FROM a professional point of view, Warren Phillips could not have been born at a better time.

He arrived on the scene in 1926, he saw the glories of print media, and he observed its decline in his retirement.

His forthcoming "Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal" (McGraw-Hill, 2012) gives a lively account of his early aspirations, his passion for journalism, and his active engagement with the Journal spanning half a century.

At the beginning, he had his share of setbacks. He was first rejected by Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and then refused a job by nearly all major newspapers in New York.

His luck changed with the Journal, which was last on his list of New York newspapers to approach. At that time the Journal was a small financial paper with a circulation of around 100,000.

When he retired in 1991, the Journal had grown into a three-section paper (first an Asian, and then an European edition), with a global circulation of 2 million.

He was first a star reporter in post-war Europe, becoming London bureau chief at age 23, foreign editor at 25, managing editor at 30, and for 15 years CEO of Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company.

He has certainly presided over the most successful financial era in the history of Dow Jones.

Not long after his retirement, the print media plunged into what now seems an irreversible slide.

With the flight of advertisement to the websites and migration of readers to electronic devices, some newspapers have collapsed. The rest are struggling.

But certainly Phillips started off without these forebodings.

Many journalists today may still agree with the author in his shrewd assessment of journalism: "Reporting and researching each new story provided an education in new subject after new subject. I actually was being paid while I reaped such benefits."

His first marriage came to a quick end in 1949 in Germany where his bride, unable to stand the neglect from her busy husband, ran off with a photographer.

"Working the 3pm to 10pm shift at the Stars and Stripes, traveling most mornings to do reporting for Journal stories, and then using what free time I had at home in Pfungstadt to compose and type up my stories - all this left little time for domestic life," he writes.

Phillips attributes the quick recognition of his abilities to his grasp of a kind of writing and reporting style that transformed the Journal from "a sleepy thirty-two-thousand-circulation financial sheet, in 1941, into the modern powerhouse it became."

Among the revolutionary principles of Journal editors at that time were: News was not just what happened yesterday, but included interpretation and anticipation of future trends; business news did not have to be dull, and should be written in a lively, jargon-free fashion.

For a family-controlled public company, support from the controlling family is essential, and so is the managerial commitment to professional standards and core principles. These factors combined to fuel the Journal's growth.

When the author first joined the Journal, whisky, hams and travel junkets were considered traditional perks of reporters and editors.

Later, in the new code of ethics, such gifts would be returned to the sender with a note of appreciation.

These policies aimed at building reader trust.

Public trust

As Harold Evans, former editor of The Times, once said: "Readers trust their bodies to their doctors, their children to their teachers, but they open their morning paper like a virgin entering the sergeant's mess."

But newspapers used to take pride in having a mission, not simply turning a good profit.

One of China's largest newspapers is the Xinmin Evening News, where xinmin is actually taken from the first sentence of the first of four books of the Confucian Canon (the Four Books), meaning "to renovate the people."

How many of our reporters today can still afford to be concerned with their mission before they sit down to write anything? Are they writing to inform and educate the public, or are they merely cheerleaders for some businesses, or the establishment?

In theory the best writers and editors should always place commercial interest behind their public service obligations.

In practice, as our society prostrates itself before the shrine of Mammon and the "free" market, it sounds pedantic and pretentious to talk about mission.

Editorial integrity

Phillips recalls that publisher of The New York Times once said, "I just told John Oakes [then editor of the Times's editorial page] that we were raising the price of the Times from twenty to twenty-five cents - thirty cents without the editorial page."

Phillips thought "anyone who could make a quip like that about his own paper was an all-right guy."

The Journal once carried articles alleging conflict of interest in contracts concerning Mobil's senior management. Mobil pulled all its advertising from the paper, stopped all press releases to the Journal and forbade any Mobil officials from talking to Journal reporters. The Journal did not back down.

At the turn of the century, the global print media decline became evident, putting the future of all print media in question.

Since 2002 Dow Jones and the Journal had been afflicted by share price decline and hemorrhaging of advertising revenue.

In late 2007 Dow Jones was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which not long ago was engulfed in a British tabloid phone hacking scandal. Then in October, the Journal was accused by a British paper of falsifying its sales figures.

Phillips' memoir gives a parallel account of a successful newspaperman and a successful newspaper's era of heady growth.

But what's the message for journalists today still working for papers struggling to survive?

Here Phillips' observations of the publishing industry as a whole may shed some light. He went into the self-publishing business with his wife after retirement.

Uncertainties

The author observes that books on current events, celebrities, cooking, and business can still sell, but quality fiction becomes harder and harder to sell.

"Our view ... is that now, in an era of declining educational standards, there are fewer adults interested in reading fiction about life's complexities and nuances and more who are attracted by the excitement and entertainment they find in science-fiction fantasies, vampires stories, novels originally written for children such as the Harry Potter series ..." he writes.

In a world where cultural enterprises have to justify their existence by their money-earning power, the businesspeople are taking control of everything.

Wherever you are, see how the people around you - whether migrant workers, senior office staff or students - are equally amused and mesmerized by their handheld e-gadgets, and you become convinced that we are in for the age of great democratization of tastes.