Career
Swope was the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917 for a series of articles that year entitled "Inside the German Empire" The articles formed the basis for a book released in 1917 entitled Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War, which he wrote with James W. Gerard.
He is known for saying, "I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time." He is also credited with coining the phrase "Cold War".
He was the first newspaperman to employ the "op-ed" concept of opinion pieces printed opposite the editorial page.
Although standard editorial pages have been printed by newspapers for many centuries, Swope established the first modern op-ed page in 1921. When he took over as editor in 1920, he realized that the page opposite the editorials, was "a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries." He wrote:
"It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America... and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts."
Swope served as the editor for New York World 's 21-day crusade against the Ku Klux Klan in October 1921, which won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922. As an example of investigative journalism, it was ranked 81 out the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century by New York University's journalism department.
He was a legendary poker player, at one point in his life winning over $470,000 in a game with an oil baron, steel magnate and entertainer. Swope was also a member of a social club, the precursor to the Algonquin Round Table known as the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Pleasure Club. He was inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame of the United States Croquet Association in 1979 and his son Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr. in 1981.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Bayard Swope
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)