The American Newspaper | Page 6

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