The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

DANA: HIS "SUN" AND ITS CITY 241

many adjacent columns-a feat which Mr. Bennett and
some of his imitators seemed to consider feasible. Surprise is not the only emotion upon which a newspaper
can play. The Sun stretched all the human octaves from
horror to amusement, but the keys of horror were only
touched when it was necessary.
Make rules for news? How is it possible to make a
rule for something the value of which lies in the fact
that it is the narrative of what never had happened, in
exactly the same way, before? John Bogart, a city
editor of the Sun who absorbed the Dana idea of news
and the handling thereof, once said to a young reporter:
" When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because
it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is
news."
The Sun always waited for the man to bite the dog.
Here is Mr. Dana's own definition of news:
The first thing which an editor must look for is news.
If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful;
and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything
which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient
interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public
or of any considerable part of it.
There is a great disposition in some quarters to say
that the newspapers ought to limit the amount of news
that they print; that certain kinds of news ought not to
be published. I do not know how that is. I am not
prepared to maintain any abstract proposition in that
line; but I have always felt that whatever the divine
Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to
report.
A belief has been accepted in some quarters that the
Sun of Dana's time preferred college men for its staff.
This was in a way false, but it is true that a great