Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1899: Vol. LVI, November, 1899 to April, 1900Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1899: Vol. LVI, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
created a demand for the news, were the first to devise a system of
obtaining it promptly at a cost that made possible the publication of
daily papers at a profit in almost every town in the country. Brief
reports of all important events are transmitted by cable or telegraph
to a central office in New York, Washington, or Chicago, where they
are condensed or elaborated, as occasion may require, and then sent
out over special telegraph wires to papers all over the country that
are subscribers to the service. The larger papers of the country,
however, do not rely upon this service alone. They are represented by
special correspondents not only in all the chief cities of the United
States, but in London. Paris, Berlin, and other news centers of the
Old World.
The development of the newspaper into a medium for recording day by
day every event of human interest was so rapid during the civil war
and the stirring times immediately thereafter that many faults of form
and detail remained. The journalism of that period was a new
departure, and the men who created it had no precedent to guide them,
but all the time there was a steady and intelligent effort to improve
in all directions. The efforts of the leading men in the profession,
influenced by conditions and surroundings, resulted in the creation of
what were for a time known as schools of journalism--that is, one man
set up an ideal, and another man strived to create a journal of
another character. The aim of all was to publish the general news of
the day, but political influences were still strong enough to control
editorial policy, and ultra-partisan and sectional views were
incorporated in the record of events. There were still editors of
great power and influence in politics and public affairs, and they
tried to shape the current of the new condition by the force of
editorial writing. A number of editors, of both the old and new order,
for a time followed the policy of subordinating to partisan politics
all other features of the newspaper. They sought to make the press the
dominant influence in politics, and to do that they presented in their
journals only one side of public and party questions. They undertook
to think and to reason for their readers, and their partisan and
sectional views were reflected in the news columns of their papers. So
long as party feeling ran high this style of journalism was popular
and successful, but the newspaper, being in the nature of an educator
of the masses, soon set the people to thinking for themselves, and
created a demand for the news of public and political events without
the color of individual opinion. The change from intense partisanship
to partial or complete independence of editorial utterance has come
slowly, and is still under way. To-day there is no great daily
newspaper in the United States so entirely subservient to a political
party as to support any man or measure without question or protest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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