Telling the News: An Editor's Story In the era before radio, television and Internet, newspapers were a key link between a small town and the outside world. Many communities had multiple papers and competition among them was fierce. In the following first person account written in 1928 by Poughkeepsie EagleNews editor George W. Davids Jr., we see how the rivalry among Poughkeepsie newspapers to outwit and "scoop" each other was as much a part of daily journalism as the news itself. During Davids' years as a journalist, there were five other papers in Poughkeepsie besides his own (The Evening Enterprise, The Evening Star, The News-Telegraph, The News-Press, and the Sunday Courier). Years after the blockbuster stories Davids covered had lost their gripping power, his remembrances of how he got the stories and how the public hungered to read them retain a vibrant immediacy. George W. Davids, Jr. (1871-1962) was the son of Poughkeepsie's legendary newsman George W. Davids, Sr. who joined the staff of The Eagle the day Fort Sumter was fired on in 1861. Together, father and son served a combined total of 55 years with the Daily Eagle and its successor the Eagle-News. George W. Davids Jr. started his newspaper career shortly after his father's death in 1894 and continued as a reporter and then editor until resigning in 1919 to become General Manager of the Bardavon Theatres Corporation. George W. Davids, Jr.: "Any newspaper prides itself in giving to its readers items of news or importance, especially if that paper can `scoop,' as the newspapermen say, its rivals in the field. ...This was especially noted when the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor. The event inaugurated the outbreak between this country and Spain in the SpanishAmerican war. On this occasion the night force of The Eagle was preparing to close the wire and send the paper to press. In fact the operator had been given the `30,' the good night signal and was on his way home when the editor got an Associated Press phone call telling him of the rumor that the Maine had been blown up and asking him to recall the operator. It was about
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