PRESS-ROOM OF A DAILY NEWSPAPER.
"They change so often," was the reply, "that an answer made this year will hardly answer for next. Each member of the ministry has his organ; that of the foreign ministry, as before stated, is Le Journal de St. Petersbourg; while that of the War Department is the Russki Invalid; known to the outer world as the Invalide Russe. The organ of the Naval Bureau is published at Cronstadt, the great naval port of the Empire, and not at the capital; but as Cronstadt is only a few miles away, the locality is of little consequence. The Golos is generally understood to be the organ of the Ministry of the Interior; and as this department has the supervision of the press, this paper is said to have more freedom than its rivals. But even the Golos does not escape the hand of the censor, and its freedom of speech has several times brought it into trouble.
"What would be called a small circulation in America is a large one in Russia. There is not a daily paper in the Empire that averages a circulation of twenty-five thousand copies, and the leading papers of the two great cities have to content themselves with ten or fifteen thousand. I have been told that the daily papers of St. Petersburg do not circulate altogether more than eighty thousand copies daily outside the capital, and about fifty thousand in it. Remember, the mass of the population does not know how to read and write as in America, and consequently the circulation of the newspapers is confined to a small portion of the community.
INTERVIEWING AN EDITOR.
"A paper of great influence, probably the greatest in the Empire, is the Moscow Gazette. It is supposed to be the organ of the Emperor, with whom its editor, Mr. Katkoff, is on terms of intimacy. Important edicts of the Government are frequently foreshadowed in the Gazette, and the national and international pulses are often felt through its columns. But, with all its influence, the Gazette does not circulate more than twenty thousand copies—at least according to the figures at my command. The Moscow Gazette is more frequently quoted by foreign writers than any other journal in Russia; and if it were published in French rather than in Russian, we should probably hear of it even more frequently than we do."
"It's a pity they don't give us a French edition of it," said Frank. "I would like very much to read the paper and know what it has to say, but of course I can't as long as it is in Russian. French is the diplomatic language, and I wonder they don't make an edition for foreign circulation."