[3]The English system has the same complicated problem to face but the pressure of mere time and space is relaxed by our easier habits. A larger part of the paper is habitually filled with regular services and with, what I have called above, the decorative items. All this comes in early and can be judged more coolly and definitely fixed in quantity. What is incomparably the most difficult part of a newspaper’s task, the adjustment, arrangement and choice between various items of news, is relegated to an allotment of space on less imperative terms and is more governed by mere routine. The simple explanation of this material consolation to editors and sub-editors lies in the fact that competition about mere news is not, speaking relatively in respect of American practice, tuned up to the same pitch of keenness. As we shall see in the next chapter, the English papers are content to have a comparatively large amount of their mere news provided from common sources.
[3] This contrast of which I speak is an extremely difficult matter to write about. I have perhaps made rather more of the point than many journalists, especially in London, would allow to be true. There is now no paper in London worked exactly under what I have called the typical English system, but all the daily papers have evolved their own separate practice from something very like it. It prevails in the provinces, and will ultimately, I have no doubt, be transformed gradually to something more resembling the American system. For instance, in London practice the functions of (1) the Chief Sub-Editor, and (2) the News Editor are coming to be very much the same as those of the City Editor and Managing Editor in New York.
The effect of this on the usual arrangement of the staffs of English papers is that the type of organization is more primitive, the working of it less vehement and more elastic and variation from one settled type more common. No two English newspapers have their staffs organized in exactly the same way. Yet there is practically very little departure from the grand traditional tripartite division of functions, including the editor with his personal staff of leader-writers or budding editors, the room of sub-editors, and the corps of reporters. This system is so flexible that it need not be materially altered in form to meet the most varying needs. Even the most progressive, sensational and restless innovators, who have half adopted the latest American impetuosities, can fit them tolerably well into the English framework. The editor and his staff share the responsibilities of power and round them they have an extensive group of half-employed satellites, differentiating into all shades of expertism and virtuosity. The sub-editors are not, as a layman often imagines them from their name to be, assistant editors, but those whose business it is to exercise the art of “sub-editing”; that is to say, of correcting, revising, arranging, selecting and passing judgment on news and “copy” of all kinds, except strictly “editorial” matter. In their quiet room filled with news clippings, flimsies and MSS. lies the core of an English newspaper, just as in America the critical work is done over the city editor’s telephone. The “sub-editors” have one great advantage over the American “copy-readers” in that they have a real and often final control of and power over copy and much of the responsibility of deciding what is to be considered “optional” at the last moment rests with them. The reporters are dwindling both in number and function owing to the inroads of two outside institutions; firstly, the purely reporting or shorthand work is now almost completely taken over by the great newsagencies, and secondly the semi-amateur outside specialist is coming to fill up more and more space both in the daily and evening papers. For instance there are people, who make a comfortable income by writing signed and unsigned articles on gardening on half a dozen papers; others specialize as reporters on naval and military matters, photography, golf, cycling, motor-cars, aviation, the weather, health, comic paragraphs, etc.; celebrated professors resign government posts and earn increased incomes by writing on science; dons at college write regularly on their special subjects. So that the sphere of the regular reporter narrows every day and his work is tending more and more to be confined to selecting incidents of an unusual kind and dressing them up in a way, which amounts to very much the same thing, as the American “newspaper story,” although the style of doing it is rather different.
The conscious aim of all news-collectors and reporters on all Anglo-Saxon newspapers is to score a “scoop” or a “beat,” which is the technical press name for an exclusive item of sensational interest. In America this achievement is still but very rarely within the powers of an individual reporter. A striking instance of a success of this kind in amateur detective work was made by a reporter on the New York World at the time when an attempt was made on the life of Russell Sage in December, 1891. The point of the sensation was that no apparent clue remained of the identity of the man, who threw the dynamite bomb, as his own body was almost completely destroyed. He had penetrated into Sage’s office in Broadway but mismanaged his throw, so that he himself was blown up without leaving any more traces than a few scraps of cloth and a button or two. This was the reporter’s opportunity. He secured one of the buttons and an adhering fragment of cloth. On the button was the name of a well-known Boston tailor. So with this clue in his possession, which had escaped the attention of the police, he took the next train to Boston. Interviewing the tailor and showing the cloth he found that a suit of this cloth had lately been made for a young Boston broker, named Henry Norcross. Further enquiry about Norcross’s antecedents and a visit to his home elicited the facts that Norcross had lately been in financial trouble and had been missing for several days. Putting two and two together the reporter risked the conclusion that Norcross and the potential murderer were one and the same man, and, inducing his paper to adopt his view, he obtained one of the greatest newspaper successes in New York. For the matter had been the sole topic of conversation in town for days and the subsequent verification of the facts fully confirmed his brilliant and daring hypothesis.
Those individual “beats” are rare and are becoming rarer. Their most frequent opportunity used to occur in war correspondence but nowadays in war all news is served out by the censor in common to a group of correspondents and the only task left to the latter is to arrange to wire the news according to the dimensions of the parental purse at home. Outside war a modern “scoop” is obtained only by elaborate and organized expenditure, undertaken a long time beforehand for some special purpose with the risk that the whole scheme may fall through and the money be wasted. A classic instance of a successful “beat” of this kind was the expedition organized by Stanley at the expense of the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph to find Livingstone in Africa. A comparative failure of the same kind was the Jackson-Harmsworth exploration towards the North Pole. The Daily Mail achieved an inverted “scoop,” when it announced the massacre of the legations at Pekin.
The Daily Chronicle of London in the beginning of 1912 successfully brought off a sensational “beat,” no doubt by previous arrangement and at great expense, in being the only paper to receive an authentic telegram from Captain Amundsen, on his returning from the discovery of the South Pole. This “beat” was respected by all the London papers of the day and was only quoted by permission next day to a limited extent. In New York a different situation arose. The New York Times had purchased the American copyright of this telegram from the London Chronicle and expected to have it as exclusive news; since however New York time is five hours later than English time, there was time for Hearst’s paper, the New York American, to have the whole article telegraphed from Europe and to publish it simultaneously with the New York Times. The quarrel developed into a law-suit, turning on the question, whether there is copyright in news in the United States or whether there may be copyright in the literary form of news, a question long vexed in Europe and not yet entirely decided.
Another extensive “scoop” hardly known, but quite unequalled, in London was obtained by the Manchester Guardian, who had prepared for it long beforehand. The death of Queen Victoria took place at 6.30 on a Monday evening and on the following Tuesday morning there appeared in the ordinary way, incorporated in the daily paper, some twenty full pages of biography by several distinguished writers with a large number of illustrations, at a time when illustrations hardly ever appeared in the daily press. The success of this unexpected tribute to the late Queen was prodigious. Editions of many thousands were absorbed at once and single copies were sold in Lancashire towns by private speculators for five shillings each. The sale continued for five days and after a million copies of the issue had been sold, the publication was closed down out of mere weariness and in order to allow the ordinary work of the office to be carried on.
An amusing instance of a “beat,” which “fell down,” dates back to the time when the Oxford and Cambridge boat race was a matter of more absorbing interest to the general public than it is nowadays. A provincial evening paper with small circulation endeavoured to force itself to the front by engineering a sensational success. It prepared, some little time before the result was to be announced, two complete editions, one printed in dark blue ink announcing an Oxford victory, the other printed in a lighter blue colour announcing Cambridge as the winner. That year there was a dead heat.
A more important if not so disastrous a failure is recorded by Sir William Russell, who was sent on a special mission for the Times to Dublin to report the trial of O’Connell in 1844. He came back in a specially chartered steamboat well ahead of any one else and as he was entering the Times office among a group of shirt-sleeved men, whom he took to be compositors of his own paper, one came up touched his hat and said, “We are glad to hear, sir, they have found O’Connell guilty at last.” “Oh yes!” replied Russell innocently, “all guilty but on different counts.” This individual turned out to be an emissary of the Morning Herald, who stole Russell’s secret from him in the very jaws of the rival office.
If the ambition of the newspaper man is to achieve a “scoop” or “beat,” his ever present fear, and one much more imminently near to him than the corresponding hope, is an inadvertent libel. The great libel actions of the past, which have become historic, such as the Parnell letters and Pigott case, were generally the result of deliberate intention of the newspaper to run the risk in question, but only a newspaper editor knows how often accidental libels have been avoided by mere luck and at other times unfortunately not avoided at all. Libels lurk in single words misplaced, in head lines, in queer coincidences, in accidental resemblances of name or description. Many instances have come within my personal recollection, of which the following are a few. There was the celebrated Artemus Jones case, where an occasional contributor writing for a northern paper was giving a character sketch of people on their holidays at a French watering place. He mentioned as a purely supposititious character, a certain Artemus Jones, who apparently misbehaved himself or conducted himself in a reprehensible manner. Now there happened to be living in the neighbourhood a real Artemus Jones, a fairly well-known man, who was also even a frequent contributor to the same paper. The real man brought evidence of damage to his reputation and was awarded a considerable sum in compensation.