The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-08-13
THE COMING NEWSPAPER.
A Forecast with Comfort in It for All
 Of US

E3 { & q a
 A Forecast with Comfort in It for All
 of US.
 We have seen the startling changes of the last twenty years. What are you to
 expect and prepares Tor iii the next i twenty?
 It Is safe to predict that the better
 class of daily newspapers and their
 readers may come to mutual under standing that less quantity and better quality would be mutually advan- tageous The Saturday Review once called Macauley the father of pictur- esaue. reporter and Dickens has often been called their prince No doubt these are ambitious models; but the press that sent MacGahan to a European war and Harding Davis and Bigelow to an American one. and has developed So many of our most popular authors from it's ranks, can rise above the pres- ent wordy and tedious level of telling the news whenever the editors and their readers agree that 1t is desirable. In that direction lies one of the best hopes for the future of the best newspapers. Fewer words, shorter stories told, few CT SIS a week reporters, who only write by main strength and awkwardness, and more men who have learned the capacities of the English tongue; fewer men whose chies idea is to rake in all the rubbish they can and label itwlth startling head- lines, and more men who know what is worth telling and know how to single it out from the mass of rubbish; fewer mere photographers in nonpareil whose sole idea is to set down in fine type everything they see, and more artists who know what to see and how to make in words, a picture of it--tfat is the line of progress for an intelligent press, worthy of an intelligent community. But first of all, the public must make up its mind that the merit of a paper, it's enterprise. sts resources and it's ifn- portance are not determined by the number of it's pages--that paper is made out of cordwood and costs 2 cents a pound; that type is set by steam, and that white sheets can be run through prining machines in any number you want in any big office at the rate of 1O0,- 900 an hour. If the people continue to want quantity, as they certainly seem to do now, the quantity will no doubt continue to be printed-though Sheri-i dams ghost should hiss in every editors ear that easy printing, even more than easy writing, makes cursed hard read ing. % '-
 Thus far these suggestions may have seemed to partake more of preaching than of prophecy. It is for the public, quite as much as for the newspapers or for the young men who are coming forward to make them, to determine whether, when grouped they portray at all the newspaper of the next quarter or half century. We shall have. fewer sen- sational papers, and get the news told more as a landscape is painted, with some 9j sense of perspective and some artistic omission of offensive or worth- less objects, whenever and as far as the public taste is well enough educated to prefer a correct and vivacious style to blood and thunder written and print- ed as if with paint brush. We shall surely have shorter, reports of many things, if not also smaller papers. The notion that Sundays paper. must be ten times as big as Mondays will be miti- gated. The first class daily paper of