Republican news item. [volume] (Laport, Pa.) 1896-19??, 1898-09-15

|
speak or write of the blundering print
ing press: or. seeing paper filled with
| divorce cases or social scandal, we speak
and write of the filthy printing press;
or, seeing Journal, through bribery.
! wheel round from one political side to
J the other in one night, we speak of the
corrnpt printing press, and many talk
! about the lampoonry, and the empiri-
! Cism, and the sans culottism of the
printing press.
An Everlasting Blessing.
But discourse now on subject you
| have never heard-the immeasurable
and everlasting blessing of a good news
paper. Thank God for the wheel full OF
( eyes. Thank God that we do not have,
( like the Atbenians, to go about to gath
! er up and relate the tidings of the day,
since the omnivorous newspaper does
I both for us. The grandest temporal
i blessing that God has given to the nine
teenth century is the newspaper. We
would have better appreciation of this
blessing if we knew the money, the
brain, the losses, the exasperations, the
/ anxieties, the wear and tear of heart
strings, involved in the production of a
good newspaper. Under the impression
that almost anybody can make news
paper, scores of inexperienced capitalists
every year enter the lists, and conse-
quently during the last few years
newspaper has died almost every day.
The disease is epidemic. The larger pa
pers swallow the smaller ones, the
whale taking down 30 minnows at one
swallow With more than Z, 900 dailies
and weeklies in the United States and
/ Canada, there are but SO a half century
| old. Newspapers do not average more
than five years existence. The most of
them die of cholera infantum. 1t is high
time that the people found out that the
most successful way to sink money and
keep it sunk is to start newspaper.
There comes time when almost every
one is smitten with the newspaper mania
and starts one or have stock in one he
must or die.
The course of procedure is about this:
A literary man has AN agricultural or
scientific or political or religious idea
which he wants to ventilate. He has no
money of his own-lterary men seldom
have. But he talks of his ideas among
confidential friends until they become
infamed with the idea, and forthwith
they buy type and press and rent com
posing room and gather corps of edi-
tors, and with prospectus that proposes
to cure everything the first copy is flung
on the attention of an admiring world.
After awhile one of the plain stockhold-
ers finds that no great revolution has
been effected by this daily or weekly
publication that neither sun nor moon
stands still; that the world goes on ly-
ing and cheating and stealing just as it
did before the first issue. The aforesaid
matter Of fact stockholder wants to sell
out his stock, but nobody wants to buy,
and other stockholders get infected and
sick of newspaperdom, and an enormous
bill at the paper factory rolls into an
avalanche, and I'll printers refuse to
work until back wages are paid up, and
the compositor bows to the managing
editor, and the managing editor bows to
the editor in chief, and the editor in
chief bows to the directors, and the di
rectors bow to the world at large, and
all the subscribers wonder why their
# ]
have to learn that newspaper is as
much Of an institution as the Bank of
England or Yale college and is not an
enterprise If you have the aforesaid
agricultural or scientific or religious or
political idea TO ventilate, you had bet
ter charge upon the world through the
columns already established. 1t is folly
for any one who cannot succeed at any
thing else to try newspaperdom. If you
cannot climb the hill back of your house,
it is folly to try the sides of the Matter
horn
Comes Through Fire.
To publish a newspaper requires the
skill, the precision, the boldness, the
vigilance, the strategy of a commander
in chief. To edit newspaper requires
that one De statesman, an essayist, a
geographer. statistician, and in ac-
QUESTION encyclopaedia. To man, to
govern, to propel newspaper until it
shall be fixed intuition, a national
fact, demand more qualities than any
business on earth. If you feel like start
ing any newspaper, secular or religious,
understand that you are being threat
ened with softening of the brain or lu-
macy, and, throwing your pocketbook in
to your wife's lap, start for some insane
asylum before you do something des-
perate. Meanwhile, as the dead news
papers, week by week, are carried out
to the burial, all the living newspapers
give respectful obituary, telling when
) they were born and when they died.
The best printers ink should give at
least one stickful Of epitaph II it was
good paper, say. "Peace to its ashes. "
If it was bad paper, / suggest the cpl
taph written for Francis Chartreuse
"Here continueth to rot the body of
Francis Chartreuse, who, with an in
; flexible constancy and uniformity OF
life, persisted i'll the practice of every
| human vice, excepting prodigality and
hypocrisy. His Unsuitable avarice ex-
J empted him from the first, his match
, lacr i,opndepca from the Sepoud - T saw