With many people newspaper reading becomes a fixed habit. They come to enjoy their favorite publication just as they enjoy food and sleep. It gives them topics for thought and conversation. They become interested in its features, in the “colyum” of fun and chat and josh that has become so popular, in the illustrated comic strips that started with Foxy Grandpa and have come to include Percy and Ferdie, Bringing up Father, Mutt and Jeff, and the rest of the jolly folk. Constant reading about them brings a feeling of personal acquaintance with them and the habit of seeking for them. They help amazingly to draw readers and to retain them. The newspaper habit is to be encouraged and these features help to fix it. There can be no doubt of the popularity of the medical column, of the puzzle department, of the question and answer feature, and of the other like things that serve to amuse the reader.
Parents seek topics, also, that will interest the children, simple and childlike though they be. It is amusing to note how interested older people get in articles on important subjects written down to a child’s understanding. Somebody is going to make a fortune sometime by printing a children’s newspaper giving the news and the questions of the day in language and thought that children can understand. “Grown-ups” will appreciate it quite as much as will the youngsters.
Just how much of exaggeration and feverish language and typographical eccentricity to inject into the sheet always puzzles the editor. He is tempted by public demand for it, yet he does not want a reputation for sensationalism.
The hysteria of the sensational newspaper may not be of harm to a young person who reads it casually. But suppose she, the shop girl for instance, acquires the habit of reading it every day. Because of her employment, or her environment, she has not time or opportunity to read anything else. She comes to think and to talk in its exaggerated, inflamed, feverish language. Its typographical, breathless announcements startle her—fill her with feverish emotions. She becomes a pessimist, for in the sensational sheet the true, the good, the normal are ignored. “Virtue go hang; vice is the thing that attracts attention” is the motto. The maiden is fed on the abnormal, the unusual, on mental monstrosities, and fancies. It influences her life.
It was said not so very long ago that ten years of cheap reading had changed the British from the most stolid nation of Europe to the most hysterical and theatrical. Be this as it may: habitual cheap reading must of necessity produce cheap thinking, and cheap expression of thought, and consequently cheap moral conduct. It is in this direction that the sensational press and the cheap literature of the day have their chief influence. Cheap literature produces cheap mentality and, therefore, a cheap people.
In defense of sensationalism it is urged that you cannot arouse the interest of the ignorant man by ordinary methods of speech. His mind is too sluggish to comprehend it as ordinarily spoken. He can appreciate big headlines and lurid catch words and they attract him.
I have lingered over these things in somewhat prosy manner, perhaps, but if you are going into the newspaper business I know of little more important than real study of what to print. The practical newspaper man thinks of it by the hour. The good newspaper is not the product of chance. Every phase of life is thought out and its relation to public interest is weighed. Public interest changes almost daily. It must be studied, must be anticipated, must be prepared for.
CHAPTER VI
THE PLEASING EXPERIENCES OF THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT