“You seem to know a great deal about me.”
“I do.”
“Would you mind telling me why? Are you a detective from Scotland Yard?”
He laughed.
“No, I am only one of your editors. You constantly write for me in the St. James’s Gazette. My name is Hugh Chisholm.”
The same thing happened with regard to the Pall Mall Gazette and Sir Douglas Straight.
Editors seldom or never write; many of them do not even know how. There are, of course, one or two brilliant exceptions, as W. L. Courtney of the Fortnightly, Owen Seaman of Punch, L. J. Maxse of the National Review, Austin Harrison of the English Review. But there is hardly a single daily paper where the editor is a writer, except J. L. Garvin of the Pall Mall, and J. S. R. Phillips of the Yorkshire Post. Many editors were once “reporters,” and on an occasion of stress were put on to edit some subject. Having done it satisfactorily they came in useful in times of pressure, and finally became one of the many sub-editors necessary in a news office. From that apprenticeship they have gradually climbed to the post of editor. An editor is therefore not a literary man as a rule, but a business manager with a sound judgment of the public pulse and what the public wants. If he is wise he never goes into Society or knows people, because then his hand is free, and he can be independent. He decides the policy and the attitude of his paper, therefore he must read all the contemporary Press, and about eleven o’clock in the morning he is so buried in other people’s newspapers that he has to be dug out of the pulpy débris and printer’s ink.
It is a tremendous strain to be an editor, besides a terrible responsibility. Poor men, I pity them. It is bad enough to be a topical writer; to have a “printer’s devil” waiting on one’s door-mat for articles on which the ink is hardly dry; but to have to read and pass everything nightly at such a pace is enough to send the wretched editor demented. He is responsible for libellous matter, so out it must go. He must not offend his political party, so free-lance contributors must be “edited,” and, above all, he has only so many columns to fill and ten times the amount of stuff waiting to be inserted.
Then again, The Times, that great bulwark of the British Constitution, receives from fifty to a hundred letters a day for insertion, out of which only six or eight of the most public interest can be printed. The Times is a great asset of the country, and proud, indeed, should be John Walter, the fifth generation. He is Chairman of the journal founded and maintained by his family at such a high standard for so many years. He ought to write the true history of The Times, as he alone can.
But there are many and puzzling questions as to the journalism of the present day.