PROVINCIAL NEWSPAPERS IN ENGLAND.

Inangahua Times, Volume II, Issue II, 16 April 1880, Page 2

PROVINCIAL NEWSPAPERS IN ENGLAND.

♦ • It was thought at one time that the railway facilities for the despatch of the 1 London papers to the provinces would ruin the country journals. But the tele« graph beats steam, and the provinces soon outstripped London competition by 1 harnessing tha lightning.' The spirit of I enterprise tbua roused extended to all departments of the oountry Press, and the result has been not its rnin, bat the limitation of the sale of the London journals in the country, and a shock to one of London's literary institutions— l mean the monthly magsame. There was a t'me when fiction and miscellaneous literature were confined to the ' magaaiue,' a word invented by my predecessor (old Stephen Cave, of the ' Gentleman's), bnt nowadays the London dai'y papers rival the monthlies in sketch and essay, the London weeklies hate taken up the putlieas tion of novels, and the country journals outvie them ail in. that admirable combination of fiction, light literature science, and art gossip, and social articles which used to be the special characteristics of a wall balanced family magsainp. These are curious features of the splendid progress of journalism, and they demonstrate tho truth of the axiom Umt in the march of advancement something or somebody must go to the wall, la this cisc I fear it is the London magaaine which is going. At present it is upheld chiefly by the flctionist, but the public is getting tired of waiting a month to know whether the blonde Angeline pushed the trusting Adonis into the well, or whether the tall guardsman really did run off with his neighbor's wife. By and by Lonlon will have to buy the country newspaper which supplies these romantic facts every week, and which engage some of the most popular of the English pens that deal with the doings of that imagine nry world, whose tragedies of love and fate prove so great a relief to jaded minds after the bard facts of this exceedingly . prosaic and material world. — Joseph ffiitton,