HOW PRESS TELEGRAPHY IS MANAGED IN NEW ZEALAND.

Inangahua Times, Volume II, Issue II, 25 July 1881, Page 2

HOW PRESS TELEGRAPHY IS MANAGED IN NEW ZEALAND.

♦ We are prepared to endorse the opinions of the North Otago times on this subject. Much of the telegraphic stuff now appearing in the newspapers is either pure squash or unmitigated gossip. For example, at one time we are told that a little dog succeeds in falling from the roof of a shanty on to a sidewalk without breaking a bone in its body. Then we are ever and anon treated to such electrifying items as that some village race meeting got up we may be sure for the benefit of tte local publie«house and the owners of some spuivned hacks, has resulted in a clear profit to the managing committee of the enormous sum of £7 ; that the police have made an important seizure at a sly"grog shop of three bottles of gin and a kerosene lamp filled with brandy ; that some benighted settlers at a place named Whangoroa are so abandoned and so regardless of the political perdition that they have asked a person named Hobbs to stand at the next general election—a year hence ; that Sir George Grey has the gout in his

little finger ; Mr Hall has had an eyetooth extacted ; poor Mr Oliver does not quite know when he will address his constituents, or what be will say when he does address th^m j or that a .very humble Auckland politicians Speight has had the tremendous hardship to take a visit to Christcburch before the sess:< nof Parliament. Or from Wellington, as on the Queen* Birthday, comes the appalling intelligence, that the weather at Cbristcburch is almost quite too lovely ; or that the great and gifted population of FLoki« tika are in a state of robellion because some rabbit'hufch of an office is to be removed to the rival village of Greymoulh. Occasionally we bear from Invercargill that wholesale arbilrary changes involving the dismissal of o-ie childless old man and two orphan boys, who are the sole support of their parents, are being mado in the Government workshops, and that public meetings are held in every bar room io the town, protesting against the abominable tyranny and attributing it all to the undying j?alonsy of Dunedin. Very often an advertisement pure and simplo is foisted on the Pre?s and the public, as an item of news. This is done in the case of theatrical persons whose satchel are stolen while they are drunk, or whpn one happens to be playing Yankee-grab for the three drinks, or when a man who happens to hive a policy for 1 6d in pone accident 1 insurance company gives a nasly wrench to Lis thumb nail, and has the whole amount of the policy pud over to him with a promptitude that is calculated to captivate all rightly constituted minds. Sometimes the public have their breath taken away with the announcement that a shark and a boat both happened to be going in :be same direction in the Auckland har* bor at one time, and that while the people in tbe boat were bent on pleasure the shark was bent on business, manifesting as little regard for the feelings of the boat's occupants as kndsharks themselves manifest for private rights or public interests, when in pursuit of their prey.