Year: 1879

- -@~~ THE TENDENCIES AND POSSIBILITIES OF

 JOURNALISM - NOBLER ACHIEVEMENTS.

 HIGHER PURPOSES AND GREATER POWER.

 Mir. Whitelaw Reid's address before the New York State Press Association. at Rochester, is replete with instructive facts and information concerning the journalism of to-day, and abounds with thoughtful speculation in regard to jour- nalism in the future. We extract some of the more interesting passages, as follows:

 WHAT SHALL THE NEWSPAPER BE?

 Why should the busy man read the history of yesterday at a greater disad- vantage than the history of hundred years ago? Yet that of hundred years ago has been most carefully collated, sifted, winnowed, relieved of surplusage and arranged in proper perspective. You are not forced to read the official documents, to burrow among the dry re- ports, to study with minute and painstak- ing care the di@ecto maem6ra. You are not loaded with facts that are useless. particulars that give no form or color to the picture. All this waste is removed. Thousands of pages are searched to give you one, but on that one is all you need to know. A moderately industrious man might spend his lifetime reading the authorities on which Motley constructed the " History of the Dutch Republic" yet who-speaking. of intelligent people in the mass, not of individual investi- gators-who cares for the authorities Who wants anything but Motley? The greatest of recent narrative successes has been Greens "Short History of the English People, Why shall not the most enterprising journal of the next decade be that which shall still employ colossal capital to gathersall the news, and then crown and fructify its expendi- ture by having staff of, Greens and Froudes to tell it Are busy people entitled to fewer labor saving and time saving appliances about the affairs that most vltally concern them-the affairs of their own day and home-than about those of past centuries? Why should not the impeachment of Andrew John- son, for instance, have been as we'll told for us as the impeachment of Warren Hastings? A thousand want to know the story of yesterday where one cares for that of hundred years ago. Shall this one command the labor, the scholar ship, the genius of the world, while the thousands must toll for themselves among the confused heaps and winnow a bushel for every grain they get?

 PICTURESQUE FIDELITY OF NARRATIVE.

 do not mean that the news of to-day must be dwarfed into the space it would receive in the histories of a hundred years hence. It must, of course, be treated with the fullness which the pres- ent, or if you will, the feeting interest in it demands. But the eclectic princi- pie is precisely the same. The reader of to-day is entitled to have the story of the day told for him as skillfully as if it were the story of hundred years ago !; as attractively, in proportion to his inter- est in it as briefly, with as little waste and as rigid an exclusion of everything that does not add to the vividness and fidelity of the picture. The Saturday Revaea0 called Macaulay the father of picturesque reporters. It is in getting such reporters that the ultimate success of the wisest and most munifcent news paper enterprise must display itself in the next decade. Nor do mean that it is only reporting on grand scale that IS to be thus ennobled-reporting great battle, revolution, pageant that fixes the eye of the world. The genius that enriched the dramatic story of the death of Charles H., or the peace of Ryswick, never showed itself to greater advantage that in that famous third chapter, wherein by a thousand subtle touches and the use of myriad trihing incidents, like those that now lie under every reporters eye, there was repro duced picture of past age moro min ute, more comprehensive, more vivid, and we may even say, more interesting, than any newspaper has given us of our own. It will be the highest achieve ment of the most enterprising journal ism to make, day by day, for the morn- ing reader, such 8 picture of his own city. of his own country-such a picture for him of the world, indeed, of the day before.

 sKILLFUL CONDENSATION.

 We shall not have more news. The world IS ransacked for it now. Earth, sea, and air carry it to us from every capital, from every people, from every continent and from every island. We shall not have bigger newspapers they are bigger now than busy people can read. We shall have better newspapers the story better told better brains em- ployed in the telling; briefer papers papers dealing with the more important of current matters in such style and with such fascination that they will command the widest interest. There will be more care and ability in selecting, out of the myriad of things you might tell, the things that the better people want to be told, or ought to be told. There will be greater skill in putting these things be. fore them ing the most convenient and attractive shape. Judgment in select ing the news; genius in telling it-that IS the goal for. the highest journalistic effort of the future. In making a news paper, the heaviest item of expense used to be the white paper. Now it is the