But with regard to the general and daily press it may be said that both in the United Kingdom and in America newspapers tend to range themselves in grades and in each grade it is the largest circulation, which brings in the greatest advertising revenue and profits. The highest grade has the smaller circulation but a monopoly of certain kinds of advertising, which is the backbone of its security. The lowest grades have immense circulations, high rates for advertising and very large revenues. But because the readers in this grade are mostly people of small means these newspapers are not the best organs for those expensive articles of luxury on the sale of which the largest sums of money are spent. The largest volume of business therefore undoubtedly goes to the middle grades, where considerable circulations prevail among the wealthy middle classes. The most profitable clientèle for a newspaper is among the vulgar rich, who are easily led in their habits and expenditure by the suggestions of fashion and the interested blandishments of the skilled exploiter.
Of all the functions exercised by the manager of a great newspaper property the most serious and responsible is his collaboration with the editor in weighing the relative advantages to be gained and the cost to be incurred by enterprise of all kinds. Unfortunately for newspapers, while they are driven by a law of their being to assert themselves wherever possible by venturing on new ground this can practically never be done without the outlay of very large sums of money. Here is certainly a case, where two heads are better than one. The editor is generally the executive, as he knows that very little effort is permanently remunerative, which does not improve the quality or extend the influence of the publication. But he is very seldom the best judge of how much can be risked for a certain object and whether the object itself, even when successfully gained, will really be worth the sacrifice. There are certain cases, such as war correspondence, when reckless expenditure, perhaps of two or three years’ income, may be forced on a newspaper by competition. There are others where the risk and expense may be optional, such as the organization of special correspondence abroad, the establishment of new and permanent features of the paper, the starting of a new edition for local distribution, or perhaps of extending the area of circulation of the journal by going earlier to press and catching special trains.
The special train has been a very important feature in the changes, which have come over journalism in this country, both in the provinces and especially in London. Unlike America where spacious habits in geography confine every newspaper to the suburbs of the populous towns, Great Britain can almost be reached in all its corners before breakfast by morning papers printed in central positions. The result is a perpetually recurring struggle for better facilities of distribution involving increased expenses and altered habits. There was a time when provincial newspapers “went to press” early in order to utilize the ordinary mail trains which generally left at or near midnight. London on the other hand, which had no large towns near to it, generally closed for press only at 3 a.m. But the special trains have radically changed these habits. To the best of my knowledge the first paper to run special trains of its own was the Manchester Guardian, whose object was to improve the paper by giving more time before “press”; the special train in this case postponed publication from 12.30 to 1.30 a.m. with very beneficial results.
In London the process of change was reversed. London has the serious disadvantage of being at one end and in one corner of our little island. To reach the great populations of the Midlands, the North and the South West a series of special trains costing enormous sums of money were started about 2.15 or 2.30 with the result that the hour for “going to press” was moved forward from 3 or 3.30 a.m. to 1.30 a.m., seriously cutting down the possibilities of considered literary production. The example of this exacting competition was first set by the Daily Mail at the outbreak of the Boer war and was necessarily followed by every London morning paper. How severely this was felt by the weaker brethren of the press, the following story will illustrate. I was assured by the proprietor of a prosperous newspaper that the increased expenditure on this competition at that time entirely wiped out his current profits for some years and reduced his property to the position of a journal struggling to establish itself. The indirect effect on the editorial staffs of newspapers was also disastrous to some. The result of curtailing the time for journalistic effort placed those papers, whose speciality was superior literary style and well weighed judgments, on much the same footing as the cheaper papers.
As a partial relief from the expense of special trains and carriage of newspapers it has become the practice for the progressive popular papers of London to print elsewhere local editions, which have also the advantage of meeting local needs both with regard to news and advertisements in a way that a purely metropolitan issue can never do. In this respect also the initiative was taken by the London Daily Mail, which at the turn of the century established a branch office and printed a northern edition in Manchester, from whence it could reach all the north and the greater part of Scotland by breakfast. This was followed some years later by a special edition in Paris, in which the local edition is printed in French. It has since extended its grasp by starting a Midland edition in Birmingham. The Daily News followed the example of the Mail by establishing a Manchester office but it anticipated the Mail by being the first to go to the Midlands. The London Daily Chronicle has followed the other two to the Midlands and will probably end also by going up north. To the best of my knowledge the first daily paper in England to start a special local edition was the Manchester Guardian, when it produced its Welsh Edition about the years 1894 or 1895. But the practice had long been common among the weekly papers of the country.
Analogous to the enforced expenditure on communication is the provision that has to be made for cabling foreign or special correspondence. In this matter the pressure to follow the example of a richer competitor is not overwhelming, as readers have different tastes and many are almost indifferent to foreign news. Yet every paper feels very severely the indignity of being obliged to admit inferiority in enterprise and of publicly taking a seat in the second row in any respect. Yet the cost of cable messages is sometimes prohibitive and they have to be summarily cut off on occasion. In any system of foreign correspondence by cable, the salary of the correspondent is a mere trifle compared to the expense of telegraphing. Every foreign correspondent is aware that his fate, as far as that particular position is concerned, is determined much less by the quality of his own work than by financial plethora or stringency at home. It has been the fate of many, as it has once been mine, to find themselves quietly snuffed out by the application of this effective extinguisher.
A new terror has been added to journalism in America, though hardly yet to the same extent here by the use of wireless telegraphy. In New York all the leading papers have wireless plants, which they use not only to transmit and receive their own news but to intercept where possible those of others. It is credibly repeated that after the Titanic disaster one of the causes of the appalling confusion of reports and rumours was that every newspaper kept getting fragmentary messages intended for every other and the most absurd and self-contradictory accounts passed current without any attempt to verify them. Clearly in future the manipulation of press messages by wireless telegraphy will have to be very severely curtailed in any future naval war. In fact it seems to me that the only possible road to security will be to forbid it without any exception.
The latest development in enterprise of this kind was recently devised by the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Express in conjunction with the Yorkshire Post and the Manchester Guardian. When Mr. Winston Churchill made his sensational irruption into Ulster at the beginning of 1912 the public wires were entirely taken up with general orders and the lease of a special wire was impossible. The speech was then reported by undersea transmission over the electrophone, the first time that this instrument had ever been used in that way. There were thirty-two transmitters placed round the platform where Mr. Churchill spoke and his voice was heard distinctly in the Liverpool offices and his words were then taken down as he uttered them.
The mention of the telephone reminds me that much that has been said in this chapter and elsewhere with regard to the telegraph applies also especially to the telephone, which in some respects is an equal and even better competitor. Some of the London press agencies use this form of communication for reporting police cases and other immediate items of news to the complete exclusion of the telegraph. At one time I had to examine very carefully the merits of a wireless system of telephoning through the ground for this purpose but could not persuade myself, that it would operate with accuracy and inevitable success. I have heard no more of it.