My Journalist Days

A town crier walked through the village streets ringing his bell and shouting headlines to the residents - the early kind of journalists, the chief method in isolated American town and villages of delivering the news. His cries were fundamental to good journalism in those times -just delivery of the facts. On any scale in growing cities came larger and filtered down into villages in the form of one-page, hand-operated press, the type set by hand into a chase and the crude paper impressed with the news. Meantime, the town crier continued well into the nineteenth century, replicated by the newsboy who drags his wagon filled with paper and broadcasts the headlines, "ROCK HOUSES PRICE UP...ROCK HOUSES SPRING UP, read all about it!" The Crier rings his bell to alert attention.