THE INTERESTINGNESS OF NEWSPAPERS.
MR. MORLEY missed a grand chance on Saturday evening, when speaking at the annual dinner of the Press Club, of interesting every editor in the country. The profession would really have liked to hear a man of his intellectual rank, and with his double experience, on the comparative pleasures and pains of work at the desk and in the House of Commons, and on the difference in the call on the mind produced by the necessity of writing a leader and the necessity of answering a formidable speech in debate. He could have told us something which every one would have remembered, and perhaps have even explained why he himself is, like Burke, so great an exception to the general law that men who are eloquent in speech can seldom or never write. He might have explained, too, a little more fully what he meant when he compared the strength of the Press with the strength of the House of Commons, and we cannot avoid a suspicion that originally he intended to do it. His very pregnant remark, however, that the Press of a district failed very often to return Members of its own way of thinking, was so ill-received that, being, like most considerable orators, sensitive to immediate effects, he receded from that dis- cussion, and found a subject upon which he could truthfully be a little more agreeable. He had something at once true and pleasant to say on the increasing interestingness of the Press. Of that improvement we, who rather resent the flattery which it is the custom of politicians to bestow upon newspapers, fancy there can be no doubt. The experience of the present writer unhappily extends over a much longer period than Mr. Morley's, and he would say decidedly that while there had been a marked falling off in the daily news- papers in the vigour and intellectual rank of their leading articles, the interestingness of such newspapers, that is, their claim to be read by those who desire mental entertain- ment, had in the last forty years amazingly increased. Mr. Morley, rather to our surprise, attributes that increase mainly to the increase in the size of the papers, and talks of the fifty columns of new matter which now appear in the Times or Chronicle as if that quantity were in itself the grand attraction. We doubt that. We should say the main drawback to the Times was the enormous quantity in it, and the time it takes to read it with anything like honest mental attention. Even if you avoid all the " events and fixtures and finals," and pass over the police reports, and read only one paragraph in the money article, it still, as a rule, takes a quick reader a clear hour to make sure that he has read his Times. Those who really read it through as some men do, omitting nothing but advertise- ments, must spend over it nearly two hours, and that is a large section not only of a working day but of a working life. It is, indeed, an expenditure of time which it is difficult to justify, unless we reckon the reading of a newspaper as at once education and recreation, which in the case of a vast number of human bein gs would not be true. Still, it is true that newspapers are more interesting than they were, and that not only for the reason which Mr. Morley assigns. They do, as he says, now devote space to reviews, and occasionally, when they are not too much bent on being in advance of each other, the reviews are exceedingly well done. We have hardly seen better criticism anywhere than appears occasionally in the pages of the Chronicle, and at least two of the provincial papers —probably many more—have a deft art in the way of gutting books and boiling them down which, if we were publishers, would inspire in us unspeakable wrath. The improvement, however, is not confined to literature. The newspapers really cover a wider range, relate the daily history of more countries, make personages much more visible, and not in- frequently narrate stirring incidents in a style which makes them as exciting as any adventures either in the historic
past or in fiction. The surface of the world is spread oat before the readers of a wealthy newspaper like a great panorama, with the advantage that all the personages upon it are seen, as in some of the newest photographs, in actual and continuous motion. The world is reduced to a stage, and the observer is positively fascinated by the drama going on, which, being well "rendered," is so attractive that not a few of the spectators become stage-struck. If there are men who, as Mr. Morley says, give ten minutes a day to newspapers, and for the rest trust to their friends' conversation, there are others, we fear a thousand times more numerous, whom the newspapers so possess that they can read nothing else. All other kinds of print seem to them a little insipid, and they are actually known to buy newspapers by the half-dozen, and keep all but one or two unread in order that in the evening, or whenever they have easy leisure, they may fill themselves full with their varied and, as they say, their "living" contents. We know at least three cultivated men with whom newspaper- reading is a kind of dram-drinking, who are positively wretched if their newspapers are accidentally delayed, and who would, we have no sort of moral doubt, steal them if they could not obtain them in a legitimate method,—an allegation, by the way, which, as the Post Office and Messrs. W. Smith well know, is by no means jocular, except as regards the par- ticular individuals. Of all species of portable property news- papers are the most frequently stolen, and they are not stolen for gain, but for a charm which to the thieves is positively irresistible.
We entirely agree with Mr. Morley that the interestingness of newspapers has amazingly increased, but we have never -ceased to wonder why it does not increase still more. It seems an impudent thing to say, but we believe that the majority of proprietors of daily papers are still wonderfully .unaware of some of the conditions of their own trade. They never, for example, realise the profound ignorance of the mass of their readers, but go on publishing telegrams and even, strange to say, accounts of battles without editing them, without notes, without explanations even of geo- graphical references. They are unable to believe that nine out of every ten of their readers do not know where Armenia is, are wholly ignorant of the connection of Spain with Cuba, and are not sure that Venezuela is not a dependency of British India. Nor are they ever aware that among their audience are thousands who, though not ignorant, never quite keep up with the news, who miss intelligence for a week or two at a time, and who are utterly puzzled when they take -up the threads to understand what the last turn in the kaleidoscope may mean. The telegrams, to be really in- teresting to the majority, want notes in brackets explaining in brief but clear language that a Cape " boy " fighting at Bula- wayo is not an English lad residing at the Cape, but a coloured native enlisted and drilled within the Colony. They might in- deed go much further than such annotations. The mass of the half-cultured, knowing nothing accurately, are grateful for information, and would, we believe, eagerly read, say, two columns a day giving them all " the facts " about the topic of the hour, written by men without rhetoric or prejudice or fear of being considered tedious. The new notion of the newspapers is that "paragraphs pay," and that is true in a way, because men like to read by snatches, and are impatient of long- winded disquisitions ; but so also would detailed information, even of the driest kind, and that is the one thing never given. Take, as an example, South Africa. The newspapers are full every day of South Africa, and give everything except the facts as to what South Africa is, the differences among the provinces, their areas, their cultures, the character of their .populations, their comparative resources, all the facts of which the experts are conscious when they write or speak. We undertake to say that of all who are excited every day by the news from Bnlawayo, not one in fifty really understands why English troops cannot be sent in time to the relief of the besieged, or has formed any conception of British South Africa, except as a rather extensive English county or perhaps province. This is the kind of information never given in newspapers, and its absence is one reason at least of the absurd criticism to which Governments are con- stantly subjected. Such information would be very dull ? That is the error of the well-informed, who, as we have said of newspaper-proprietors, never can recognise that nothing is dull which great masses of readers want to read. There is a
page in almost every daily paper all about " fixtures and finals" which, to Mr. Morley and to us, and, we hope and trust, to thousands more, is not only dull but positively disgusting, yet there is not a newspaper whose conductors are not aware that if they suppressed this page they would suppress their own circulation with it. The majority, we repeat for the third time, know nothing, they wish to know everything about the topic of the day, and they are grateful to any paper which will even partially relieve their ignorance as the Times sometimes does in the columns indexed as containing " special articles." Even the range of the newspapers, extensive as it seems to be, might be amazingly enlarged. We do not believe the publio would be in the least tired with more of the history of intel- lectual movements, like, for instance, the very curious develop- ment of historic inquiry in France since the great war, or the still more curious development in Germany and Belgium of Collectivist opinion, while we are certain that the neglect in almost all secular newspapers of all facts as to religious pro- gress or decay is, considered from the point of view of their interestingness, a huge mistake. All that would cost money P Nonsense. What does money signify if a daily paper can be made so interesting that a quarter of a million of persons buy it, and feel that if they do not buy it a great interest is taken out of their lives ?
Mr. Morley, of course, could not discuss the question in his speech because he wanted to be agreeable and did not want to be long, but we wonder if he would agree with us in believing that the snare of the modern newspaper-proprietor is snippeti- ness, a belief that the average reader will swallow anything, however tasteless, if only it is presented to him in morsels. That belief has obviously attained the ascendency of a com- mercial creed, dominates the Press of America, and is rapidly affecting the external appearance of almost all newspapers in Great Britain. The very latest among them, started by one of the most acute and successful newspaper speculators in Europe, is all snippets. We cannot have the audacity to sug- gest that a movement so continued and so widespread is based upon a fallacy, is, in fact, a mere recoil againetIong-winded- ness, and yet we cannot help suspecting that this is true, and that the rage for short paragraphs, like the rage for short sermons, is a mere protest against boredom by vapid dis- course. People are not impatient of an hour's sermon if it is worth listening to for an hour, any more than they are of a two-hours' speech when it contains a Budget or an expo- sition of a great policy. It is interestingness and not form which secures the circulation of a successful daily newspaper, most of whose purchasers reject its politics, smile at its invectives, and disbelieve its prophecies, and though this interestingness has increased, it could be increased still more.
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