran one paragraph: “James McCune of 319 South Green street, a packer, is at the County hospital with a fractured skull. He was knocked down by William Warrington of 528 South Halstead [sic] street, a teamster. The men quarreled at West Congress and South Halstead streets. The police held Warrington without booking him.” The realist reporting leaves the reader to make sense of the conflict between pack- ers and teamsters. The Tribune no longer runs short local crime stories that lack a modern rationale to explain the broader significance.
After the 1960s, accident stories showed a steep increase in length. Two exam-
ples illustrate how they grew longer. Shortly before the turn of the century, the
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 17
Times contained a two-paragraph item that begins this way: “Four-year-old Dora
Cohen was run over before her father’s eyes by a horse and wagon in front of her
home, at 87 Hester Street, at 7:30 o’clock last evening. The child’s ribs were crushed
in and she died an hour later in her father’s arms.” The story conveys the drama
and pathos of an occurrence worthy of attention. The second paragraph reports
a chronology of the accident, describing the street, express wagon, and driver in
realist detail. Short items disappeared over the century, so that by 1994 the Times
covered only much bigger accidents that revealed the abstractions of trends and
patterns or the complexity of major, underlying problems. For instance, a report
on a flooding incident in Fort Fairfield, Maine, on April 19 that year runs much
longer by adding information on previous floods, state emergency measures, and
the damage, as well as what triggered the flooding. It illustrates the modern pen-
chant for providing an interpretation, which takes first more research and then
more space.
Another way to look at the length of stories in newspapers is by counting the
number of items (whether typography or image) on the front page (figure 2.2).
6
In
Source: Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997.
Longer News Articles
Figure 2.1
1894 1914 1934 1954 1974 1994
Length of an average newspaper story, on a scale from 1 to 5.
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Overall
Accident
Crime
Job
New York Times
Chicago Tribune
Oregonian
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18 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
three newspapers—the metro daily San Francisco Chronicle, the small daily Spring-
field, Illinois, State Journal-Register, and the small-town weekly Peterborough (formerly
Contoocook) Transcript of New Hampshire—items declined. News is more than a
jumble of items but groups any related headlines, texts, and images into a story. For every story, one other item, such as a stand-
alone illustration or an ad, also
ran on average. The one-to-one pattern did not change in a century, but what did
change was how many stories could fit. The length increased. As modern news advanced, main stories acquired a grander scale, so that dramatically fewer stories would fit on the front page.
A typical page in 1885 had room for almost twenty-five stories, but by 1985
the number dropped to about five. Other things happened, of course. The pages themselves got smaller to match modern notions of efficiency, usually justified for their economy. The text type grew larger under the influence of modern design and legibility science, and ads disappeared into inside pages as modern ideas of content organization advanced. Much of the descriptive labor of realist reporting moved out of stories, and more photos and illustrations took its place. Modernism
Source: Barnhurst and Nerone, 1991.
Figure 2.2
Sparser Front Pages
Average number of items and stories on page 1 of newspapers.
0
10
20
30
40
50
1885 1895 1905 1915 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985
Items
Stories
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 19
found expression in all aspects of form and content, as well as in story length. The
text of stories grew longer to provide a modern perspective on events. A century
ago most stories that began on the front page ended on the front page. Only the
biggest stories continued onto another page. By the late twentieth century, the few
stories that would fit on a typical front page ran long enough to jump to another
page inside the paper. The segment inside grew longer than an entire story from
a front page of the late 1800s. Modern sense-
making needs room.
U.S. newspaper reporting by the early 1900s had gained fame for its brevity,
especially compared with the European press. The “new” journalism of that era was brief and denotative, the expression of the machine age and a kind of fac- tual realism that defined the emerging occupation and became fixed in the public mind. News by that definition is brief and realistic, but news in practice has come to produce something else. Despite the pressure they feel to be brief, U.S. report- ers write longer news stories than their colleagues did a century ago. Their beliefs misalign with their actions, and that misrecognition, shared with academics and the general public,
7
is a central, unacknowledged aspect of news as it enters the
digital twenty-
first century. American news is short and snappy, and that realist
picture of news stuck, but modernist news came to defy that expectation, at least in the case of newspapers. What about in other media?
The picture on U.S. television evening news is a bit more complex, but news
reports have grown longer overall in line with modernism. Some studies have extrapolated from the declining number of news stories and the static length of newscasts to calculate how much longer.
8
Two studies took direct measures of
story length, showing that the average news report grew from just over a minute and a half (in the first period, 1982 to 1984) to more than two minutes a decade later on the big three broadcast networks of the era, ABC, CBS, and NBC. There is no indication of what elements ran longer, such as the descriptive material from images or the explanatory material in speech, but the images tend to run in the background in any case.
In some ways speech—the contents of text—moved faster. Election reports
on the broadcast networks shrank by about a fifth, from about three minutes in 1968 to two and a half in 1988.
9
The reports were always short, the equivalent of
about twelve inches in a column of newspaper text. As election reports got shorter, newscasters cut down on pauses by the end of the 1980s, but most of the change resulted from the shrinking sound bite. The realist representations from sources, speaking in audio and film or video clips, declined, falling to less than a quarter in length from 1968 to 1988 (from 43.1 to 8.9 seconds). The drop was so dramatic that “sound bite” became a household term, fueled debates among media critics and practitioners, and spawned a cottage industry of books and articles. The realist stuff of news was shrinking, causing alarm.
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20 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
But
and sense for realist actualities. Researchers can measure length several ways:
how long reporters went on each time they talked, how often they talked in a story
package, and what share of the total time they were speaking in a report. By the
three measures combined, newscasters gained time to use for explaining what
happened.
10
They ran slightly shorter each time they talked, giving the experience
of increasing speed to the hearer, but they spoke more than twice as often, and
their share of the average election report grew in a clear trend (figure 2.3).
The anchors and correspondents spoke much more often, and correspondents
spoke much longer as a share of each report, leaving sources, an element of real- ism, with a much smaller share. Consider what a typical election report sounded like in 1968:
crkite: The presidential campaign today featured a long-range debate over
presidential debates. From Portland, Oregon, Vice-president Humphrey
issued another challenge to Richard Nixon.
Figure 2.3
Sources: Steele and Barnhurst, 1996; Hallin, 1992.
More TV Newscaster Talk
Share of speaking for journalists and sources (sound bites) in a typical election story.
0
20
40
60
80
100
1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988
Sound bites
Anchors
Correspondents
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 21
humph Yeah, I’ve been trying to get Mr. Nixon to come on a platform like this.
I think you ought to ask him; I’ve been asking him. Why can’t we have national
debates along the style of the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Why shouldn’t the
American people hear from Mr. Nixon, Mr. Wallace and myself at the same time? Why shouldn’t we be able to come to Portland? You’ve got a fine audi- torium here, you have television, and the national networks, they wouldn’t miss it, you know. It’d be just too much fun, and besides that, it would be free, it would be on them, instead of on some of us having to go around and ask you to contribute to our campaign coffers. In all candor, I think the time has arrived in a city, in a country of over 200 million people, where we have the media that we are privileged to have today. Where candidates quit acting like they’re running around playing games with each other, talking to partisan audiences. I think we ought to have the candidates side by side, sitting up here, just as these men are here, and we take our turn on a subject like this, present our case, answer your questions, and you go out of here like the jury, and make your own decision.
(1-
second pause)
dean: Humphrey has been all fired up over this debate issue for weeks now and
is especially miffed today. In a talk prepared for tonight, he scornfully labels
Nixon as the Shadow and Brand X. “Where is he?” Humphrey taunts, “Where
is the Shadow? When will you meet with me somewhere that the American
people can look at both of us?” Hubert Humphrey on the attack—it’s been just
about that way at almost every campaign stop. Morton Dean, CBS News, with
the Humphrey campaign in Portland, Oregon.
CBS air
Nixon’s response, including the anchor’s introduction and wrap up, correspondent
John Hart’s introduction, description, and sign-
off, and four sound bites of Nixon
rejecting any debates (including the quip, “It’s one thing to ‘Give ’em hell,’ but it’s something else to give ’em Humphrey, believe me!”). The central element in the reports is the realist actuality of a politician talking. The newscasters do a lot of talking, too, but they use some of that time to quote directly or paraphrase what the candidates said.
Now compare that pattern against coverage from 1988. An ABC newscast on
September 28 also includes two political reports. In the first, anchor Peter Jennings introduces candidate Lloyd Bentsen’s “strong words” critical of his opponent Dan Quayle: “I would pray for the good health of George Bush every night.” Then, to describe “the new post-
debate rock ’em, sock ’em Michael Dukakis,” correspondent
Sam Donaldson speaks six times and weaves in five sound bites, four by Dukakis and one by the Soviet foreign minister. The example is less extreme than the average but shows how newscasters speak more than the politicians and when conveying
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22 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
politicians’ ideas tend to provide interpretations in the modern mode. Coverage
continues with a second report:
jennin
gs: Well, it was a shirt-sleeved George Bush who added a bit of country fla-
vor to his campaign today. ABC’s Brit Hume was with him.
hu
me: The Bush campaign rolled up the spine of Illinois today in a bus caravan
intended to portray the vice-president as a man in tune with rural America.
Indeed, the tunes were supplied by country music stars Loretta Lynn, Crystal
Gayle, and Peggy Sue.
(The three stars inside the tour bus sing “Stand by George Bush” to the tune of “Stand by
Your Man.”)
hu
me: Bush’s bus, by the way, had a microwave oven, a fancy restroom, and, best
of all, no reporters. They now travel with Bush, but not near him. At a series of small-
town rallies, a shirt-sleeved Bush was introduced by Loretta Lynn. He
told folks he was with them, unlike the other guy who wants to tighten tax col- lection to cut the deficit 35 billion dollars, something Bush said would require doubling the Internal Revenue force.
bush No, I do not want to create an auditor army of IRS agents, and I believe
that everyone should pay his or her fair share, no question, but I’m not for a program that is going to increase IRS seizures and give the IRS more power. (Video from a street rally)
hu
me: Earlier Bush also worked the IRS into an attack on Dukakis’s college loan
plan, which would be financed by continuing payments much like Social Security.
bush We do not need to put the IRS on your tail for the rest of your life as a
reward for a college education.
hu
me: Polls show Bush behind in Illinois and he apparently thought getting
out among the people would be just the thing. Did that also mean he would answer reporters’ questions? Not today. After all, you can carry this accessi- bility stuff too far. Brit Hume, ABC News, Ottawa, Illinois.
In the latt
the politicians, whose sound bites average about ten seconds. The reporters again
use some of their time to paraphrase and quote each candidate, but they also do
something new: they talk about themselves and how politicians are treating them.
Modern ideas tend to serve elites, and the controversy over politician sound bites
exposes the tension between traditional political elites and the emerging voices
of news practitioners taking control in media coverage.
Visual images supply realism to television, and another way to look at the change
in the news is by counting the number of times newscasters appear on screen. A study of election reports on the big three evening news shows reveals that the rate
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 23
more than doubled (figure 2.4).
11
In the late 1960s the anchor appeared once and
read the typical report; a correspondent appeared in only half the stories. By the
mid 1980s the anchor would appear twice during an election story, usually at the
beginning and end, and the campaign reporter would appear twice in the middle.
Correspondents were appearing four times as often as they did twenty years ear-
lier, and anchors were providing the big picture leading into and out of the report.
Both roles became more central to making sense of events.
In 1988 the number of shots with news people dropped along with visual ele-
ments such as graphics, captions, and video clips. By that election, candidates had learned the lessons of the image-
conscious Reagan era. Bush and Dukakis pos-
tured for cameras in media events designed to convey a message through images. Political handlers set up scenes for the media and distributed video press releases. As politicians asserted control, newscasters seem to have backed off at first. But the networks reacted to candidate visuals with skepticism, scoffing, for example, at the image of Dukakis on a tank, his helmet perched awkwardly on his head.
More TV Newscaster Appearances
Average number of times journalists appear in a typical election story.
Figure 2.4
Source: Barnhurst and Steele, 1997.
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992
Anchors
Correspondents
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24 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
Fo
stock video footage and funding a joint exit poll. The cost-saving measures made
them look more alike, and so they again added more visual elements. They used modern explanatory graphics, impressive sets, and a cast of news personalities to differentiate themselves from the competition. Visual techniques also insulated networks from the growing influence of spin doctors and from the flow of ready-

made images that the Clinton, Bush, and Perot campaigns distributed. The number
of newscaster appearances climbed to a new high that year.
What happened on the small screen relates to what happened in print. News-
papers were the place where the first U.S. newscasters got their training and where they looked for standards and inspiration. In newspapers the length of articles jumped between the 1950s and 1970s, during the time when TV network newscasts moved from fifteen to thirty minutes and became more than headline-
reading
services. Newscasters did try unsuccessfully to expand the evening news to an hour, and they followed the lead of newspaper reporters by doing a bigger share of the talking on air and appearing on screen much more often. Modern news clearly advanced on television. But is there an exception to the pattern of news practitioners writing and speaking more in print and on TV?
One place to look is National Public Radio (NPR), the home of long audio
reports. All Things Considered started out in 1970 to provide alternative content
during the early evening, when the television networks were broadcasting con-
ventional news.
12
It built its reputation on lengthy, sound-
based features unlike
anything on commercial radio. Historians say that by the time Morning Edition
joined the program schedule late in the 1970s, NPR news was already becoming less an alternative outlet. But did reports get shorter as NPR news evolved away from feature style? A study of election-
year content from 1980 to 2000 found that
instead they did the opposite (figure 2.5). What aired on serious radio defied the definition of realist news.
The typical report on NPR grew almost a third longer.
13
Longer reports meant
less room—fewer stories in each broadcast, fewer chances for listeners to encounter the real, and more encounters with modern explanations. In 1980 the programs would air about eight segments in thirty minutes, but the number fell to 7 seven in 1984 and six in 1988. By 2000 only four segments aired during a typical half hour. The number had fallen by half over the two decades. Initially the two programs followed different patterns. Morning Edition ran short features designed to fit the needs of commuters, and All Things Considered was looser, with more variety and some lengthy reports. Slowly the programs began to resemble each other. In 1992 Morning Edition went from ninety to 120 minutes, matching its afternoon counter- part—another expansion.
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 25
One factor making the news longer was politics. Political reports run longer
than other topics on NPR news. A typical day’s coverage of the U.S. presidential
campaign includes two reports from the trail, but on average the coverage ran more
than a minute shorter for candidates Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980 than
for George W. Bush and Al Gore twenty years later. A minute is a long time in the
world of broadcasting, where ads that length command a premium. In news the
largest jump of some forty seconds occurred in 1992, when Bill Clinton first ran
for election. Other stories covered politics besides U.S. national elections, such
as federal and state policies, court-
decision skirmishes, and foreign-government
actions. NPR reported on more politics of all sorts, and the share of political reports doubled between 1992 and 1996 alone. In 1980 only one out of six stories covered politics. In 2000 the share had grown to one out of three. In other words, all sorts of stories grew long, the broadcasts extended in length, and one of the longest topics took a bigger share of airtime. Politics is the premier beat in news, and so the growth relates to the modern, elite status of the work.
Longer Radio Reports
Average length of stories in minutes on National Public Radio daily news programs.
Figure 2.5
Source: Barnhurst, 2003.
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000
0:00
1:00
2:00
3:00
4:00
5:00
6:00
All reports
Political reports
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26 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
W
were, but again in complex ways. Although sound bites (the recordings of sources)
shrank on NPR, the average speech of newscasters stayed about the same. In a 1980
All Things Considered story on a speech where he faced hecklers, Ronald Reagan has
three sound bites (averaging more than half a minute) and takes up more than half
of the time (in a report of almost three and a half minutes). The reporter provides
transitions between the excerpts:
cr And in response to anti-ERA chants, he defended his position on wom-
en’s rights.
rea
ga I don’t believe that there is anyone in this crowd who does not sup-
port equal rights for everyone in this country. [long applause and cheers] Now,
it just so happens that I do not believe that simple sounding amendment is
the answer to securing those rights. [cheers and applause] It will remove from
elected representatives, and put in the hands of unelected judges, that entire
matter.
cr Most of the speech, however, was on education . . .”
S
began to shrink. In a 1996 healthcare discussion during the presidential debate,
Bill Clinton and Bob Dole speak five times (averaging two seconds) for less than
a sixth of a report that runs more than six minutes. The newscasters, in contrast,
speak eleven times (averaging almost half a minute). The shrinking reached a low
point in 2000 but was worse for politicians’ sound bites. During a routine cam-
paign update from Michigan on All Things Considered, October 5, two of Al Gore’s
sound bites amount to a greeting, “Hi guys,” followed by the sound of laughter in a
daycare center, then his departing “Bye-
bye.” The newscasters speak seven times,
always at length to provide modern structure and order to tame the seeming chaos of politics.
Longer reports and expanded programs made room for everyone to talk more
often. Newscasters spoke more often too, but their speech did not shorten when the NPR sound bite began shrinking, and they also began interviewing each other as sources, a further expression of their status as modern explainers. One way to see the overall result is by adding up all the talk of newscasters and compar- ing it to the total for other speakers during the programs (figure 2.6). Although it bounces around from year to year, the trend is up almost 10 percent on average every four years. Newscasters always did the lion’s share of the talking during NPR reports, but they talked even more, increasing their time by more than half. The total increase for all others was smaller, about one-
third. Did others’ speech
expand because the reports grew longer? No, after controlling for the length of reports, we found the difference between newscasters and others is still strong.
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Chapter 2. Stories Only Seemed Shorter • 27
Their portion changed the most, enlarging as an element of the longer reports and
the longer broadcasts. The modern way of reporting clearly advanced on NPR.
Newspapers, television, and radio are “legacy” media, older industries but with
well-known, influential outlets. Whenever newer venues for news have appeared,
they have tended to rely on established patterns of media practice and content. Young U.S. newspapers of the colonial era published clippings from the estab- lished European press, television newscasts of the 1950s drew their standards and a picture of the day’s news from newspapers, and radio even before NPR followed the same pattern. Print and broadcast news are “legacy” media in another sense, because they accept an older view of news that relies on twentieth-
century mod-
ernism. Its realist events have been losing ground to modern issues and problems, but practitioners and observers misperceive the change that puts actual news con-
tent at odds with expectation. It is long, not short, for one thing.
Modern news, like modernism in literature and the arts, reacted against tradi-
tional handicraft and sided with the orderly ways of industry and mass production.
More Radio Newscaster Talk
Figure 2.6
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000
Journalists
All others
0
5
10
15
20
25
Total length of speech (in seconds) on National Public Radio daily news programs.
Source: Barnhurst, 2003.
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28 • Part 1. Nes Pursued Modernism
Mass communication harnessed new technologies for high-speed manufacturing
and delivery, building economies of scale on the model of few senders connected
to many receivers. Like other expressions of the modern urge, modern news is
elite. A model with elites holding resources at the center and receivers holding less
at the periphery contains its own justifications. It supplies order, efficiency, and
authority, and it promises public service, consumer choice, and progress. Mass
communication emerged along with the growth of urban areas, which required
organization and infrastructure. The modern aim to be progressive imagines fairer
distribution of goods and information. It embraces the consumer, who can opt
for the delights of novelty, chosen as a kind of progress. But a story of growth is a
simplification that masks the complicated course of change with simple amassing
quantity. News modernism prefers that kind of abstraction, which seems rational
but moves news away from concrete realism and toward modern explanation.
In the digital era, modern ideas may seem quaint when legacy media fail to excite
the imagination as newer technology does. Despite the financial woes of print news operations and huge losses in the reporting jobs they once fielded, newspapers continue to provide most original reporting in the United States. Although that pattern may be changing, newer media now distribute the bulk of news, especially through online aggregators and search engines. They deliver events in snippets that make the news seem short and realist. But what about the online presence of outlets that do the reporting? Is their content shorter, or do those presenting news in digital venues follow legacy patterns that misrecognize how news practices have moved away from realism?
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Chapte
Longer News Turned Elite
W
hat happens to news seems to hinge on the spidery webs of emerging digital
technologies. The early years of the internet in the 1990s saw high expecta-
tions for new media and harsh criticism for legacy news. Tom Koch, a former daily
news reporter and editor who worked for UPI, predicted in 1991 that new technolo-
gies would “eventually redefine” news, perhaps making stories longer and more
involved.
1
A decade later a majority of U.S. newspapers had an online presence,
and reporters and editors said that technology was changing what they do. But it
remained unclear how news stories might change online. Instant electronic distri-
bution could focus news on brief items, but websites have ample space for report-
ers to write longer accounts. The new generation of web interactivity emerging in
the new century and the growth of mobile devices put further pressure on news
organizations. By 2009 respondents to an insider survey for The Atlantic maga-
zine could not “see anything on the internet that produces news—that is, detailed
responsible empirical journalism” and concluded: “The internet trains readers to
consume news in ever-
smaller bites.”
2
Sho news would imply a continued commitment to modernism. Did reports get shorter as mainstream news outlets focused on web editions? Three studies tracked the content changes as newspapers moved online.
3
To compare the changes long term
meant using the same outlets in the hundred-year newspaper study: the New York
Times, Chicago Tribune, and Portland Oregonian. By 1994, news stories in the study had
grown in length (to 3.0 on the 10-point scale). Online the stories were even longer
Barnhurst_text.indd 29 4/18/16 11:12 AM

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content

“The Black Darwîshes do not employ the knife,” answered Abû
Tabâh; “they employ strange and more subtle weapons.”
I stared hard at him in the darkness. I thought I knew my Cairo,
but this sounded unpleasantly mysterious. However—
“I am indebted to you, Abû Tabâh,” I said, “for your timely
warning. As you know, I always personally avoid any possibility of
misunderstanding in regard to my relations with Egyptian
womenfolk.”
“With some rare exceptions,” agreed Abû Tabâh, “particulars of
which escape my memory at the moment, you have always been a
model of discretion, Kernaby Pasha.”
“I will warn my friend,” I said hastily, “of the view of his conduct
mistakenly taken by the gentleman in the black turban.”
“It is well,” replied Abû Tabâh; “we shall meet again ere long.”
With that and the customary dignified salutations he departed,
leaving me wondering what hidden significance lay in his words, “we
shall meet again ere long.”
Experience had taught me that Abû Tabâh’s warnings were not to
be lightly dismissed, and I knew enough of the fanaticism of those
strange Eastern sects whereof the Rifa’îyeh, or Black Darwîshes, was
one, to realize that it would prove an unhealthy amusement to
interfere with their domestic affairs. Felix Bréton, who possessed the
rare gift of capturing and transferring to canvas the atmosphere of
the East with the opulent colorings and vivid contrasts which
constitute its charm, had nevertheless but little practical experience
of the manners and customs of the golden Orient. He had leased a
large studio situated on the roof of a fine old Cairene palace hidden
away behind the Street of the Booksellers and almost in the shadow
of the Mosque of el-Azhar. His romantic spirit had prompted him
after a time to give up his rooms at the Continental and to take up
his abode in the apartment adjoining the studio; that is to say,
completely to cut himself off from European life and to become an
inhabitant of the Oriental city. With his imperfect knowledge of the

practical side of native life in the East, I did not envy him; but I was
fully alive to his danger, isolated as he was from the European
community, indeed from modernity; for out of the boulevards of
modern Cairo into the streets of the Arabian Nights is but a step, yet
a step that bridges the gulf of centuries.
As I entered his studio on the following morning, I discovered him
at work upon the extraordinary picture “Danse Funébre.” Shejeret
ed-Durr was posing in the dress of an ancient priestess of Isis.
Bréton briefly greeted me, waving his hand towards a cushioned
dîwan before which stood a little coffee-table bearing decanters,
siphons, cigarettes, and other companionable paraphernalia. Making
myself comfortable, I studied the picture and the model.
“Danse Funébre” was an extraordinary conception, representing
an elaborately furnished modern room, apparently that of an
antiquary or Egyptologist; for a multitude of queer relics decorated
the walls, cabinets, and the large table at which a man was seated.
Boldly represented immediately to the left of his chair stood a
mummy in an ornate sarcophagus, and forth from the swathed
figure into the light cast downwards from an antique lamp, floated a
beautiful spirit shape—that of an Egyptian priestess. Upon her face
was an expression of intense anger, as, her fingers crooked in
sinister fashion, she bent over the man at the table.
The mummy and sarcophagus depicted on the canvas stood
before me against the wall of the studio, the lid resting beside the
case. It was moulded, as is sometimes seen, to represent the face
and figure of the occupant and was as fine an example of the kind
as I had met with. The mummy was that of a priestess and dancer
of the Great Temple at Philæ, and it had been lent by the museum
authorities for the purpose of Bréton’s picture.
His enthusiasm at first seeing Shejeret ed-Durr was explainable by
the really uncanny resemblance which the girl bore to the modeled
figure. Studying her, from my seat on the dîwan, as she posed in
that gauzy raiment depicted upon the lid of the sarcophagus, it
seemed indeed that the ancient priestess was reborn in the form of

Shejeret ed-Durr the ghazîyeh. Bréton had evidently tabooed make-
up, with the exception of the characteristic black bordering to the
eyes (which appeared in the presentment of the servant of Isis); and
seen now in its natural coloring the face of the dancing-girl had
undoubted beauty.
Presently, whilst the model rested, I informed Bréton of my
conversation with Abû Tabâh; but, as I had anticipated, he was
sceptical to the point of derision.
“My dear Kernaby,” he said, “is it likely that I am going to interrupt
my work now that I have found such an inspiring model, because
some ridiculous darwîsh disapproves?”
“It is highly unlikely,” I admitted; “but do not make the mistake of
treating the matter lightly. You are right off the map here, and Cairo
is not Paris.”
“It is a great deal safer!” he cried in his boisterous fashion, “and
infinitely more interesting.”
But my mind was far from easy; for in the dark eyes of the model,
when their glance rested upon Felix Bréton, there was that to have
aroused poisonous sentiments in the bosom of the Man of the Glare.
III
During the course of the following month I saw Felix Bréton two or
three times, and he was enthusiastic about the progress of his
picture and the beauty of his model. The first hint that I received of
the strange idea which was to lead to stranger happenings came one
afternoon when he had called upon me at Shepheard’s.
“Do you believe in reincarnation, Kernaby?” he asked suddenly.
I stared at him in surprise.
“Regardless of my personal views on the matter,” I replied, “in
what way does the subject interest you?”
Momentarily he hesitated; then—

“The resemblance between Yâsmîna” (this was the real name of
Shejeret ed-Durr) “and the priestess of Isis,” he said, “appears to me
too marked to be explainable by mere coincidence. If the mummy
were my personal property I should unwrap it——”
“Do you seriously desire me to believe that you regard Yâsmîna as
a reincarnation of the elder lady?”
“That or a lineal descendant,” he answered. “The tribe of the
Ghawâzi is of unknown antiquity and may very well be descended
from those temple dancers of the days of the Pharaohs. If you have
studied the ancient wall paintings, you cannot have failed to observe
that the dancing girls represented have entirely different forms from
those of any other women depicted and from those of the ordinary
Egyptian women of to-day.”
His enthusiasm was tremendous; he was one of those
uncomfortable fanatics who will ride a theory to the death.
“I cannot say that I have noticed it,” I replied. “Your knowledge of
the female form divine is doubtless more extensive than mine.”
“My dear Kernaby,” he cried excitedly, “to the trained eye the
difference is extraordinary. Until I saw Yâsmîna I had believed the
peculiar form to which I refer to be extinct like the blue enamel and
the sacred lotus. If it is not reincarnation it is heredity.”
I could not help thinking that it more closely resembled insanity
than either; but since Bréton had made no reference to the wearer
of the black turban, I experienced less anxiety respecting his
physical than his mental welfare.
Three days later there was a dramatic development. Drifting idly
into Bréton’s studio one morning I found him pacing the place in
despair and glaring at his unfinished canvas like a man distraught.
“Where is Shejeret ed-Durr?” I inquired.
“Gone!” he replied. “She disappeared yesterday and I can find no
trace of her.”
“Surely the excellent Suleyman, proprietor of the dancing
establishment, can assist you?”

“I tell you,” cried Bréton savagely, “that she has disappeared. No
one knows what has become of her.”
I looked at him in dismay. He presented a mournful spectacle. He
was unshaven and his dark hair was wildly disordered. His despair
was more acute than I should have supposed possible in the
circumstances; and I concluded that his interest in Yâsmîna was
deeper than I had assumed or that I was incapable of
comprehending the artistic temperament. I suppose the Gallic blood
in him had something to do with it, but I was unspeakably distressed
to observe that the man was on the verge of tears.
Consolation was impossible, and I left him pacing his empty studio
distractedly. That night at an unearthly hour, long after I had retired
to my own apartments, he came to Shepheard’s. Being shown into
my room, and the servant having departed—
“Yâsmîna is dead!” he burst out, standing there, a disheveled
figure, just within the doorway.
“What!” I exclaimed, standing up from the table at which I had
been writing and confronting him. “Dead? Do you mean——”
“He has murdered her!” said Bréton, in a dull monotonous voice
—“that fiend of whom you warned me.”
I was appalled; for I had been utterly unprepared for such a
tragedy.
“Who discovered her?”
“No one discovered her; she will never be discovered! He has
buried her body in some secret spot in the desert.”
My amazement grew with every word that he uttered, and
presently—
“Then how in Heaven’s name did you learn of her murder?” I
asked.
Felix Bréton, who had begun to pace up and down the room, a
truly pitiable figure, paused and looked at me wildly.
“You will think that I am mad, Kernaby,” he said; “but I must tell
you—I must tell someone. I could see that you were incredulous

when I spoke to you of reincarnation, but I was right, Kernaby, I was
right! Either that or my reason is deserting me.”
My opinion inclined distinctly in the direction of the latter theory,
but I remained silent, watching Bréton’s haggard face.
“To-night,” he continued, “as I sat looking at my unfinished picture
and trying to imagine what could have become of Yâsmîna, the
mummy—the mummy of the priestess—spoke to me!”
I slowly sank back into my chair. I was now assured that Felix
Bréton had formed a sudden and intense infatuation for Yâsmîna
and that her mysterious disappearance had deranged his sensitive
mind. Words failed me; I could think of nothing to say; and bending
towards me his haggard face—
“It whispered to me,” he said, “in her voice—in my own language,
French, as I have taught it to her; just a few imperfect words, but
sufficient to convey to me the story of the tragedy. Kernaby, what
does it mean? Is it possible that her spirit, released from the body of
Yâsmîna, has returned to that which I firmly believe it formerly
inhabited?...”
I had had the misfortune to be a party to some distressing scenes,
but few had affected me so unpleasantly as this. That poor Felix
Bréton was raving I could not doubt, but having persuaded him to
spend the night at Shepheard’s and having seen him safely to bed, I
returned to my own room to endeavor to work out the problem of
what steps I should take regarding him on the morrow.
In the morning, however, he seemed more composed, having
shaved and generally rendered himself more presentable; but the
wild look still lingered in his eyes and I could see that the strange
obsession had secured a firm hold upon him. He discussed the
matter quite calmly during breakfast, and invited me to visit the
scene of this supernatural happening. I assented, and hailing
arabîyeh we drove together to the studio.
There was nothing abnormal in the appearance of the place, but I
examined the mummy and the mummy case with a new curiosity;

for if Felix Bréton was not mad (and this was a point upon which I
recognized my incompetence to decide) the phantom voice was
clearly the product of some trick. However, I was unable to discover
anything to account for it. The sarcophagus stood against the outer
wall of the studio and near to a large lattice window before which
was draped a heavy tapestry curtain for the purpose of excluding
undesirable light upon that side of the model’s throne. There was no
balcony outside the window, which was fully, thirty feet from the
street below; therefore unless someone had been hiding in the
window recess beside the sarcophagus, trickery appeared to be out
of the question. Turning to Bréton, who was watching me haggardly
—
“You searched the recess last night?” I said.
“I did—immediately. There was no one there. There was no one
anywhere in the studio; and when I looked out of the open window,
the street below was deserted from end to end.”
Naturally, I took it for granted that he would avoid the place, at
any rate by night; and I said as much, as we passed along the Mûski
together. I can never forget the wildness in his eyes as he turned to
me.
“I must go back, Kernaby,” he said. “It seems like desertion, base
and cowardly.”
IV
Bréton did not join me at dinner that evening as we had arranged
that he should do, and towards the hour of ten o’clock, growing
more and more uneasy on his behalf, I set out for the studio, half
hoping that I should meet him. I saw nothing of him, however, as I
crossed the Ezbekîyeh Gardens and the Atabet el-Khadrâ into the
Mûski. From thence onward to the Rondpoint the dark and narrow
streets were almost deserted, and from the corner of the Shâria el-
Khordâgîya to the Street of the Bookbinders I met with no living
thing save a lean and furtive cat.

My footsteps echoed hollowly from wall to wall of the overhanging
buildings, as I approached the door giving access to the courtyard
from which a stair communicated with the studio above. The
moonlight, slanting down into the ancient place, left more than half
of it in densest shadow, but just touched the railing of the balcony
and the lower part of the mushrabîyeh screen masking what once
had been the harêm apartments from the view of one entering the
courtyard. Far above me, through an open lattice, a dim light shone
out, though vaguely. This part of the house was bathed in the
radiance of the moon, which dimmed that of the studio lamp; for the
open window was the window of Bréton’s studio.
The door at the foot of the stairs was partly open, and I ascended
slowly, since the place was quite dark and I was forced to feel my
way around the eccentric turnings introduced by an Arab architect to
whom simplicity had evidently been an abomination.
A modern door had been fitted to the studio; and although this
door was also unfastened, I rapped loudly, but, receiving no answer,
entered the studio. It was empty. The lamp was lighted, as I had
observed from below, and a faint aroma of Turkish tobacco smoke
hung in the air. Clearly, Bréton had left but a few moments earlier;
and I judged it probable that he would be returning very shortly, for
had he set out for Shepheard’s he would not have left his door
unlocked, and in any event I should have met him on the way.
Therefore, having glanced into the inner room, which, latterly,
Bréton had been using as a bedroom, I sat down on the dîwan and
prepared to await his return.
The lamp whose light I had seen shining through the window was
that which hung before the model’s throne, and the curtain which
usually draped the window recess had been partially pulled aside, so
that from where I sat I could see part of the centre lattice, which
was open. My mind at this time was entirely occupied with uneasy
speculations regarding Bréton, and although I had glanced more
than once at the large unfinished picture on the easel, from which
the face of Shejeret ed-Durr peered out across the shoulder of the

seated man, and several times had looked at the mummy set upright
in its painted sarcophagus, no sense of the uncanny had touched me
or in any way prepared me for the amazing manifestation which I
was about to witness.
How long I had sat there I cannot say exactly; possibly for ten
minutes or a quarter of an hour: when, suddenly, an eerie whisper
crept through the stillness of the big room!
Since I had more than once been temporarily tricked into belief in
the supernatural, by means of certain ingenious devices, I did not
readily fall a victim to the mysterious nature of the present
occurrence. Yet I must confess that my heart gave a great leap and I
was forced to exert all my will to control my nerves. I sat quite still,
listening intently for a repetition of that evil whisper. Then, in the
stillness, it came again.
“Felix,” it breathed, “because of you I lie dead in a grave in the
desert.... I died for you, Felix, and now I am so lonely....”
The whispering voice offered no clue to the age or the sex of the
speaker; for a true whisper is toneless. But the words, as Bréton had
declared, were uttered in broken French and spoken with a curious
accent.
It ceased, that ghostly whispering; and I realized that my nerves
could stand no more of it; for that it came or seemed to come from
the mummy of the priestess was a fact as undeniable as it was
horrible.
Resorting to action, I sprang up and leaped across the room,
grasping first at the curtain draped in the window on the right of the
sarcophagus. I jerked it fully aside. The recess was empty. All three
lattices were open, on the right, left, and in the centre of the
window; but, craning out from the latter, I saw the street below to
be vacant from end to end.
Stepping back into the room, and metaphorically clutching my
courage with both hands, I approached the sarcophagus, peered
behind it, all around it, and, finally, into the swathed face of the

mummy itself. Nothing rewarded my search. But the studio of Felix
Bréton seemed to have become icily cold; at any rate I found myself
to be shivering; and walking deliberately, although it cost me a
monstrous effort to do so, I descended the dark winding stairway
into the courtyard, and, on regaining the street, discovered to my
intense annoyance that my brow was wet with cold perspiration.
I had taken no more than ten paces in the direction of the Sûk es-
Sûdan when I heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and for
some reason (I can only suppose as a result of my highly strung
condition) I stepped into the shelter of a narrow gateway, where I
could see without being seen, and there awaited the appearance of
the one who approached.
It was Felix Bréton, his face showing ghastly in the moonlight as
he turned the corner. I could not be certain if a mere echo had
deceived me, but I thought I could detect faintly the softer footfalls
of someone who was following him. From my cover I had an
uninterrupted view of the entrance to the house which I had just
left; and without showing myself I watched Bréton approach the
door. At its threshold he seemed to hesitate; and in that brief
hesitancy were illustrated the conflicting emotions driving the man. I
recalled the words he had spoken to me that morning. “I must go
back, Kernaby; it seems like desertion, base and cowardly.” He
opened the door and disappeared.
As he did so, a second figure crossed from the shadows on the
opposite side of the street—that is, the side upon which I was
concealed; and in turn advanced towards the door. As he passed my
hiding-place I acted. Without an instant’s hesitation I hurled myself
upon him.
How he avoided that furious attack—if he did avoid it—or whether
in the darkness I miscalculated my spring, I do not know to this day:
I only know that I missed my objective, stumbled, recovered myself
... and turned with clenched fists to find Abû Tabâh confronting me!
“Kernaby Pasha!” he cried.

“Abû Tabâh!” said I dazedly.
“I perceive that I am not alone in my anxiety for the welfare of M.
Felix Bréton.”
“But why were you following him? I narrowly missed assaulting
you.”
“Very narrowly,” he agreed in his gentle manner; “but you ask me
why I was following M. Bréton. I was following him because I have
seen so many of those who have crossed the path of the Black
Darwîshes meet with violent and inexplicable deaths.”
“Murder?” I whispered.
“Not murder—suicide. Therefore, observing, as I had anticipated,
a strangeness in your friend’s behavior, I have watched him.”
“The strangeness of his behavior is easily accounted for,” I said.
And excitedly, for the horror of the episode in the studio was still
strongly upon me, I told him of the whispering mummy.
“These are very dreadful things of which you speak, Kernaby
Pasha,” he admitted, “but I warned you that it was ill to incur the
enmity of the Black Darwîshes. That there is a scheme afoot to
compass the self-destruction or insanity of your friend is now evident
to me; and he has brought this calamity upon himself; for the words
which he believed to be spoken by the spirit of the girl Yâsmîna
would not have affected him so unpleasantly if his attitude towards
her had been marked by proper restraint and the affair confined
within suitable limitations.”
“Quite so. But although the Black Darwîshes may be both
malignant and clever, that uncanny whispering is beyond the control
of natural forces.”
“Such is not my opinion,” replied Abû Tabâh. “A spirit does not
mistake one person for another; and the whispering voice addressed
itself to ‘Felix’ when Felix was not present. I believe, Kernaby Pasha,
that you are the possessor of a pair of excellent opera-glasses? May
I suggest that you return to Shepheard’s and procure them.”

V
The platform of the minaret seemed very cold to the touch of my
stockinged feet; for I had left my shoes at the entrance to the
mosque below in accordance with custom; and now, from the
wooden balcony, I overlooked the neighboring roofs of Cairo, and
Abû Tabâh, beside me, pointed to where a vague patch of light
broke the darkness beneath us to the left.
“The window of M. Felix Bréton’s studio,” he said.
Raising the glasses to his eyes, he gazed in that direction, whilst I
also peered thither and succeeded in making out the well of the
courtyard and the roofs of the buildings to right and left of it. It was
not evident to me for what Abû Tabâh was looking, and when
presently he lowered the glasses and turned to me I expressed my
doubts in words.
“It is surely evident,” I said, speaking, as I now almost invariably
did to the imám, in English, of which he had a perfect mastery, “that
we have little chance of discovering anything from here, since
nothing was visible from the studio window. Furthermore, who save
Yâsmîna could have spoken in the manner which I have related and
in broken French?”
“An eavesdropper,” he replied, “might have profited by the lessons
which Yâsmîna received from M. Bréton; and all vocal characteristics
are lost in a whisper. In the second place, Yâsmîna is not dead.”
“What!” I cried.
Although, when Bréton had informed me of her death, I myself
had doubted him, for some reason the ghostly whisper had
convinced me as it had convinced him.
“She has been kept a prisoner during the past week in a house
belonging to one of the Black Darwîshes,” continued Abû Tabâh; “but
my agents succeeded in tracing her this morning. By my orders,
however, she has not been allowed to return to her home.”
“And what was the object of those orders?”

“That I might learn for what purpose she had been made to
disappear,” replied Abû Tabâh; “and I have learned it to-night.”
“Then you think that the whispering mummy——”
He suddenly clutched my arm.
“Quick! raise your glasses!” he said softly. “On the roof of the
house to the left of the light. There is the whispering mummy!”
Strung up to a high pitch of excitement, I gazed through the
glasses in the direction indicated by my companion. Without
difficulty I discerned him—a man wearing a black turban—who crept
like some ungainly cat along the flat roof, carrying in his hand what
looked like one of those sugar canes which pass for a delicacy
among the natives, but which to European eyes appear more
suitable for curtain-poles than sweetmeats. Springing perilously
across a yawning gulf, the wearer of the black turban gained the
roof of the studio, crept along for some little distance further, and
then, lying prone, began slowly to lower the bamboo rod in the
direction of the lighted window.
I found that unconsciously I had suspended my respiration, and
now, breathlessly, as the truth came home to me—
“It is a speaking-tube!” I cried, “I cannot see the end of it, but no
doubt it is curved so as to protrude through the side of the lattice
window. Do you look, Abû Tabâh: I propose to act.”
Thrusting the glasses into the imám’s hand, I took my Colt
repeater from my pocket, and, having peered for some seconds
steadily in the direction of the dimly visible Darwîsh, I opened fire! I
had fired five shots in the heat of my anger at that sinister crouching
figure, ere Abû Tabâh seized my wrist.
“Stop!” he cried; “do you forget where you stand?”
Truly I had forgotten in my indignation, or I should not have
outraged his feelings by firing from the minaret of a mosque. But
sufficient of my wrath remained to occasion me a thrill of
satisfaction, when, peering through the dusk, I saw the Darwîsh
throw up his arms and disappear from view.

“There is blood in the courtyard,” said Abû Tabâh; “but Ahmad es-
Kebîr has fled. Therefore he still lives, and his anger will be not the
less but the greater. Depart from Cairo, M. Bréton: it is my counsel
to you.”
“But,” cried Felix Bréton, glaring wildly at the big canvas on the
easel, “I must finish my picture. As Yâsmîna is alive, she must
return, and I must finish my picture!”
“Yâsmîna cannot return,” replied Abû Tabâh, fixing his weird eyes
upon the speaker. “I have caused her to be banished from Cairo.” He
raised his hand, checking Bréton’s hot words ere they were uttered.
“Recriminations are unavailing. Her presence disturbs the peace of
the city, and the peace of the city it is my duty to maintain.”

PART II
OTHER TALES

I
I
LORD OF THE JACKALS
N those days, of course (said the French agent, looking out across
the sea of Yûssuf Effendis which billowed up against the balcony
to where, in the moonlight, the minarets of Cairo pointed the way to
God), I did not occupy the position which I occupy to-day. No, I was
younger, and more ambitious; I thought to carve in the annals of
Egypt a name for myself such as that of De Lesseps.
I had a scheme—and there were those who believed in it—for
extending the borders of Egypt. Ah! my friends, Egypt after all is but
a double belt of mud following the Nile, and terminated east and
west by the desert. The desert! It was the dream of my life to
exterminate that desert, that hungry gray desert; it was my plan—a
foolish plan as I know now—to link the fertile Fáyûm to the Oases!
How was this to be done? Ah!
Why should I dig up those buried skeletons? It was not done; it
never could be done; therefore, let me not bore you with how I had
proposed to do it. Suffice it that my ambitions took me far off the
beaten tracks, far, even, from the caravan roads—far into the gray
heart of the desert.
But I was ambitious, and only nineteen—or scarcely twenty. At
nineteen, a man who comes from St. Rémy fears no obstacle which
Fate can place in his way, and looks upon the world as a grape-fruit
to be sweetened with endeavor and sucked empty.
It was in those days, then, that I learned as your Rudyard Kipling
has also learned that “East is East”; it was in those days that I came
face to face with that “mystery of Egypt” about which so much is
written, has always been written, and always will be written, but

concerning which so few people, so very few people, know anything
whatever.
Yes, I, René de Flassans, saw with my own eyes a thing that I
knew to be magic, a thing whereat my reason rebelled—a thing
which my poor European intelligence could not grapple, could not
begin to explain.
It was this which you asked me to tell you, was it not? I will do so
with pleasure, because I know that I speak to men of honor, and
because it is good for me, now that I cannot count the gray hairs in
my beard, to confess how poor a thing I was when I could count
every hair upon my chin—and how grand a thing I thought myself.
One evening, at the end of a dreadful day in the saddle—beneath
a sky which seemed to reflect all the fires of hell, a day passed upon
sands simply smoking in that merciless sun—I and my native
companions came to an encampment of Arabs.
They were Bedouins
[C]
—the tribe does not matter at the moment
—and, as you may know, the Bedouin is the most hospitable
creature whom God has yet created. The tent of the Sheikh is open
to any traveller who cares to rest his weary limbs therein. Freely he
may partake of all that the tribe has to offer, food and drink and
entertainment; and to seek to press payment upon the host would
be to insult a gentleman.
[C] This incorrect but familiar spelling is retained throughout.
That is desert hospitality. A spear that stands thrust upright in the
sand before the tent door signifies that whosoever would raise his
hand against the guest has first to reckon with the Sheikh. Equally it
would be an insult to erect one’s own tent in the neighborhood of a
Bedouin encampment.
Well, my friends, I knew this well, for I was no stranger to the
nomadic life, and accordingly, without fear of the fierce-eyed throng
who came forth to meet us, I made my respects to the Sheikh Saïd

Mohammed, and was reckoned by him as a friend and a brother. His
tent was placed at my disposal and provisions were made for the
suitable entertainment of those who were with me.
You know how dusk falls in Egypt? At one moment the sky is a
brilliant canvas, glorious with every color known to art, at the next
the curtain—the wonderful veil of deepest violet—has fallen; the
stars break through it like diamonds through the finest gauze; it is
night, velvet, violet night. You see it here in this noisy modern Cairo.
In the lonely desert it is ten thousand times grander, ten thousand
times more impressive; it speaks to the soul with the voice of the
silence. Ah, those desert nights!
So was the night of which I speak; and having partaken of the
fare which the Sheikh caused to be set before me—and Bedouin fare
is not for the squeamish stomach—I sipped that delicious coffee
which, though an acquired taste, is the true nectar, and looked out
beyond the four or five palm trees of this little oasis to where the
gray carpet of the desert grew black as ebony and met the violet
sweep of the sky.
Perhaps I was the first to see him; I cannot say; but certainly he
was not perceived by the Bedouins, although one stood on guard at
the entrance to the camp.
How can I describe him? At the time, as he approached in the
moonlight with a shambling, stooping gait, I felt that I had never
seen his like before. Now I know the reason of my wonder, and the
reason of my doubt. I know what it was about him which inspired a
kind of horror and a revulsion—a dread.
Elfin locks he had, gray and matted, falling about his angular face,
shading his strange, yellow eyes. His was dressed in rags, in tatters;
he was furtive, and he staggered as one who is very weak, slowly
approaching out of the vastness.
Then it appeared as though every dog in the camp knew of his
coming. Out from the shadows of the tents they poured, those
yapping mongrels. Never have I seen such a thing. In the midst of

the yellowish, snarling things, at the very entrance to the camp, the
wretched old man fell, uttering a low cry.
But now, snatching up a heavy club which lay close to my hand, I
rushed out of the tent. Others were thronging out too, but, first of
them all, I burst in among the dogs, striking, kicking, and shouting. I
stooped and raised the head of the stranger.
Mutely he thanked me, with half-closed eyes. A choking sound
issued from his throat, and he clutched with his hands and pointed
to his mouth.
An earthenware jar, containing cool water, stood beside a tent but
a few yards away. Hurling my club at the most furious of the dogs,
which, with bared fangs, still threatened to attack the recumbent
man, I ran and seized the dorak, regained his side, and poured
water between his parched lips.
The throng about me was strangely silent, until, as the poor old
man staggered again to his feet, supported by my arm, a chorus
arose about me—one long, vowelled word, wholly unfamiliar,
although my Arabic was good. But I noted that all kept a respectful
distance from myself and the man whom I had succored.
Then, pressing his way through the throng came the Sheikh Saïd
Mohammed. Saluting the ragged stranger with a sort of grim
respect, he asked him if he desired entertainment for the night.
The other shook his head, mumbling, pointed to the water jar, and
by dint of gnashing his yellow and pointed teeth, intimated that he
required food.
Food was brought to him hurriedly. He tied it up in a dirty cloth,
grasped the water jar, and, with never a glance at the Arabs, turned
to me. With his hand he touched his brow, his lips, and his breast in
salute; then, although tottering with weakness, he made off again
with that queer, loping gait.
The camp dogs began to howl, and a strange silence fell upon the
Arabs about me. All stood watching the departing figure until it was

lost in a dip of the desert, when the watchers began to return again
to their tents.
Saïd Mohammed took my hand, and in a few direct and impressive
words thanked me for having spared him and his tribe from a grave
dishonor. Need I say that I was flattered? Had you met him, my
friends, that fine Bedouin gentleman, polished as any noble of old
France, fearless as a lion, yet gentle as a woman, you would know
that I rejoiced in being able to serve him even so slightly.
Two of the dogs, unperceived by us, had followed the weird old
man from the camp; for suddenly in the distance I heard their
savage growls. Then, these growls were drowned in such a chorus
of howling—the howling of jackals—as I had never before heard in
all my desert wanderings. The howling suddenly subsided ... but the
dogs did not return.
I glanced around, meaning to address the Sheikh, but the Sheikh
was gone.
Filled with wonder, then, respecting this singular incident, I
entered the tent—it was at the farther end of the camp—which had
been placed at my disposal, and lay down, rather to reflect than to
sleep. With my mind confused in thoughts of yellow-eyed wanderers,
of dogs, and of jackals, sleep came.
How long I slept I cannot say; but I was awakened as the cool
fingers of dawn were touching the crests of the sand billows. A gray
and dismal light filled the tent, and something was scratching at the
flap.
I sat up immediately, quite wide awake, and taking my revolver,
ran to the entrance and looked out.
A slinking shape melted into the shadows of the tent adjoining
mine, and I concluded that a camp dog had aroused me. Then, in
the early morning silence, I heard a faint call, and peering through
the gloom to the east saw, in black silhouette, a solitary figure
standing near the extremity of the camp.

In those days, my friends, I was a brave fellow—we are all brave
at nineteen—and throwing a cloak over my shoulders I strode
intrepidly towards this figure. I was within ten paces when a hand
was raised to beckon me.
It was the mysterious stranger! Again he beckoned to me, and I
approached yet nearer, asking him if it was he who had aroused me.
He nodded, and by means of a grotesque kind of pantomime
ultimately made me understand that he had caused me to be
aroused in order to communicate something to me. He turned, and
indicated that we were to walk away from the camp. I accompanied
him without hesitation.
Although the camp was never left unguarded, no one had
challenged us; and, a hundred yards beyond the outermost tent, this
strange old man stopped and turned to me.
First, he pointed back to the camp, then to myself, then out along
the caravan road towards the Nile.
“Do you mean,” I asked him—for I perceived that he was dumb or
vowed to silence—“that I am to leave the camp?”
He nodded rapidly, his strange yellow eyes gleaming.
“Immediately?” I demanded.
Again he nodded.
“Why?”
Pantomimically he made me understand that death threatened me
if I remained—that I must leave the Bedouins before sunrise.
I cannot convey to you any idea of the mad earnestness of the
man. But, alas! youth regards the counsels of age with nothing but
contempt; moreover, I thought this man mad, and I was unable to
choke down a sort of loathing which he inspired in me.
I shook my head then, but not unkindly; and, waving my hand,
prepared to leave him. At that, with a sorrow in his strange eyes
which did not fail to impress me, he saluted me with gravity, turned,
and passed out of sight.

Although I did not know it at the time, I had chosen of two paths
the one that led through fire.
I slept little after this interview—if it was a real interview and not a
dream—and feeling tired and unrefreshed, I saw the sun rise purple
and angry over the distant hills.
You know what khamsîn is like, my friends? But you cannot know
what simoom is like—simoom in the heart of the desert! It came that
morning—a wall of sand so high as to shut out the sunlight, so
dense as to turn the day into night, so suffocating that I thought I
should never live through it!
It was apparent to me that the Bedouins were prepared for the
storm. The horses, the camels and the asses were tethered in an
enclosure specially strengthened to exclude the choking dust, and
with their cloaks about their heads the men prepared for the
oncoming of this terror of the desert.
My God! it was a demon which sought to blind me, to suffocate
me, and which clutched at my throat with strangling fingers of sand!
This, I told myself, was the danger which I might have avoided by
quitting the camp before sunrise.
Indeed, it was apparent to me that if I had taken the advice so
strangely offered, I might now have been safe in the village of the
Great Oasis for which I was bound. But I have since seen that the
simoom was a minor danger, and not the real one to which this
weird being had referred.
The storm passed, and every man in the encampment praised the
merciful God who had spared us all. It was in the disturbance
attendant upon putting the camp in order once more that I saw her.
She came out from the tent of Saïd Mohammed, to shake the sand
from a carpet; the newly come sunlight twinkled upon the bracelets
which clasped her smooth brown arms as she shook the gaily
colored mat at the tent door. The sunlight shone upon her braided
hair, upon her slight robe, upon her silver anklets, and upon her tiny
feet. Transfixed I stood watching—indeed, my friends, almost

holding my breath. Then the sunlight shone upon her eyes, two
pools of mysterious darkness into which I found myself suddenly
looking.
The face of this lovely Arab maiden flushed, and drawing the
corner of her robe across those bewitching eyes, she turned and ran
back into the tent.
One glance—just one glance, my friends! But never had Ulysses’
bow propelled an arrow more sure, more deadly. I was nineteen,
remember, and of Provence. What do you foresee! You who have
been through the world, you who once were nineteen.
I feigned a sickness, a sickness brought about by the sandstorm,
and taking base advantage of that desert hospitality which is
unbounded, which knows no suspicion, and takes no count of cost, I
remained in the tent which had been vacated for me.
In this voluntary confinement I learned little of the doings of the
camp. All day I lay dreaming of two dark eyes, and at night when
the jackals howled I thought of the wanderer who had counseled me
to leave. One day, I lay so; a second; a third again; and the women
of Saïd Mohammed’s household tended me, closely veiled of course.
But in vain I waited for that attendant whose absence was rendering
my feigned fever a real one—whose eyes burned like torches in my
dreams and for the coming of whose little bare feet across the sand
to my tent door I listened hour by hour, day by day, in vain—always
in vain.
But at nineteen there is no such thing as despair, and hope has
strength to defy death itself. It was in the violet dusk of the fourth
day, as I lay there with a sort of shame of my deception struggling
for birth in my heart, that she came.
She came through the tent door bearing a bowl of soup, and the
rays of the setting sun outlined her fairy shape through the
gossamer robe as she entered.
At that my poor weak little conscience troubled me no more. How
my heart leaped, leaped so that it threatened to choke me, who had

come safe through a great sandstorm.
There is fire in the Southern blood at nineteen, my friends, which
leaps into flame beneath the glances of bright eyes.
With her face modestly veiled, the Bedouin maid knelt beside me,
placing the wooden bowl upon the ground. My eager gaze pierced
the yashmak, but her black lashes were laid upon her cheek, her
glorious eyes averted. My heart—or was it my vanity?—told me that
she regarded me at least with interest, that she was not at ease in
my company; and as, having spoken no word, having ventured no
glance, she rose again to depart, I was emboldened to touch her
hand.
Like a startled gazelle she gave me one rapid glance, and was
gone!
She was gone—and my very soul gone with her! For hours I lay,
not so much as thinking of the food beside me—dreaming of her
eyes. What were my plans? Faith! Does one have plans at nineteen
where two bright eyes are concerned?
Alas, my friends, I dare not tell you of my hopes, yet upon those
hopes I lived. Oh, it is glorious to be nineteen and of Provence; it is
glorious when all the world is young, when the fruit is ripe upon the
trees and the plucking seems no sin. Yet, as we look back, we
perceive that at nineteen we were scoundrels.
The Bedouin girl is a woman when a European woman is but a
child, and Sakîna, whose eyes could search a man’s soul, was but
twelve years of age—twelve! Can you picture that child of twelve
squeezing a lover’s heart between her tiny hands, entwining his
imagination in the coils of her hair?
You, my friend, may perhaps be able to conceive this thing, for
you know the East, and the women of the East. At ten or eleven
years of age many of them are adorable; at twenty-one most of
them are passé; at twenty-six all of them—with rare exceptions—are
shrieking hags.

But to you, my other friends, who are strangers to our Oriental
ways, who know not that the peach only attains to perfect ripeness
for one short hour, it may be strange, it may be horrifying, that I
loved, with all the ardor which was mine, this little Arab maiden,
who, had she been born in France, would not yet have escaped from
the nursery. But I digress.
The Arabs were encamped, of course, in the neighborhood of a
spring. It lay in a slight depression amid the tiny palm-grove. Here,
at sunset, came the women with their pitchers on their heads,
graceful of carriage, veiled, mysterious.
Many peaches have ripened and have rotted since those days of
which I speak, but now—even now—I am still enslaved by the
mystery of Egypt’s veiled women. Untidy, bedraggled, dirty, she may
be, but the real Egyptian woman when she bears her pitcher upon
her head and glides, stately, sinuously, through the dusk to the well,
is a figure to enchain the imagination.
Very soon, then, the barrier of reserve which, like the screen of
the harêm, stands between Eastern women and love, was broken.
My trivial scruples I had cast to the winds, and feigning weakness, I
would sally forth to take the air in the cool of the evening; this two
days later.
My steps, be assured, led me to the spring; and you who are men
of the world will know that Sakîna, braving the reproaches of the
Sheikh’s household, neglectful of her duties, was last of all the
women who came to the well for water.
I taught her to say my name—René! How sweet it sounded from
her lips, as she strove in vain to roll the ‘R’ in our Provençal fashion.
Some ginnee most certainly presided over this enchanted fountain,
for despite the nearness of the camp our rendezvous was never
discovered, our meetings were never detected.
With her pitcher upon the ground beside her, she would sit with
those wistful, wonderful eyes upraised to mine, and sway before the
ardor of my impassioned words as a young and tender reed sways in

the Nile breeze. Her budding soul was a love lute upon which I
played in ecstasy; and when she raised her red lips to mine.... Ah!
those nights in the boundless desert! God is good to youth, and
harsh to old age!
Next to Saïd Mohammed, her father, Sakîna’s brother was the
finest horseman of the tribe, and his white mare their fleetest steed.
I had cast covetous eyes upon this glorious creature, my friends, and
secretly had made such overtures as were calculated to win her
confidence.
Within two weeks, then, my plans were complete—up to a point.
Since they were doomed to failure, like my great scheme, I shall not
trouble you with their details, but an hour before dawn on a certain
night I cut the camel-hair tethering of the white mare, and,
undetected, led the beautiful creature over the silent sands to a cup-
like depression, a thousand yards distant from the camp.
The Bedouin who was upon guard that night had with him a gourd
of ’erksoos. This was customary, and I had chosen an occasion when
the duty of filling the sentinel’s gourd had fallen upon Sakîna; to his
’erksoos I had added four drops of dark brown fluid from my
medicine chest.
It was an hour before dawn, then, when I stood beside the white
mare, watching and listening; it was an hour before dawn when she
for whom my great scheme was forgotten, for whom I was about to
risk the anger, the just anger, of men amongst the most fierce in the
known world, came running fleetly over the hillocks down into the
little valley, and threw herself into my arms....
When dawn burst in gloomy splendor over the desert, we were
still five hours’ ride from the spot where I had proposed temporarily
to conceal myself, with perhaps an hour’s start of the Arabs. I knew
the desert ways well enough, but the ghostly and desolate place in
which I now found myself nevertheless filled me with foreboding.
A seam of black volcanic rock split the sands for a great distance,
forming a kind of natural wall of forbidding aspect. In places this

wall was pierced by tunnel-like openings; I think they may have
been prehistoric tombs. There was no scrap of verdure visible, north,
south, east or west; only desolation, sand, grayness, and this place,
ghostly and wan with that ancient sorrow, that odor of remote
mortality which is called “the dust of Egypt.”
Seated before me in the saddle, Sakîna looked up into my face
with a never-changing confidence, having her little brown fingers
interlocked about my neck. But her strength was failing. A short rest
was imperative.
Thus far I had detected no evidence of pursuit and, descending
from the saddle, I placed my weary companion upon a rock over
which I had laid a rug, and poured out for her a draught of cool
water.
Bread and dates were our breakfast fare; but bread and dates and
water are nectar and ambrosia when they are sweetened with
kisses. Oh! the glorious madness of youth! Sometimes, my friends, I
am almost tempted to believe that the man who has never been
wicked has never been happy!
Picture us, then, if you can, set amid that desolation, which for us
was a rose-garden, eating of that unpalatable food—which for us
was the food of the gods!
So we remained awhile, deliriously happy, though death might
terminate our joys ere we again saw the sun, when something ...
something spoke to me....
Understand me, I did not say that someone spoke, I did not say
that anything audible spoke. But I know that, unlocking those velvet
arms which clung to me, I stood up slowly—and, still slowly, turned
and looked back at the frowning black rocks.
Merciful God! My heart beats wildly now when I recall that
moment.
Motionless as a statue, but in a crouching attitude, as if about to
leap down, he who had warned me so truly stood upon the highest
point of the rocks watching us!

How long did I remain thus?
I cannot pretend to say; but when I turned to Sakîna—she lay
trembling on the ground, with her face hidden in her hands.
Then, down over the piled-up rocks, this mysterious and ominous
being came leaping. Old man though he was, he descended with the
agility of a mountain goat—and sometimes, in the difficult places, he
went on all fours.
Crossing the intervening strip of sand, he stood before me. You
have seen the reproach in the eyes of a faithful dog whose master
has struck him unjustly? Such a reproach shone out from the yellow
eyes of this desert wanderer. I cannot account for it; I can say no
more....
It was impossible for me to speak; I trembled violently; such a
fear and such a madness of sorrow possessed me that I would have
welcomed any death—to have freed me from that intolerable
reproach.
He suddenly pointed towards the horizon where against the
curtain of the dawn black figures appeared.
I fell upon my knees beside Sakîna. I was a poor, pitiable thing;
the madness of my passion had left me, and already I was within
the great Shadow; I could not even weep; I knew that I had brought
Sakîna out into that desolate place—to die.
And now the man whose ways were unlike human ways began to
babble insanely, gesticulating and plucking at me. I cannot hope to
make you feel one little part of the emotion with which those
instants were laden. Sakîna clung to me trembling in a way I can
never forget—never, never forget. And the look in her eyes! even
now I cannot bear to think of it, I cannot bear——
Those almost colorless lizards which dart about in the desert
places with incredible swiftness were now coming forth from their
nests; and all the while the black figures, unheard as yet, were
approaching along the path of the sun.

My mad folly grew more apparent to me every moment. I realized
that this which so rapidly was overtaking me had been inevitable
from the first. The strange wild man stood watching me with that
intolerable glare, so that my trembling companion shrank from him
in horror.
But evidently he was seeking to convey some idea to me. He
gesticulated constantly, pointing to the approaching Arabs and then
over his shoulder to the frowning rock behind. Since it was too late
for flight—for I knew that the white mare with a double burden
could never outpace our pursuers—it occurred to me at the moment
when the muffled beat of hoofs first became audible, that this hermit
of the rocks was endeavoring to induce me to seek some hiding-
place with which no doubt he was acquainted.
How I cursed the delay which had enabled the Arabs to come up
with us! I know, now, of course, that even had I not delayed, our
ultimate capture was certain. But at the moment, in my despair, I
thought otherwise.
And now I cursed the stupidity which had prevented me from
following this weird guide; I even thought wrathfully of the poor
frightened child, whose weakness had necessitated the delay and
whose fears had contributed considerably to this later
misunderstanding.
The pursuing party, numbering four, and led by Saïd Mohammed,
was no more than five hundred yards away when I came to my
senses. The hermit now was tugging at my arm with frightful
insistence; his eyes were glaring insanely, and he chattered in an
almost pitiable manner.
“Quick!” I cried, throwing my arm about Sakîna, “up to the rocks.
This man can hide us!”
“No, no!” she whispered, “I dare not——”
But I lifted her, and signing to the singular being to lead the way,
staggered forward despairingly.

The distance was greater than it appeared, the climb incredibly
difficult. My guide held out his hand to me to assist me to mount the
slippery rocks; but I had much ado to proceed and also to support
Sakîna.
Her terror of the man and of the place to which he was leading us
momentarily increased. Indeed, it seemed that she was becoming
mad with fear. When the man paused before an opening in the rocks
not more than fifteen or sixteen inches in height, and wildly waving
his arms in the air, his elfin locks flying about his shoulder, his eyes
glassy, intimated that we were to crawl in—Sakîna writhed free of
my grasp and bounded back some three or four paces down the
slope.
“Not in there!” she cried, holding out her little hands to me
pitifully. “I dare not! He would devour us!”
At the foot of the slope, Saïd Mohammed, who had dismounted
from his horse, and who, far ahead of the others, was advancing
towards us, at that moment raised his gun and fired....
Can I go on?
It is more years ago than I care to count, but it is fresher in my
mind than the things of yesterday. A lonely old age is before me, my
friends—for I have been a solitary man since that shot was fired. For
me it changed the face of the world, for me it ended youth,
revealing me to myself for what I was.
Something more nearly resembling human speech than any sound
he had yet uttered burst from the lips of the wild man as the report
of Saïd Mohammed’s shot whispered in echoes through the
mysterious labyrinths beneath us.
Fate had stood at the Sheikh’s elbow as he pulled the trigger.
With a little soft cry—I hear it now, gentle, but having in it a world
of agony—Sakîna sank at my feet ... and her blood began to trickle
over the black rocks on which she lay.

The man who professes to describe to you his emotions at such a
frightful moment is an impostor. The world grew black before my
eyes; every emotion of which my being was capable became
paralysed.
I heard nothing, I saw nothing but the little huddled figure, that
red stream upon the black rock, and the agonized love in the blazing
eyes of Sakîna. Groaning, I threw myself down beside her, and as
she sighed out her life upon my breast, I knew—God help me—that
what had been but a youthful amour, was now a life’s tragedy; that
for me the light of the world had gone out, that I should never again
know the warmth of the sun and the gladness of the morning....
The cave man, with a dog-like fidelity, sought now to drag me
from my dead love, to drag me into that gloomy lair which she had
shrunk from entering. His incoherent mutterings broke in upon my
semi-coma; but I shook him off, I shrieked curses at him....
Now the Bedouins were mounting the slope, not less than a
hundred yards below me. In the growing light I could see the face of
Saïd Mohammed....
The man beside me exerted all his strength to drag me back into
the gallery or cave—I know not what it was; but with my arms
locked about Sakîna I lay watching the pursuers coming closer and
closer.
Then, those persistent efforts suddenly ceased, and dully I told
myself that this weird being, having done his best to save me, had
fled in order to save himself.
I was wrong.
You have asked me for a story of the magic of Egypt, and
although, as you see, it has cost me tears—oh! I am not ashamed of
those tears, my friends!—I have recounted this story to you. You
say, where is the magic? and I might reply: the magic was in the
changing of my false love to a true. But there was another magic as
well, and it grew up around me now at this moment when I lay
inert, waiting for death.

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Mister Pulitzer And The Spider Modern News From Realism To The Digital Kevin G Barnhurst

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Mister Pulitzer And The Spider Modern News From Realism To The Digital Kevin G Barnhurst

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