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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of American Newspaper, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: American Newspaper
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2004 [EBook #3110]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN NEWSPAPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Our theme for the hour is the American Newspaper. It is a subject in
+which everybody is interested, and about which it is not polite to say
+that anybody is not well informed; for, although there are scattered
+through the land many persons, I am sorry to say, unable to pay for a
+newspaper, I have never yet heard of anybody unable to edit one.
+
+The topic has many points of view, and invites various study and comment.
+In our limited time we must select one only. We have heard a great deal
+about the power, the opportunity, the duty, the "mission," of the press.
+The time has come for a more philosophical treatment of it, for an
+inquiry into its relations to our complex civilization, for some ethical
+account of it as one of the developments of our day, and for some
+discussion of the effect it is producing, and likely to produce, on the
+education of the people. Has the time come, or is it near at hand, when
+we can point to a person who is alert, superficial, ready and shallow,
+self-confident and half-informed, and say, "There is a product of the
+American newspaper"? The newspaper is not a willful creation, nor an
+isolated phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age, as much as
+our system of popular education. And I trust that some competent observer
+will make, perhaps for this association, a philosophical study of it. My
+task here is a much humbler one. I have thought that it may not be
+unprofitable to treat the newspaper from a practical and even somewhat
+mechanical point of view.
+
+The newspaper is a private enterprise. Its object is to make money for
+its owner. Whatever motive may be given out for starting a newspaper,
+expectation of profit by it is the real one, whether the newspaper is
+religious, political, scientific, or literary. The exceptional cases of
+newspapers devoted to ideas or "causes" without regard to profit are so
+few as not to affect the rule. Commonly, the cause, the sect, the party,
+the trade, the delusion, the idea, gets its newspaper, its organ, its
+advocate, only when some individual thinks he can see a pecuniary return
+in establishing it.
+
+This motive is not lower than that which leads people into any other
+occupation or profession. To make a living, and to have a career, is the
+original incentive in all cases. Even in purely philanthropical
+enterprises the driving-wheel that keeps them in motion for any length of
+time is the salary paid the working members. So powerful is this
+incentive that sometimes the wheel will continue to turn round when there
+is no grist to grind. It sometimes happens that the friction of the
+philanthropic machinery is so great that but very little power is
+transmitted to the object for which the machinery was made. I knew a
+devoted agent of the American Colonization Society, who, for several
+years, collected in Connecticut just enough, for the cause, to buy his
+clothes, and pay his board at a good hotel.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say, except to prevent a possible
+misapprehension, that the editor who has no high ideals, no intention of
+benefiting his fellow-men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously as
+a means of money-making only, sinks to the level of the physician and the
+lawyer who have no higher conception of their callings than that they
+offer opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity, and by
+assisting in evasions of the law.
+
+If the excellence of a newspaper is not always measured by its
+profitableness, it is generally true that, if it does not pay its owner,
+it is valueless to the public. Not all newspapers which make money are
+good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable
+people, and to the prejudice, ignorance, and passion of the lowest class;
+but, as a rule, the successful journal pecuniarily is the best journal.
+The reasons for this are on the surface. The impecunious newspaper cannot
+give its readers promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news, and,
+still worse, it cannot be independent. The political journal that relies
+for support upon drippings of party favor or patronage, the general
+newspaper that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate stock
+reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious support from puffing
+doubtful enterprises, the literary paper that depends upon the approval
+of publishers, are poor affairs, and, in the long run or short run, come
+to grief. Some newspapers do succeed by sensationalism, as some preachers
+do; by a kind of quackery, as some doctors do; by trimming and shifting
+to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians do; by becoming
+the paid advocate of a personal ambition or a corporate enterprise, as
+some lawyers do: but the newspaper only becomes a real power when it is
+able, on the basis of pecuniary independence, to free itself from all
+such entanglements. An editor who stands with hat in hand has the respect
+accorded to any other beggar.
+
+The recognition of the fact that the newspaper is a private and purely
+business enterprise will help to define the mutual relations of the
+editor and the public. His claim upon the public is exactly that of any
+manufacturer or dealer. It is that of the man who makes cloth, or the
+grocer who opens a shop--neither has a right to complain if the public
+does not buy of him. If the buyer does not like a cloth half shoddy, or
+coffee half-chicory, he will go elsewhere. If the subscriber does not
+like one newspaper, he takes another, or none. The appeal for newspaper
+support on the ground that such a journal ought to be sustained by an
+enlightened community, or on any other ground than that it is a good
+article that people want,--or would want if they knew its value,--is
+purely childish in this age of the world. If any person wants to start a
+periodical devoted to decorated teapots, with the noble view of inducing
+the people to live up to his idea of a teapot, very good; but he has no
+right to complain if he fails.
+
+On the other hand, the public has no rights in the newspaper except what
+it pays for; even the "old subscriber" has none, except to drop the paper
+if it ceases to please him. The notion that the subscriber has a right to
+interfere in the conduct of the paper, or the reader to direct its
+opinions, is based on a misconception of what the newspaper is. The claim
+of the public to have its communications printed in the paper is equally
+baseless. Whether they shall be printed or not rests in the discretion of
+the editor, having reference to his own private interest, and to his
+apprehension of the public good. Nor is he bound to give any reason for
+his refusal. It is purely in his discretion whether he will admit a reply
+to any thing that has appeared in his columns. No one has a right to
+demand it. Courtesy and policy may grant it; but the right to it does not
+exist. If any one is injured, he may seek his remedy at law; and I should
+like to see the law of libel such and so administered that any person
+injured by a libel in the newspaper, as well as by slander out of it,
+could be sure of prompt redress. While the subscribes acquires no right
+to dictate to the newspaper, we can imagine an extreme case when he
+should have his money back which had been paid in advance, if the
+newspaper totally changed its character. If he had contracted with a
+dealer to supply him with hard coal during the winter, he might have a
+remedy if the dealer delivered only charcoal in the coldest weather; and
+so if he paid for a Roman Catholic journal which suddenly became an organ
+of the spiritists.
+
+The advertiser acquires no more rights in the newspaper than the
+subscriber. He is entitled to use the space for which he pays by the
+insertion of such material as is approved by the editor. He gains no
+interest in any other part of the paper, and has no more claim to any
+space in the editorial columns, than any other one of the public. To give
+him such space would be unbusiness-like, and the extension of a
+preference which would be unjust to the rest of the public. Nothing more
+quickly destroys the character of a journal, begets distrust of it, and
+so reduces its value, than the well-founded suspicion that its editorial
+columns are the property of advertisers. Even a religious journal will,
+after a while, be injured by this.
+
+Yet it must be confessed that here is one of the greatest difficulties of
+modern journalism. The newspaper must be cheap. It is, considering the
+immense cost to produce it, the cheapest product ever offered to man.
+Most newspapers cost more than they sell for; they could not live by
+subscriptions; for any profits, they certainly depend upon
+advertisements. The advertisements depend upon the circulation; the
+circulation is likely to dwindle if too much space is occupied by
+advertisements, or if it is evident that the paper belongs to its favored
+advertisers. The counting-room desires to conciliate the advertisers; the
+editor looks to making a paper satisfactory to his readers. Between this
+see-saw of the necessary subscriber and the necessary advertiser, a good
+many newspapers go down. This difficulty would be measurably removed by
+the admission of the truth that the newspaper is a strictly business
+enterprise, depending for success upon a 'quid pro quo' between all
+parties connected with it, and upon integrity in its management.
+
+Akin to the false notion that the newspaper is a sort of open channel
+that the public may use as it chooses, is the conception of it as a
+charitable institution. The newspaper, which is the property of a private
+person as much as a drug-shop is, is expected to perform for nothing
+services which would be asked of no other private person. There is
+scarcely a charitable enterprise to which it is not asked to contribute
+of its space, which is money, ten times more than other persons in the
+community, who are ten times as able as the owner of the newspaper,
+contribute. The journal is considered "mean" if it will not surrender its
+columns freely to notices and announcements of this sort. If a manager
+has a new hen-coop or a new singer he wishes to introduce to the public,
+he comes to the newspaper, expecting to have his enterprise extolled for
+nothing, and probably never thinks that it would be just as proper for
+him to go to one of the regular advertisers in the paper and ask him to
+give up his space. Anything, from a church picnic to a brass-band concert
+for the benefit of the widow of the triangles, asks the newspaper to
+contribute. The party in politics, whose principles the editor advocates,
+has no doubt of its rightful claim upon him, not only upon the editorial
+columns, but upon the whole newspaper. It asks without hesitation that
+the newspaper should take up its valuable space by printing hundreds and
+often thousands of dollars' worth of political announcements in the
+course of a protracted campaign, when it never would think of getting its
+halls, its speakers, and its brass bands, free of expense. Churches, as
+well as parties, expect this sort of charity. I have known rich churches,
+to whose members it was a convenience to have their Sunday and other
+services announced, withdraw the announcements when the editor declined
+any longer to contribute a weekly fifty-cents' worth of space. No private
+persons contribute so much to charity, in proportion to ability, as the
+newspaper. Perhaps it will get credit for this in the next world: it
+certainly never does in this.
+
+The chief function of the newspaper is to collect and print the news.
+Upon the kind of news that should be gathered and published, we shall
+remark farther on. The second function is to elucidate the news, and
+comment on it, and show its relations. A third function is to furnish
+reading-matter to the general public.
+
+Nothing is so difficult for the manager as to know what news is: the
+instinct for it is a sort of sixth sense. To discern out of the mass of
+materials collected not only what is most likely to interest the public,
+but what phase and aspect of it will attract most attention, and the
+relative importance of it; to tell the day before or at midnight what the
+world will be talking about in the morning, and what it will want the
+fullest details of, and to meet that want in advance,--requires a
+peculiar talent. There is always some topic on which the public wants
+instant information. It is easy enough when the news is developed, and
+everybody is discussing it, for the editor to fall in; but the success of
+the news printed depends upon a pre-apprehension of all this. Some
+papers, which nevertheless print all the news, are always a day behind,
+do not appreciate the popular drift till it has gone to something else,
+and err as much by clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not
+taking it up before it was fairly born. The public craves eagerly for
+only one thing at a time, and soon wearies of that; and it is to the
+newspaper's profit to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling
+moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse; to throw
+itself into it as if life depended on it, and for the hour to flood the
+popular curiosity with it as an engine deluges a fire.
+
+Scarcely less important than promptly seizing and printing the news is
+the attractive arrangement of it, its effective presentation to the eye.
+Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence, identically
+the same despatches: the one will be called bright, attractive, "newsy";
+the other, dull and stupid.
+
+We have said nothing yet about that, which, to most people, is the most
+important aspect of the newspaper,--the editor's responsibility to the
+public for its contents. It is sufficient briefly to say here, that it is
+exactly the responsibility of every other person in society,--the full
+responsibility of his opportunity. He has voluntarily taken a position in
+which he can do a great deal of good or a great deal of evil, and he,
+should be held and judged by his opportunity: it is greater than that of
+the preacher, the teacher, the congressman, the physician. He occupies
+the loftiest pulpit; he is in his teacher's desk seven days in the week;
+his voice can be heard farther than that of the most lusty fog-horn
+politician; and often, I am sorry to say, his columns outshine the
+shelves of the druggist in display of proprietary medicines. Nothing else
+ever invented has the public attention as the newspaper has, or is an
+influence so constant and universal. It is this large opportunity that
+has given the impression that the newspaper is a public rather than a
+private enterprise.
+
+It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the
+borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly
+is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and
+variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must have
+something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the
+other, or it will fail to please. The model editor, I believe, has yet to
+appear. Notwithstanding the traditional reputation of certain editors in
+the past, they could not be called great editors by our standards; for
+the elements of modern journalism did not exist in their time. The old
+newspaper was a broadside of stale news, with a moral essay attached.
+Perhaps Benjamin Franklin, with our facilities, would have been very near
+the ideal editor. There was nothing he did not wish to know; and no one
+excelled him in the ability to communicate what he found out to the
+average mind. He came as near as anybody ever did to marrying common
+sense to literature: he had it in him to make it sufficient for
+journalistic purposes. He was what somebody said Carlyle was, and what
+the American editor ought to be,--a vernacular man.
+
+The assertion has been made recently, publicly, and with evidence
+adduced, that the American newspaper is the best in the world. It is like
+the assertion that the American government is the best in the world; no
+doubt it is, for the American people.
+
+Judged by broad standards, it may safely be admitted that the American
+newspaper is susceptible of some improvement, and that it has something
+to learn from the journals of other nations. We shall be better employed
+in correcting its weaknesses than in complacently contemplating its
+excellences.
+
+Let us examine it in its three departments already named,--its news,
+editorials, and miscellaneous reading-matter.
+
+In particularity and comprehensiveness of news-collecting, it may be
+admitted that the American newspapers for a time led the world. I mean in
+the picking-up of local intelligence, and the use of the telegraph to
+make it general. And with this arose the odd notion that news is made
+important by the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire. The
+English journals followed, speedily overtook, and some of the wealthier
+ones perhaps surpassed, the American in the use of the telegraph, and in
+the presentation of some sorts of local news; not of casualties, and
+small city and neighborhood events, and social gossip (until very
+recently), but certainly in the business of the law courts, and the
+crimes and mishaps that come within police and legal supervision. The
+leading papers of the German press, though strong in correspondence and
+in discussion of affairs, are far less comprehensive in their news than
+the American or the English. The French journals, we are accustomed to
+say, are not newspapers at all. And this is true as we use the word.
+Until recently, nothing has been of importance to the Frenchman except
+himself; and what happened outside of France, not directly affecting his
+glory, his profit, or his pleasure, did not interest him: hence, one
+could nowhere so securely intrench himself against the news of the world
+as behind the barricade of the Paris journals. But let us not make a
+mistake in this matter. We may have more to learn from the Paris journals
+than from any others. If they do not give what we call news--local news,
+events, casualties, the happenings of the day,--they do give ideas,
+opinions; they do discuss politics, the social drift; they give the
+intellectual ferment of Paris; they supply the material that Paris likes
+to talk over, the badinage of the boulevard, the wit of the salon, the
+sensation of the stage, the new movement in literature and in politics.
+This may be important, or it may be trivial: it is commonly more
+interesting than much of that which we call news.
+
+Our very facility and enterprise in news-gathering have overwhelmed our
+newspapers, and it may be remarked that editorial discrimination has not
+kept pace with the facilities. We are overpowered with a mass of
+undigested intelligence, collected for the mast part without regard to
+value. The force of the newspaper is expended in extending these
+facilities, with little regard to discriminating selection. The burden is
+already too heavy for the newspaper, and wearisome to the public.
+
+The publication of the news is the most important function of the paper.
+How is it gathered? We must confess that it is gathered very much by
+chance. A drag-net is thrown out, and whatever comes is taken. An
+examination into the process of collecting shows what sort of news we are
+likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed is collected without
+much intelligence exercised in selection. The alliance of the associated
+press with the telegraph company is a fruitful source of news of an
+inferior quality. Of course, it is for the interest of the telegraph
+company to swell the volume to be transmitted. It is impossible for the
+associated press to have an agent in every place to which the telegraph
+penetrates: therefore the telegraphic operators often act as its
+purveyors. It is for their interest to send something; and their judgment
+of what is important is not only biased, but is formed by purely local
+standards. Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic
+operators, by agents trained to regard only the accidental, the
+startling, the abnormal, as news; it is picked up by sharp prowlers about
+town, whose pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for
+something spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and
+exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who
+regard casualties as the chief news. Our newspapers every day are loaded
+with accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people of whom we never
+heard before and never shall hear again, the reading of which is of no
+earthly use to any human being.
+
+What is news? What is it that an intelligent public should care to hear
+of and talk about? Run your eye down the columns of your journal. There
+was a drunken squabble last night in a New York groggery; there is a
+petty but carefully elaborated village scandal about a foolish girl; a
+woman accidentally dropped her baby out of a fourth-story window in
+Maine; in Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same railway
+train with another woman's husband; a child fell into a well in New
+Jersey; there is a column about a peripatetic horse-race, which exhibits,
+like a circus, from city to city; a laborer in a remote town in
+Pennsylvania had a sunstroke; there is an edifying dying speech of a
+murderer, the love-letter of a suicide, the set-to of a couple of
+congressmen; and there are columns about a gigantic war of half a dozen
+politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gauger. Granted that this
+pabulum is desired by the reader, why not save the expense of
+transmission by having several columns of it stereotyped, to be
+reproduced at proper intervals? With the date changed, it would always,
+have its original value, and perfectly satisfy the demand, if a demand
+exists, for this sort of news.
+
+This is not, as you see, a description of your journal: it is a
+description of only one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful
+creation. Every morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less
+distorted and imperfect, but such a mirror as it never had held up to it
+before. But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities
+and vulgarities under the name of news. And this evil is likely to
+continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than
+the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions
+and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life. A
+horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed; but the
+progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam,
+which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put
+upon the wires. We hear promptly of a landslide in Switzerland, but only
+very slowly of a political agitation that is changing the constitution of
+the republic. It should be said, however, that the daily newspaper is not
+alone responsible for this: it is what the age and the community where it
+is published make it. So far as I have observed, the majority of the
+readers in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an
+English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance at
+a column report of a debate in the English parliament which involves a
+radical change in the whole policy of England; and devours a page about
+the Chantilly races, while it ignores a paragraph concerning the
+suppression of the Jesuit schools.
+
+Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.
+The obvious remedy for this would be more intelligent direction in the
+collection of news, and more careful sifting and supervision of it when
+gathered. It becomes every day more apparent to every manager that such
+discrimination is more necessary. There is no limit to the various
+intelligence and gossip that our complex life offers--no paper is big
+enough to contain it; no reader has time enough to read it. And the
+journal must cease to be a sort of waste-basket at the end of a telegraph
+wire, into which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossip-monger can
+dump whatever he pleases. We must get rid of the superstition that value
+is given to an unimportant "item" by sending it a thousand miles over a
+wire.
+
+Perhaps the most striking feature of the American newspaper, especially
+of the country weekly, is its enormous development of local and
+neighborhood news. It is of recent date. Horace Greeley used to advise
+the country editors to give small space to the general news of the world,
+but to cultivate assiduously the home field, to glean every possible
+detail of private life in the circuit of the county, and print it. The
+advice was shrewd for a metropolitan editor, and it was not without its
+profit to the country editor. It was founded on a deep knowledge of human
+nature; namely, upon the fact that people read most eagerly that which
+they already know, if it is about themselves or their neighbors, if it is
+a report of something they have been concerned in, a lecture they have
+heard, a fair, or festival, or wedding, or funeral, or barn-raising they
+have attended. The result is column after column of short paragraphs of
+gossip and trivialities, chips, chips, chips. Mr. Sales is contemplating
+erecting a new counter in his store; his rival opposite has a new sign;
+Miss Bumps of Gath is visiting her cousin, Miss Smith of Bozrah; the
+sheriff has painted his fence; Farmer Brown has lost his cow; the eminent
+member from Neopolis has put an ell on one end of his mansion, and a
+mortgage on the other.
+
+On the face of it nothing is so vapid and profitless as column after
+column of this reading. These "items" have very little interest, except
+to those who already know the facts; but those concerned like to see them
+in print, and take the newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity
+takes the place of reading-matter that might be of benefit, and its
+effect must be to belittle and contract the mind. But this is not the
+most serious objection to the publication of these worthless details. It
+cultivates self-consciousness in the community, and love of notoriety; it
+develops vanity and self-importance, and elevates the trivial in life
+above the essential.
+
+And this brings me to speak of the mania in this age, and especially in
+America, for notoriety in social life as well as in politics. The
+newspapers are the vehicle of it, sometimes the occasion, but not the
+cause. The newspaper may have fostered--it has not created--this hunger
+for publicity. Almost everybody talks about the violation of decency and
+the sanctity of private life by the newspaper in the publication of
+personalities and the gossip of society; and the very people who make
+these strictures are often those who regard the paper as without
+enterprise and dull, if it does not report in detail their weddings,
+their balls and parties, the distinguished persons present, the dress of
+the ladies, the sumptuousness of the entertainment, if it does not
+celebrate their church services and festivities, their social meetings,
+their new house, their distinguished arrivals at this or that
+watering-place. I believe every newspaper manager will bear me out in
+saying that there is a constant pressure on him to print much more of
+such private matter than his judgment and taste permit or approve, and
+that the gossip which is brought to his notice, with the hope that he
+will violate the sensitiveness of social life by printing it, is far away
+larger in amount than all that he publishes.
+
+To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic
+of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say,
+nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt
+an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the
+transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in
+sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve
+contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand
+wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to
+these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the
+excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his
+local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a
+sharer in the universal uneasiness. It might be worth while to inquire
+what effect this exciting accumulation of the news of the world upon an
+individual or a community has upon happiness and upon character. Is the
+New England man any better able to bear or deal with his extraordinary
+climate by the daily knowledge of the weather all over the globe? Is a
+man happier, or improved in character, by the woful tale of a world's
+distress and apprehension that greets him every morning at breakfast?
+Knowledge, we know, increases sorrow; but I suppose the offset to that
+is, that strength only comes through suffering. But this is a digression.
+
+Not second in importance to any department of the journal is the
+reporting; that is, the special reporting as distinguished from the more
+general news-gathering. I mean the reports of proceedings in Congress, in
+conventions, assemblies, and conferences, public conversations, lectures,
+sermons, investigations, law trials, and occurrences of all sorts that
+rise into general importance. These reports are the basis of our
+knowledge and opinions. If they are false or exaggerated, we are ignorant
+of what is taking place, and misled. It is of infinitely more importance
+that they should be absolutely trustworthy than that the editorial
+comments should be sound and wise. If the reports on affairs can be
+depended on, the public can form its own opinion, and act intelligently.
+And; if the public has a right to demand anything of a newspaper, it is
+that its reports of what occurs shall be faithfully accurate,
+unprejudiced, and colorless. They ought not, to be editorials, or the
+vehicles of personal opinion and feeling. The interpretation of, the
+facts they give should be left to the editor and the public. There should
+be a sharp line drawn between the report and the editorial.
+
+I am inclined to think that the reporting department is the weakest in
+the American newspaper, and that there is just ground for the admitted
+public distrust of it. Too often, if a person would know what has taken
+place in a given case, he must read the reports in half a dozen journals,
+then strike a general average of probabilities, allowing for the personal
+equation, and then--suspend his judgment. Of course, there is much
+excellent reporting, and there are many able men engaged in it who
+reflect the highest honor upon their occupation. And the press of no
+other country shows more occasional brilliant feats in reporting than
+ours: these are on occasions when the newspapers make special efforts.
+Take the last two national party conventions. The fullness, the accuracy,
+the vividness, with which their proceedings were reported in the leading
+journals, were marvelous triumphs of knowledge, skill, and expense. The
+conventions were so photographed by hundreds of pens, that the public
+outside saw them almost as distinctly as the crowd in attendance. This
+result was attained because the editors determined that it should be,
+sent able men to report, and demanded the best work. But take an opposite
+and a daily illustration of reporting, that of the debates and
+proceedings in Congress. I do not refer to the specials of various
+journals which are good, bad, or indifferent, as the case may be, and
+commonly colored by partisan considerations, but the regular synopsis
+sent to the country at large. Now, for some years it has been inadequate,
+frequently unintelligible, often grossly misleading, failing wholly to
+give the real spirit and meaning of the most important discussions; and
+it is as dry as chips besides. To be both stupid and inaccurate is the
+unpardonable sin in journalism. Contrast these reports with the lively
+and faithful pictures of the French Assembly which are served to the
+Paris papers.
+
+Before speaking of the reasons for the public distrust in reports, it is
+proper to put in one qualification. The public itself, and not the
+newspapers, is the great factory of baseless rumors and untruths.
+Although the newspaper unavoidably gives currency to some of these, it is
+the great corrector of popular rumors. Concerning any event, a hundred
+different versions and conflicting accounts are instantly set afloat.
+These would run on, and become settled but unfounded beliefs, as private
+whispered scandals do run, if the newspaper did not intervene. It is the
+business of the newspaper, on every occurrence of moment, to chase down
+the rumors, and to find out the facts and print them, and set the public
+mind at rest. The newspaper publishes them under a sense of
+responsibility for its statements. It is not by any means always correct;
+but I know that it is the aim of most newspapers to discharge this
+important public function faithfully. When this country had few
+newspapers it was ten times more the prey of false reports and delusions
+than it is now.
+
+Reporting requires as high ability as editorial writing; perhaps of a
+different kind, though in the history of American journalism the best
+reporters have often become the best editors. Talent of this kind must be
+adequately paid; and it happens that in America the reporting field is so
+vast that few journals can afford to make the reporting department
+correspond in ability to the editorial, and I doubt if the importance of
+doing so is yet fully realized. An intelligent and representative
+synopsis of a lecture or other public performance is rare. The ability to
+grasp a speaker's meaning, or to follow a long discourse, and reproduce
+either in spirit, and fairly, in a short space, is not common. When the
+public which has been present reads the inaccurate report, it loses
+confidence in the newspaper.
+
+Its confidence is again undermined when it learns that an "interview"
+which it has read with interest was manufactured; that the report of the
+movements and sayings of a distinguished stranger was a pure piece of
+ingenious invention; that a thrilling adventure alongshore, or in a
+balloon, or in a horse-car, was what is called a sensational article,
+concocted by some brilliant genius, and spun out by the yard according to
+his necessities. These reports are entertaining, and often more readable
+than anything else in the newspaper; and, if they were put into a
+department with an appropriate heading, the public would be less
+suspicious that all the news in the journal was colored and heightened by
+a lively imagination.
+
+Intelligent and honest reporting of whatever interests the public is the
+sound basis of all journalism. And yet so careless have editors been of
+all this that a reporter has been sent to attend the sessions of a
+philological convention who had not the least linguistic knowledge,
+having always been employed on marine disasters. Another reporter, who
+was assigned to inform the public of the results of a difficult
+archeological investigation, frankly confessed his inability to
+understand what was going on; for his ordinary business, he said, was
+cattle. A story is told of a metropolitan journal, which illustrates
+another difficulty the public has in keeping up its confidence in
+newspaper infallibility. It may not be true for history, but answers for
+an illustration. The annual November meteors were expected on a certain
+night. The journal prepared an elaborate article, several columns in
+length, on meteoric displays in general, and on the display of that night
+in particular, giving in detail the appearance of the heavens from the
+metropolitan roofs in various parts of the city, the shooting of the
+meteors amid the blazing constellations, the size and times of flight of
+the fiery bodies; in short, a most vivid and scientific account of the
+lofty fireworks. Unfortunately the night was cloudy. The article was in
+type and ready; but the clouds would not break. The last moment for going
+to press arrived: there was a probability that the clouds would lift
+before daylight and the manager took the risk. The article that appeared
+was very interesting; but its scientific value was impaired by the fact
+that the heavens were obscured the whole night, and the meteors, if any
+arrived, were invisible. The reasonable excuse of the editor would be
+that he could not control the elements.
+
+If the reporting department needs strengthening and reduction to order in
+the American journal, we may also query whether the department of
+correspondence sustains the boast that the American, newspaper is the
+best in the world. We have a good deal of excellent correspondence, both
+foreign and domestic; and our "specials" have won distinction, at least
+for liveliness and enterprise. I cannot dwell upon this feature; but I
+suggest a comparison with the correspondence of some of the German, and
+with that especially of the London journals, from the various capitals of
+Europe, and from the occasional seats of war. How surpassing able much of
+it is!
+
+How full of information, of philosophic observation, of accurate
+knowledge! It appears to be written by men of trained intellect and of
+experience,--educated men of the world, who, by reason of their position
+and character, have access to the highest sources of information.
+
+The editorials of our journals seem to me better than formerly, improved
+in tone, in courtesy, in self-respect,--though you may not have to go far
+or search long for the provincial note and the easy grace of the
+frontier,--and they are better written. This is because the newspaper has
+become more profitable, and is able to pay for talent, and has attracted
+to it educated young men. There is a sort of editorial ability, of
+facility, of force, that can only be acquired by practice and in the
+newspaper office: no school can ever teach it; but the young editor who
+has a broad basis of general education, of information in history,
+political economy, the classics, and polite literature, has an immense
+advantage over the man who has merely practical experience. For the
+editorial, if it is to hold its place, must be more and more the product
+of information, culture, and reflection, as well as of sagacity and
+alertness. Ignorance of foreign affairs, and of economic science, the
+American people have in times past winked at; but they will not always
+wink at it.
+
+It is the belief of some shrewd observers that editorials, the long
+editorials, are not much read, except by editors themselves. A cynic says
+that, if you have a secret you are very anxious to keep from the female
+portion of the population, the safest place to put it is in an editorial.
+It seems to me that editorials are not conned as attentively as they once
+were; and I am sure they have not so much influence as formerly. People
+are not so easily or so visibly led; that is to say, the editorial
+influence is not so dogmatic and direct. The editor does not expect to
+form public opinion so much by arguments and appeals as by the news he
+presents and his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an idea
+until it becomes familiar, by the reading-matter selected, and by the
+quotations of opinions as news, and not professedly to influence the
+reader. And this influence is all the more potent because it is indirect,
+and not perceived-by the reader.
+
+There is an editorial tradition--it might almost be termed a
+superstition--which I think will have to be abandoned. It is that a
+certain space in the journal must be filled with editorial, and that some
+of the editorials must be long, without any reference to the news or the
+necessity of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at the moment
+to fill the space with original matter that is readable. There is the
+sacred space, and it must be filled. The London journals are perfect
+types of this custom. The result is often a wearisome page of words and
+rhetoric. It may be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much of
+it. The necessity of filling this space causes the writer, instead of
+stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made
+perspicuous and telling, to beat it out thin, and make it cover as much
+ground as possible. This, also, is vanity. In the economy of room, which
+our journals will more and more be compelled to cultivate, I venture to
+say that this tradition will be set aside. I think that we may fairly
+claim a superiority in our journals over the English dailies in our habit
+of making brief, pointed editorial paragraphs. They are the life of the
+editorial page. A cultivation of these until they are as finished and
+pregnant as the paragraphs of "The London Spectator" and "The New-York
+Nation," the printing of long editorials only when the elucidation of a
+subject demands length, and the use of the space thus saved for more
+interesting reading, is probably the line of our editorial evolution.
+
+To continue the comparison of our journals as a class, with the English
+as a class, ours are more lively, also more flippant, and less restrained
+by a sense of responsibility or by the laws of libel. We furnish, now and
+again, as good editorial writing for its purpose; but it commonly lacks
+the dignity, the thoroughness, the wide sweep and knowledge, that
+characterizes the best English discussion of political and social topics.
+
+The third department of the newspaper is that of miscellaneous
+reading-matter. Whether this is the survival of the period when the paper
+contained little else except "selections," and other printed matter was
+scarce, or whether it is only the beginning of a development that shall
+supply the public nearly all its literature, I do not know. Far as our
+newspapers have already gone in this direction, I am inclined to think
+that in their evolution they must drop this adjunct, and print simply the
+news of the day. Some of the leading journals of the world already do
+this.
+
+In America I am sure the papers are printing too much miscellaneous
+reading. The perusal of this smattering of everything, these scraps of
+information and snatches of literature, this infinite variety and medley,
+in which no subject is adequately treated, is distracting and
+debilitating to the mind. It prevents the reading of anything in full,
+and its satisfactory assimilation. It is said that the majority of
+Americans read nothing except the paper. If they read that thoroughly,
+they have time for nothing else. What is its reader to do when his
+journal thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in a fair-sized
+duodecimo volume, and on Sundays the amount of two of them? Granted that
+this miscellaneous hodge-podge is the cream of current literature, is it
+profitable to the reader? Is it a means of anything but superficial
+culture and fragmentary information? Besides, it stimulates an unnatural
+appetite, a liking for the striking, the brilliant, the sensational only;
+for our selections from current literature are, usually the "plums"; and
+plums are not a wholesome-diet for anybody. A person accustomed to this
+finds it difficult to sit down patiently to the mastery of a book or a
+subject, to the study of history, the perusal of extended biography, or
+to acquire that intellectual development and strength which comes from
+thorough reading and reflection.
+
+The subject has another aspect. Nobody chooses his own reading; and a
+whole community perusing substantially the same material tends to a
+mental uniformity. The editor has the more than royal power of selecting
+the intellectual food of a large public. It is a responsibility
+infinitely greater than that of the compiler of schoolbooks, great as
+that is. The taste of the editor, or of some assistant who uses the
+scissors, is in a manner forced upon thousands of people, who see little
+other printed matter than that which he gives them. Suppose his taste
+runs to murders and abnormal crimes, and to the sensational in
+literature: what will be the moral effect upon a community of reading
+this year after year?
+
+If this excess of daily miscellany is deleterious to the public, I doubt
+if it will be, in the long run, profitable to the newspaper, which has a
+field broad enough in reporting and commenting upon the movement of the
+world, without attempting to absorb the whole reading field.
+
+I should like to say a word, if time permitted, upon the form of the
+journal, and about advertisements. I look to see advertisements shorter,
+printed with less display, and more numerous. In addition to the use now
+made of the newspaper by the classes called "advertisers," I expect it to
+become the handy medium of the entire public, the means of ready
+communication in regard to all wants and exchanges.
+
+Several years ago, the attention of the publishers of American newspapers
+was called to the convenient form of certain daily journals in South
+Germany, which were made up in small pages, the number of which varied
+from day to day, according to the pressure of news or of advertisements.
+The suggestion as to form has been adopted bit many of our religious,
+literary, and special weeklies, to the great convenience of the readers,
+and I doubt not of the publishers also. Nothing is more unwieldy than our
+big blanket-sheets: they are awkward to handle, inconvenient to read,
+unhandy to bind and preserve. It is difficult to classify matter in them.
+In dull seasons they are too large; in times of brisk advertising, and in
+the sudden access of important news, they are too small. To enlarge them
+for the occasion, resort is had to a troublesome fly-sheet, or, if they
+are doubled, there is more space to be filled than is needed. It seems to
+me that the inevitable remedy is a newspaper of small pages or forms,
+indefinite in number, that can at any hour be increased or diminished
+according to necessity, to be folded, stitched, and cut by machinery.
+
+We have thus rapidly run over a prolific field, touching only upon some
+of the relations of the newspaper to our civilization, and omitting many
+of the more important and grave. The truth is that the development of the
+modern journal has been so sudden and marvelous that its conductors find
+themselves in possession of a machine that they scarcely know how to
+manage or direct. The change in the newspaper caused by the telegraph,
+the cable, and by a public demand for news created by wars, by
+discoveries, and by a new outburst of the spirit of doubt and inquiry, is
+enormous. The public mind is confused about it, and alternately
+overestimates and underestimates the press, failing to see how integral
+and representative a part it is of modern life.
+
+"The power of the press," as something to be feared or admired, is a
+favorite theme of dinner-table orators and clergymen. One would think it
+was some compactly wielded energy, like that of an organized religious
+order, with a possible danger in it to the public welfare. Discrimination
+is not made between the power of the printed word--which is
+limitless--and the influence that a newspaper, as such, exerts. The power
+of the press is in its facility for making public opinions and events. I
+should say it is a medium of force rather than force itself. I confess
+that I am oftener impressed with the powerlessness of the press than
+otherwise, its slight influence in bringing about any reform, or in
+inducing the public to do what is for its own good and what it is
+disinclined to do. Talk about the power of the press, say, in a
+legislature, when once the members are suspicious that somebody is trying
+to influence them, and see how the press will retire, with what grace it
+can, before an invincible and virtuous lobby. The fear of the combination
+of the press for any improper purpose, or long for any proper purpose, is
+chimerical. Whomever the newspapers agree with, they do not agree with
+each other. The public itself never takes so many conflicting views of
+any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals are certain to
+discover. It is impossible, in their nature, for them to combine. I
+should as soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical
+profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause, or an opinion, or a man,
+that does not get somewhere in the press a hearer and a defender. We will
+drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of whom it may concern.
+With all its faults, I believe the moral tone of the American newspaper
+is higher, as a rule, than that of the community in which it is
+published.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's American Newspaper, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
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