The Young Man and Journalism

by Chester Sanders Lord

Newspapers and periodicals increased rapidly after this time. Henry Fielding, the novelist, was editor of the True Patriot in 1745 and the Jacobite Journal in 1747. Dr. Samuel Johnson started the Rambler in 1750 and the Idler in 1758. In 1714, eleven papers were appearing in London. In 1733, the number had increased to eighteen and in 1776, to fifty-three.

John Wilkes in his newspaper the North Briton accused the king of lying in his address at the opening of Parliament in 1762, for which Wilkes was committed to the tower and expelled from the house, of which he had been a member.

Oliver Goldsmith wrote his delightful letters from “A Citizen of the World” for the Public Ledger. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hazlitt and John Campbell were writers for the Morning Chronicle.

And in after years, contributing to the London Times at one period or another as writers, were: Beaconsfield, Lord Chancellor Brougham, Cardinal Newman, Lord Grey, Lord Macaulay, Sir William Harcourt, Moore, Dean Stanley, Lord Sherbrook, and Dr. Groley.

The constant and consistent progress of the newspaper since its feeble beginnings, and especially its development in the last two hundred years, attest its importance to mankind. Rarely, indeed, has progress been more deliberate; rarely has it been more substantial. Long years of experience with it have tested and verified the newspaper’s usefulness.

Thirst for news and for information has always prevailed and newspaper progress undoubtedly must have taken a vigorous spurt with the invention of type and printing but for the reason that both church and state joined in its repression. In 1685, at the close of the reign of King Charles II. there were in all England two newspapers only, worthy of the name, and both of them were under the strict supervision of the royal censor.

The first real jump in newspaper progress came with the relaxation of government repression just after the year 1700. It was then that Addison, Steele, Defoe, Fielding, Swift and Dr. Johnson, gave the real beginnings to journalism. Thereafter, for a hundred and fifty years, the advance and improvement in the making of newspapers were deliberate and irresistible. From chatterers and gossipers only the journals came gradually to be leaders of thought and of public opinion and circulators of essential information. But the change in them was so slow as to be almost unnoticed from year to year.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, came the invention of the modern printing press which permits the printing of a newspaper of thirty-five pages or more at the rate of thirty thousand or more copies an hour; the invention of the stereotyping process by which newspaper pages may be duplicated to indefinite numbers, in solid metal, and used on an indefinite number of presses in the printing of a single edition; and the invention of the typesetting machine by which type may be cast and placed with something like six times the speed of the old-time process of hand composition. They were marvelous inventions.

These inventions removed mechanical difficulties that had confined the size and restricted the circulation of newspapers, and great changes came quickly. Heretofore the newspapers had been restricted to eight pages and many of them printed four pages only; but immediately twenty and twenty-four page editions appeared and thirty-five and forty page ones are common now. This great increase in volume permitted a like increase in scope and we now see in the newspapers a mass of information on an innumerable number of topics. Moreover, all changes in national or social life bring changes in newspapers. Big business brought big newspapers, as soon as they could be made.

Greatly increased newspaper importance has followed this expansion. It is possible to present great events with a fullness of detail and an attention to side issues hitherto unknown. A senator’s attack on the Administration may be printed in full—six or seven columns of it. An investigation involving the conduct of the war may be reported question and answer verbatim. Pages are devoted to a catastrophe like the blowing up of Halifax that a few years ago would have been described in as many columns. Scores of special articles are printed the like of which never had found place in the daily newspaper. And in the evening sheets, especially, are department features intended to interest women and children, funny picture series, puzzles, medical information, screeds, and freak features—all of which emphasize the very great change from comparatively a few years ago. And every change from the beginning has been in the direction of progress, has made the newspaper a greater and a better product, has given to it the increased confidence of the public. Confidence in a production of any sort usually is withheld until experience has tested and verified it. The value and the importance of the newspaper have come to be firmly established.