THE NEW JOURNALISM

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2556, 17 July 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE NEW JOURNALISM

HARMSWORTH AND HIS NEWSPAPER FACTORIES.

(By a Newspaper Reader in the “Citizen.”)

Modem journalism has a remarkable fondness for informing the public what a highly moral concern it is. The Empire’s editors have lately been gathered together at a mutual admiration society' in London, and in the eloquence which the occasion has evoked there are one or, two statements that need a little qualification. For instance. Lord Rosebery was reported as having said, in an after-dinner oration, that the power of the great newspaper was gaining. This is a statement that is open to”question. The power of the press is gaining, and gaining rapidly but it is quite another thing to say that the power of the individual newspaper exercised through its editoral columns is increasing. Every year sees more papers read by more people, .and every year sees the newspapers more readily able to stir the British nublio into panics. At the same time the centre of gravity in the lournalistic situation has shifted, is not the leader-writer turning the handle of the thunder machine who frightens the groat British public today. It is the news editor, who “features this and buries that array in small type in a back page, who orders out the big scare heading, and who decides what shall strike the eye of paterfamilias as be opens Ilis favorite sheet. THE NEWSPAPER KING. There is in London to-day a man who has simpl” to give his word to make a national panic. The five metropolir tan panic dailies owned by him, and the two possessed by his rival in the same line of business, were the chief sources of the recent navy scare. This man— Alfred Harmsworth —Lord Northcliffe, to give him the name by which Mr. Balfour put him into the House of Lords—wields moi'e power than probably. any other person in the British Empire. London is. the great clear-ing-house. for news, and a good portion of the cable message that reachthe outer portions of the Empire are mcrel'v re-liash of what the Harmsworth papers say. London is a long way off, and Lord Northoliffe’s office is a spot away down beneath the horizon. But it is there that the diet of the New Zealand newspaper reader is settled very much more often than he suspects. In the circumstances it behoves New Zealand to understand what the Harmsworth brand stands for. Alfred Harmsworth began his newspaper career about twenty years ago as a free-lance writer on the London press. He was the son of a barrister, was poor, without influence, and without friends. A few years later saw him proprietor of “Answers,” a penny weekly, on the lines of “Tit Bits.” “Tit Bits.” it is worth noticing in passing, was the beginning of his rival, Pearson’s, career. This one paper is said in its time to have brought Harmsworth in eighty thousand pounds a year. Harmsworth had a genius for business and organisation. Ho approached the newspaper from the business point of view, and lie supplies news, his critics say, as so much merchandise. He is first, last, and all the time for the line that sells. THE HARMSWORTH DISCOVERY. When he became, principal proprietor; of the “Evening News,” half-penny journalism in London was down-at-the-heels business. The penny papers of the day were written for the educated upper classes. A quarter of a. century of popular education had brought into existence an enormous, half-educated public—a public whose compulsory minimum of book-learning had left it witfi little more than the ability to read and .write. Harmsworth discovered and exploited this public, and he has gone from one adventurous flight to another. He took the moribund “Evening News,” rattled its old bones so vigorously, and so brushed it up with new ideas that the public fairly fought for it. Then came the “Daily Mail.” All the wiseacres in the know predicted his ruin with this venture. For this extraordinary lialf-pennyworth lie procured the best journalists, the most popular special correspondents, and the most modem machinery that money could buy. The paper was an instantaneous success. It penetrates from one end of England to the other, and people who had never read a paper before took in the “Daily Mail” and swore by it. The old newspapers prided themselves on being accurate records of events. They were so solemn and dull that the public came in time to mistake solemnity and dullness for accuracy itselfThe “Daily Mail” was not a record of events. It ivas a sort oL“Tit Bits” made up from the day’s happenings. That portion of the news that would bring ha’pence was sorted out with the hand of. genius and the rest, put in the wastepaper basket. Parliament, on a dull day the “Daily Mail” would dismiss with a paragraph. It would at the same time give a heading and a good position on its principal page to a telegram from a special correspondent describing how some German burgomaster had got out of bed in the small hours and swallowed ink instead of medicine. It had its own public to feed and it fed it. At the same time its news service was kept so remarkably up-to-date that even those who most disliked its methods could not afford to ignore it. New Zealand knows, for instance, how it bought the last news from the Antarctic.

A PEERAGE AND THE “TIMES.” The Harmsworth publications have been consistently jingo and Conservative. They are to be counted by the score, and include daily papers, magazines, -weekly, papers, and monthly papers of all descriptions. The same machine-made trial is over the lot of them. They were an imposing array, and their owner bulged large in the public eye.' In return for his services to the Conservatives he was finally knighted, given a baronetcy, and finally made a baron. Lord Nortliclitfc, at little over forty, has come to occupy a very different standard from that of Mr. Alfred Harmsworth, owner of “Answers,” a little over- twenty. A final touch was given to the picture a year ago, when his Lordship took advantage of the dissensions among the proprietor’s to buy into the London “Times.,” He has not yet a controlling share in that publication, but the Harmsworth young men will gradually find their way in to hustle Printing Houso Square along on strictly business lilies. The coming of Harmsworth and Ins newspaper factories is not an isolated event. A newspaper is a commercial enterprise, but it has been one of the best traditions of journalism that an editor is ; something more than a mere purveyor of nows. Even the’ veriest Party hacks, tied hand and foot, still try to persuade themselves and their readers that they stand ion justice and the people's rights. In the lianiisW orth news sheets the leading article

shrank to a paragraph, ami was all but discarded. When taey. uesired to influence their public they did bo through their news columns by the mingling of bare sensational assertion and suggestive imputations. To these arts of panic-mongering hard-headed men of business and sober professional and university men have succumbed with hardly more resistance than the frequenters of the public house. Tho Harmsworth methods have been so successful that the infection threatens to bo dangerous. Rival newspaper proprietors will soon be trying to outHarmsworth Harmsworth, and tho prospect is not a pleasant one. The most significant feature of the new journalism is this, decay of the leading article. There £s no disguising the fact that the newspaper leader everywhere lacks the authority it once possessed. A large portion of the public. skips it altogether, and those who read it do not regard it with the veneration and respect that their fathers did. The public is becoming increasingly suspicious and distrustful of newspaper opinion. In one of the leading American magazines a New York editor, for instance, recently gave a very doubtful answer to the question whether a newspaper could tell its readers the plain unvarnished truth and pay its way IS HONESTY AND INDEPENDENCE POSSIBLE. Our New Zealand daily papers have a high standing, but bow many of them attempt to tell the plain unornamented truth in their leading articles? With a very fair proportion party interests are the main thing. ' The modern newspaper, moreover, is sold at a loss and has to live on its advertisers. Theoretically the newspaper sells the advertiser what he likes within the bounds of decency and the law of libel. There the transaction should end. But how often does it end there? How many weak-kneed newspaper proprietors and editors in New Zealand live in mortal fear and terror of offending some influential advertiser or other? Would many of our daily newspapers, for instance. lie so low about the Union Company monopoly were they not in receipt of "the Union Company’s standing advertisements? When the newspaper leading article begins to lose weight it is chiefly because the men who are behind it are either playing an artificial party game or have not the pluck to tell the truth when sitting mum and saying nothing looks more immediately profitable. If the country wants the honest newspaper it has to remember that independence and honesty in the newspaper business depend very largely on the public thirst for truth.