The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1871-05-05
THE .N'EW'Sx'.7PER.

Progress in American Journalism Within
Twenty Years.
From an Address before the Boston Radlca
Club, by Mr.. f. b. Sanborn.
The newspaper of to day is very
different thing from the newspaper
which Dickens satirized in Martin
Chuzzlewit.' Not only have the means
of communication been infinitely en-
larged, so that our news flashes to us
with the speed of lightning from every
quarter of the world but the ncwspa-
per has ceased to be the vehicle of mere
news. Moral and scientific questions
are ably discussed, reforms are advoca.
ted, discoveries chronicled, in short, the
newspaper holds its mirror up to every
aspect of the times. Thoreau was in
the habit of condemning newspapers
He read once a week, but considered
himself the worse for even so much dis
sipation. Read not the times" he
said, "rcad the Eternities. But there
came a season when Thoreau read every
newspaper he could find. 1t was when
John Brown lay wounded at Harper's
Ferry and his enemies thronging about
and questioning him drew from him
those answers which rang through the
country for years, and still thrill the
heart as we recall them. 1t was the
reporter OF the New York newspaper
who then and there noted down the un-
dying words, which might else have been
lost thus was it made manifest for
what reason the New York newspaper
had been allowed to exist all these
years, since no other paper could have
had q reporter there. In those days
the Times and the Eternities got printed
on the same sheet, as they always do
when hero appears.
Of late years there has been a
marked increase in the courage as well
as in the resources of following in the
wake of public opinion, they have
sprung to the front, and aspire to lead
where they used to follow. In the last
ten years the tone of our journals has
greatly changed. If they are not yet
models of courage, they are by no means
deficient in boldness, and no longer
deem it their duty to "feel round for tho
average judgment of their readers, and
express that" as Wendell Phillips used
to accuse them of doing. One reason
for this change is the rapidity with
which, as a nation, we have passed from
a provincial to an imperial position
among the nations for, waiting or our
prosperity, have come fabulous wealth,
increased culture, a prodigious diversity
of tastes and interests, and wide ex.
pansion of the horizon of individual
ambition. Under the spur of these ex-
elements new class of newspaper edi-
tors has appeared. An English travc-
Ter, in 1888, spoke of the American ed
itors as shrcwd, but uneducated men"
but the description no longer applies.
Nearly all the rising or lately risen
journalists in the country are educated
men-many of them highly accomplish.
cd in scholarship or literature. They
are travelled men, too; familiar with
foreign countries and with their own.
Either as editors or correspondents.
journalism Is drawing into its service
the highest culture and the best brain
in the country, whether of men or
women. When Mrs. Child, that genial
grandmother of feminine journalism in
America, wrote her Letters from New
York." when Margaret Flu Ter went to
the same city to help Mr.. Greeley edit
the Tribune, how daring and strange
their ventures seemed to their country.
women. Now their successors in the
same field are legion. But, with SO
many recruits to the ranks of journa-
lism, it must be confessed that the mum /.
Der of really able editors is still small
Brilliant, and forcible and sensible as
American journalists are, they seldom