Found on Rob Curley’s Facebook profile:
“Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place.
Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work.
Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings.
A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity.
But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know.
I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet.
New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.”
– William Allen White, April 21, 1931
He was an American journalist known as the “Sage of the Emporia Gazette,” whose mixture of tolerance, optimism, liberal Republicanism, and provincialism made him the epitome of the thoughtful small-town American.
My wife, Deborah Withey, had the honor to redesign his paper a few years ago and his memory is always alive.
