Already a legendary labor reporter in 1924, Art Shields begins a series of advice on the importance and mechanics of working class journalism.

‘News From the Class Struggle Front’ by Art Shields from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 122. August 9, 1924.

This article which the editor of the DAILY WORKER magazine section asked me to write is addressed to the voluntary correspondents whom he wants to get on the job.

I wish to put over this idea—that the influence of a revolutionary labor paper depends on the activity of the voluntary correspondents from whom the paper must get a large part of its news.

NEWS! That is the stuff that makes a paper if it is abundant and interesting—and kills the circulation if it isn’t supplied promptly. The circulation of a newspaper depends firstly on its news columns. Editorials have their importance in clinching the ideas developed from the news but they don’t break the ice into the big circulation pond as live news does. And it hardly seems to need stating that a successful appeal to the masses is impossible unless the masses are hearing the message.

I do not wish the reader to think that I regard the news columns as mere bait to catch a subscriber for the editorials and special articles. I am arguing for the news for its own sake. I believe that no other department of a labor paper has the educational value of the news pages if these really mirror the class struggle with accuracy. I am confident that nothing stirs a worker to action in this struggle as the running news picture of the fight itself.

News From 48 States.

A revolutionary labor newspaper must burn with the news from the class war front of its city, country and the world—but first of all with the news close to home because that is what relates immediately to the life of the worker. Its columns must illuminate the garment and steel strikes of its city, the stockyard “Jungles” and “Western Electrics.” If it is a national newspaper it must flash back the significant events of the farms and factories of the 48 states. It MUST do this to awaken national interest and achieve power.

This news must be told in your working-class newspaper but if the telling of it depends on the unaided efforts of the small staff which a class conscious labor paper can maintain then the reader will have to go hungry for most of the facts he bought the paper to find. A paper which does not get and does not want the support of the department store, banks and railroads that make possible the huge staffs of capitalist newspapers has to operate on a very low cost basis. Newspaper cemeteries are dotted with the crosses of labor papers that tried to run on too large an overhead. To live, a revolutionary labor paper has to cut its paid staff down to the bone, perhaps down to a bare five editors, assistants and reporters.

This means that the voluntary correspondent has to put his shoulder to the wheel if the nation’s news is to be done. Fortunately he is beginning to do it. But he needs to be spurred into ten times as much action as he is yet showing.

Much Big News Now.

Think of all the live news that is breaking today. A report has just come in of a strike of steel workers at McKee’s Rocks, can imagine how the editor of the DAILY WORKER is fuming if the local correspondents are not supplying the details. The Ku Klux Klan and the shipping trust has been raiding the wobbly marine workers at San Pedro. Fiendish atrocities: little girls scalded near to death in boiling coffee vats; men frightfully beaten by the gangsters but undaunted in their fight to organize the seamen and longshoremen. One good story comes in, then silence. The labor world wants to know what happens. The paper doesn’t tell them because the local comrades just neglected to put their pens to paper.

These are events that are faking place or have recently occurred They can be multiplied by the dozen. At the present time there is a cloakmakers’ strike in Baltimore; there are Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ strikes in New York, assaults on free speech in Pennsylvania, important political developments in Minnesota and a host of other happenings in the labor world. An ocean of news, much of which is printed and much of which is passed over because the correspondents have not been on the job.

To the extent to which the correspondents are supplying this news to that extent the paper becomes a force in their locality.

Active radicals accept the idea that the revolutionary press is their strong weapon in the fight. They get up picnics to raise money for the press and they hustle out selling the paper. But not many of them realize the aid they can give to their paper by SENDING IN THE NEWS.

Workers’ News In Russia.

Over in Russia the workers have learned to send in the news. Anna Louise Strong told about it at the annual dinner of the Federated Press in Chicago last January. In Moscow and other Soviet cities the individual workers’ stories fresh from the job are prominently displayed. They increase the circulation of the paper and they supply the specific data from the job which leads to the installation of better management methods. If a technician is slighting his work he is likely to read about himself when he least expects it. If a new invention is applied in an industry the workers on the job tell how it sizes up.

Here in America there is no workers’ administration of industry just yet but there is a fight for this goal and there are revolutionary papers that are aiding in this fight. The intelligent workers’ duty is to keep his paper posted about the fight in his locality. As in Russia this voluntary correspondence will not only increase circulation—the first requisite for newspaper power—but it supplies the facts about the class war battles which other workers must have to check up with their own experience and improve their tactics of warfare against the common enemy.

If the Russian workers, most of whom could not read or write until after the revolution, can SEND IN THE NEWS the American workers can also.

In another article I will tell how easy it is to write news reports, the easiest form of composition. There are a few simple rules to follow and Presto! the thing is done.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n127-aug-15-1924-DW-LOC.pdf