War correspondence falls into the same category as a foreign news service and is treated in much the same fashion everywhere. The public is so infatuated with the early stages of a war and so bored and incapable of serious interest in it after a few weeks, that the proper treatment of war news is the most serious problem, which a newspaper manager has to face. For an editor, the situation is confined to a simple issue even if his task of arranging for news requires great brilliancy in planning and judgment in selecting his men. For him it is a question of spending what is allowed him by the manager and proprietor and he cuts his clothes according to his cloth. But for those, who have to supply the sinews of war correspondence in [4]thousands of pounds the task is most unpleasant. The manager sees his advertising revenue curtailed and his expenses of distribution increased, while he obtains in return only a slight increase of revenue from greatly increased but useless circulation. The popular impression that newspapers and their owners like wars is fundamentally false. The only kind of war that a newspaper manager would really welcome is one that would last only three weeks, of which he had exclusive information; he might then be repaid all that it would cost him. The most dangerous feature of war from the point of view of newspaper finance is that a vast expenditure must be kept up long after the general public has ceased to take serious interest in it. A little can be saved in telegraphing at this stage and a correspondent or two may be cautiously withdrawn, but for the most part, wherever the men are first placed, there they must stay, even if they send nothing. The unfortunate manager lies awake at night thinking of a thin line of men, servants, donkey-boys, despatch-bearers, horses, ponies, camels, and mules all eating their heads off uselessly at the front day after day with little revenue coming in wherewith to feed them.
[4] Probably the maximum figure reached in extravagant war-costs was in the case of a New York paper during the Cuban war, which estimated its special monthly expenditure at $300,000, or at the rate of £720,000 a year. This rate was maintained, however, only for a short period during the height of the war.
There is a great deal of romance and glamour attached to war correspondents personally, to the men, who suffer hardships and risk their lives more from fever than from bullets at the front, but none to the organization which sends them unwillingly abroad. It is a plain fact however that the public at present takes less and less interest every year in either foreign or war correspondence. The great public is intelligent and quick but not at all addicted to continuous attention devoted to anything but its business and serious amusements. It has become so much accustomed to have its interest sensationally stimulated at frequent intervals that nothing will hold it very long. All news has to partake of the nature of a “story” in the newspaper sense; the fate of kingdoms, the marriage of a Gaiety actress, the trial of a clever criminal will weigh differently for the time with the man in the train and the tram car but the duration of his interest will not be appreciably different in any case. Of the three the trial will probably be remembered the longest. The amount of space now devoted to this class of special correspondence remains still more a matter of tradition than calculation but the latter is slowly overtaking it and daily curtailing it. The dictum of a leading London manager about news is, that he will not print anything that interests less than a third of his readers and such a policy is beginning to cover the whole field and to narrow news down steadily only to those things which are next door to the daily preoccupation of the majority of readers.
In any account, however brief, of the characteristics of the American method of manufacturing “stories” one cannot omit to mention that extraordinary phenomenon of their journalism; the Sunday paper. Of these there are some which consist of the daily issue with additional supplements, which are conducted on the plan of a magazine. They are on the whole the exceptions and the majority are built on a sensational scale both as to size and as to general eccentricity of character. To a stranger, even if he be English, they are almost incomprehensible and indescribable and, as criticism on these points is quite a delicate matter, it would be safer to repeat an American description of them. “The average Sunday paper is like nothing else on earth. It might well be called a literary dime museum, for the editor presents not ‘stories’ that will simply amuse or entertain, but only those which will attract attention, because of their absurdity and the pictures, which sometimes cover whole pages, are, if anything, more unusual than the text.”
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT NEWSAGENCIES
Every man, who has had a newspaper in his hand, has remarked that from time to time on any occasion, which seems important, two or more accounts appear of the same event. These differing accounts to some extent repeat themselves and are also supplementary to one another. The most detailed one will be the production of the newspaper’s own reporters, who often work on the skeleton story provided from outside the office. The other accounts appear from one or other of the general agencies, whose function it is to supply to many newspapers the fundamental framework on which each is built up. The sphere of action of these agencies has grown steadily, owing to the mere utility of having the strain of competition lessened between rival newspapers. The field, which they cover, is continuously expanding and will soon include all that kind of news, which is expensive to gather and also offers little opportunity for obtaining individual distinction.
Of the established organizations the most interesting, which are also among the most important, began from the natural co-operation of newspapers in order to eliminate ruinous competition and to save expense. Although there are many newsagencies of all kinds, which are out and out commercial concerns, buying news and selling it at a profit, it is remarkable that on both sides of the water the leading news supply company is in each case a co-operative concern. In America it is the Associated Press, in the United Kingdom it is the Press Association and they are both organized on similar lines. It was the excessively daring and competitive spirit of American journalism, which in the early forties, brought about the first attempt at co-operation. At that time years before an Atlantic cable was laid competition for European news was limited to sending out fast sailing vessels to meet incoming ships and take the latest news from them. Newspapers vied with one another as to who should sail out the farthest and catch the news soonest, until at last it came to sending fast vessels all the way over to Europe to get the news at its source. Such competition had a sufficiently ridiculous aspect to bring about its own collapse and somewhere about 1850 the New York papers organized a joint service, which while primarily covering European news grew slowly to cover both general news and practically all but the internal news of each city, as subject for competition among newspapers. This was the germ of the Associated Press, which numbers about 700 papers as subscribers and regular members and is certainly the largest newsgathering concern in the world. It is both a newsgatherer and a news-trader and also a news exchange between its own members. As an exchange it receives news free from its members and retails it at a low charge. As a trader it buys from the great international foreign newsgatherer, Reuter’s Telegram Company and hands over the telegrams to its subscribers. Finally it has its own supplementary corps of editors and reporters in all important centres.
There is one very important respect in which the Associated Press of America differs from its English counterpart and that is that, while it is a very large, it is not a universally co-operative body. Existing members have a right to block the entry of new members and to that extent it is a close corporation. For instance the New York World has always vetoed the inclusion in the system of the New York Sun, thus driving the latter paper to maintain its own foreign and home service and in fact to establish a rival agency, in order, by getting outside help, to lessen the burden of its own expenditure. This rival agency, known as Laffan’s service, even has customers on this side of the water.
The co-operative English newsgathering organization, called the Press Association, had a different origin. It arose from a domestic crisis in the newspaper world, which was coincident with the taking over of the private telegraph companies by the State, whereby the telegraphs at once became a public service. Up to that time the newspapers, as the largest customers, enjoyed the advantage of a special rate for the transmission of news but without the power of furnishing their own services. About the fifties the telegraphs of the country were in the hands of three companies, who used their monopoly of the wires for the purpose of making also a monopoly of news services to all papers out of London. As these services were without any competition and cheaply organized for profit, the plight of the provincial papers was distressing. It came to a point where the provincial press organized a co-operative telegraph company of their own in 1865, so as to secure at any rate their own supplies or force their opponents to come to terms. This policy would have been certainly carried out, but whether successfully or not one cannot say, if it had not been for a national movement in favour of an improved telegraph service which culminated in the purchase of the telegraph organization from the private companies by the government. The provincial newspapers were led by necessity to organize a substitute for the old and inefficient common telegraph news services, which they did by founding in 1868 the Press Association under the lead of the late John Edward Taylor of the Manchester Guardian.