Los Angeles daily herald., 1888-12-31
BOGUS NEWSPAPER MEN
How They Impose Upon the
Public.
IMPosqERS BECOMING NUMEROUS
They Interfere With the Legitimate
Gathering of the News
of the Day.

amusement among the newspaper
fraternity at the time, and is well worth
being used now to point moral for the
general public. The keeper OF a we'll
known and popular place of resort,
desirous of showing his gratitude to the
newspapers from which he had received
q number of favorable notices,
determined to give q little ban
quet to the members OF the
press" To arrange the ceremony and
distribute the invitations he picked out
an alleged newspaper man who has no
standing whatever in any Office in the
city. Two invitations happened to find
their way into the hands OF men con-
nected with the papers. but they, under
standing the situation, declined to attend.
The baneue came and went, but the
real newspaper men of the city never
heard OF it until week or two later. Of
course no notice of the affair appeared in
the papers, and there was probably not
. man present who could by any kind Of
stratagem get matter into print in q re-
putable newspaper.
The newspaper men of the city were
not inclined to waste many tears over
the affair, but on the contrary looked
upon it as q first-class joke. At this
particular time of the year, when busi-
ness is active and news lively, men who
earn their living by regular seven-days-
in-the-week newspaper work have very
little time to be running around after
banquets or any other kind of amuse-
ment which comes in the evening. The
moral of the situation, however, is to be
found in the attention which it calls to
acertain peculiar class of men who are
the very bane of the real newspaper
workers existence-the bogus journal
ists."
Every profession has it's imitators, but
it is questionable whether any is more
tormented with humbugs than the news
paper line. 1t is popularity supposed to
be to mans advantage in variety of
ways to be connected with a newspaper.
Free tickets to places of amusement,
passes for railroad travel, admission to
all sorts of places where the general
public is shut out and favors of various
sorts in all lines of business. These are
generally supposed to come unsolicited
to the man who does newspaper work.
Much of this is theory, but there
is q sufficient basis of fact to
make it we'll worth while for the
individual who has cheek enough to
carry out the role to pass himself off for
q newspaper man. And there is no risk
whatever connected with the effort.
The ran who calls himself doctor and
experiments on human anatomy takes
q good many chances; the humbug
lawyer will soon be found out; but the
bogus journalist appears to be able to
work his little scheme right along, and
it will be suspected by no one except
those regularly connected with the
papers.
At the present time there are between
thirty and thirty-five men who do all the
work, editorial and repertorial, on the
daily journals of this city. There are
half as many more who are connected
with the business offices, who OCCASION
ally do local work. Every paper has a
small contingent force of two or three
men who are put on when business is
very lively, and laid off when it is dull
In every city there must be a few regu-
are of that class. There is probably not
q single experienced newspaper man who
reads this article that cannot name over
q dozen men who are constantly passing
themselves off as being connected with
one paper or another, who know abso-
lutelv nothing about the business and
could not obtain work in any Office at any
price. 1t is question whether the hum
bugs do not far outnumber the real article
at the present time in Los Angeles. The
man who got up the 'fpress" banquet had
no difficulty in finding plenty of material
of his own peculiar sort to grace the
boards.
The existence of this parasite class may
or may not be matter of interest to the
public, but to the newspaper man himself
it carries with it host of inconvenience.
Being more numerous than the regular
reporters, the humbugs are more ubiquit-
GUS. They manage to be on
hand whenever fight or an
accident or any kind of excit-
ing circumstance takes place, and
push their way in, using the name of
some paper as a password. When the
rightful claimant to the information gets
along he finds it difficult to work over an
exhausted claim. He is very likely.
moreover, if assured that some one rep
resenting his own paper has already
looked up the facts in the affair, to as
sumo that some other member of the
force has happened along instead of
him and obtained all that is needed.
Thus he misses his chance. The average
reporter, however, is on the watch for
his impersonators, and does not get
caught in that way many times.
In the matter of the securing of favors
which are supposed to come to newspa-
per men to compensate in measure for
the many disagreeable features of their
line of work, the humbug reporter is, to
q considerable extent, shut off by the
systematic arrangement which at present
prevails. The time was when a man
who had impudence enough could get
into a theater or place Of public amuse-
ment ON the strength of an alleged con-
nection with a newspaper, but at
present, although the experiment is
often tried, it nearly always re-
suits in failure. Within a short
time this paper has been importuned to
pay for the livery expenses of an in
dividual named Phil Hastings, who hires
buggies and coolly charges it up "to the
HERALD" Of course the dealer, who
gives privileges to anv man on the state
ment that he is connected with q news
paper, takes his chances.
But the most exasperating feature of
the whole arrangement is the discredit
which men of this class sue