The American Newspaper | Page 9

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