THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM.
IN his address at the annual conference of the Institute of Journalists at York Mr. Donald, the President, drew a startling and ominous picture of the prospects of the profession. In his last sentence, indeed, he changed from the prophet to the preacher, and exhorted his hearers never to forget that "the dignity of the most fascinating, the most powerful, and the noblest profession in the world is in their keeping, and to take care that, in all their actions and their work, they should be worthy of the name Gentlemen of the Press.'" Unfortu- nately almost every one of the changes which he foreshadows will make it harder to follow this advice. Journalism demands thought, taste, and principle, and in the future as here painted those who practise it will more and more be tempted to dispense with all three. New evils sometimes bring new remedies with them, and we can but hope that this will prove true in the newspaper world. But at present the prospect is not encouraging.
The first change that Mr. Donald notes is that "the press has become commercialized." It is not only individual owner- ship that is disappearing, it is that "the proprietorial system" is disappearing with it; when a newspaper was owned by one man, or by a group of men holding similar views upon public affairs, there were no shareholders to be taken into account. Though to make a profit was in the long run necessary to a newspaper's existence, the owners might, and often did, prefer "less profit to compromise with principle." Mr. Donald shows, in some disturbing figures, the magnitude of the change which has taken place. "Twenty years ago the list of the London Stock Exchange did not contain a single newspaper corpora- tion. Now twelve large companies, representing many millions of capital, figure in the quotations," and many other companies " are dealt with publicly in a more restricted market." In other words, newspapers are more and more owned not by journalists or by men interested in the conduct of public affairs, but by simple investors. They have bought their shares purely for the sake of the dividend they hope to receive on them. With such a proprietary am this it is almost inevitable that the men responsible for the conduct of the paper should give their first thoughts to the interest of their shareholders. The test of journalistic success will be the number of purchasers shown by the books of the company. For purchasers bring advertisers, "and dividends must be earned even if principle has to suffer in the process." It is difficult to see how this process can be checked. Newspaper success is like any other business success. It needs capital, and capital is only to be secured by the prospect of good interest. The small owners, the men who founded a new journal in order to preach a certain policy, and were content if they earned as much as would enable them to keep it going, are giving place to the ordinary capitalist, and with rare exceptions he expects from the newspaper in which he has shares just what he expects from any other concern in which he has invested money. The readers are no longer told what, in the opinion of the conductors of their favourite journal, are the principles which most advance the public interest. Instead of this they are content to learn what is found to yield the largest profit at the end of the financial year. It will take time, no doubt, to accustom men to the change, but as the process will be going on all round them, it will become familiar in time.
A second change noted by Mr. Donald does not necessarily banish principle from journalism, but it is very injurious to independence of thought. A London newspaper primarily reflects a section of London opinion, and of late years especially the influence thus exercised has sometimes been usefully checked by the great provincial journals. Now the provinces are served by some of the London newspapers as effectively as by those published on the spot. This tends inevitably to the identification of local opinion with the opinions served out to it from a central organization. This is only applying on a larger scale a process which has been going on for a number of years in Parliament. Before the general supersession of the local caucuses by a central organization local feelings and views were pretty sure to be consulted when a candidate for the House of Commons had to be chosen. On this or that point in the Ministerial policy the local com- mittee might know that the constituency was not of one mind, and they might think it expedient not to insist on the entire surrender by the candidate of the right to have an opinion of his own. Now election addresses read very much as though they had all been written by the same hand. From one end of the country to the other the same confidence in Ministers is proclaimed, and it is based on the same grounds. The change has not answered the party purpose in every ease, as was seen in the Newmarket election the other day. The Government lost a seat, if we may believe some Liberal observers, because the Central Liberal Committee had not con- descended to inquire what was the general opinion about racing. In the most part, however, local opinion dutifully accepts the Ministerial candidate. What Mr. Donald calls "the incursion of the London press into the provinces in time to be delivered with the morning milk" tends directly to the subordination of local opinion to the opinion of London, and in this way makes the House of Commons represent not so much the balanced and unprompted sentiment of the whole country as the uniform and very much prompted sentiment of an organized group of politicians. Whichever party is in power, this is a change for the worse. It is con- ceivable indeed that it may, in the end, work its own cure, but we are not very sanguine that it will do this. "The big combinations are able, by their efficient organiza- tion and their power, to make it impossible for papers run on old-fashioned lines to survive." So long as these big com- binations were confined to London there was a fair chance of the injury done by them being corrected by the great pro- vincial journals. But if these are gradually to disappear, the suppression of public opinion whenever it makes against the policy favoured at headquarters will go on unexposed. The "modern widely circulated newspaper" may be all that Mr. Donald describes it. It may be "a superb piece of mechanism, with every department playing its own part in harmony with the others." But the outcome will not make politics more wholesome. It will put more power into the hands
of a party caucus at the expense of the electorate, to whose welfare this "superb piece of mechanism" is sup- posed to minister. Mr. Donald appears to be quite aware of this danger. "The coming of the corporation and the
nationalization of newspapers," he tells us, "place enormous power to sway public opinion in the hands of a few people."
Or, to state the same fact differently, this nationalization process is essentially anti-democratic. When the press of a country passes into the hands of a few people we see the first step taken towards oligarchical government. It would be well if we could feel that forewarned is forearmed. But in the present indifference of public opinion it is impossible to feel any certainty that we shall profit by the warning. If the newer journalism is preferable to the old "from the point of view of the reading public," it promises to be infinitely worse from the point of view of the thinking public.
One contrast which Mr. Donald finds between the old and the new system exists, we think, chiefly in his imagination. "The writing editor, as the centre from whom the life-blood of the newspaper flowed, is becoming extinct." In the greatest of English newspapers it had become extinct at least seventy years ago. There never was a more "forceful personality" behind a paper than Delane, yet Delane did not write one of the leaders which from 1841 to 1877 made the Times a power in the country. Upon the mischief of another change in journalism generally we feel no doubt. "The importance of the news department is magnified at the expense of the purely editorial." Indeed it is. In the old-fashioned newspaper the reader was helped to form a judgment upon such important facts as were presented to him. In many of the present news- papers they are thrown at him in such abundance that he has neither time nor inclination to read what is said of them in the leading columns. Nor is it only upon the readers that this displacement of comment by news exerts a mischievous influence. It has often the further effect of giving an exaggerated importance to movements which do not deserve to be thus glorified. Probably if the actions of the militant suffragists had not been chronicled in so many news columns, and invested with an unreal significance by so many inter- viewers, the Government would have found it less impossible to deal with them. Publicity is just what the offenders are most anxious to secure, and it is a very unfortunate incident of newspaper enterprise that it has so often gratified their desire for a gratuitous advertisement.
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