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From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal.

LONDON MORNING NEWSPAPERS.

As, then, we believe that the notions popularly entertained of the means whereby the news of the world is every morning served up to us with our hot coffee and rolls are somewhat vague, we propose to devote this paper to a sketch of the intellectual and material engine to which society and civilization owe so much; and after some pondering as to the simplest and most comprehensive course to be adopted, we have come to the resolution first, of enumerating and describing the several parts of the machine in detail, and then after putting them into gear, and setting the whole in motion, of directing attention to the general working, and of explaining the motive forces and the plan of operation of the entire mechanism.

WITH the exception, perhaps, of the mys-antly establishing, or successfully carrying terious regions of the theatrical coulisse, there on, a London morning journal. are no establishments the secret working of which is less known to the general mass of the public than that of those great collectors and condensers of political intelligencethose extraordinary machines which are the contemporary historians of the world-the London Morning Newspapers. With almost every other grand branch of national industry we are more or less acquainted. Most people have a notion of the operations of the blast furnace or the power-loom: most people have picked up some smattering of the mode in which cottons are spun at Manchester, and razors ground at Sheffield. Little treatises devoted to descriptions of branches of national industry are frequently issued from the press the coarse raw material is traced through its every successive stage until it arrives at the consummation of a costly and finished fabric. We may read or see how the lump of ore becomes a legion of shining and delicate needles-how certain constituent mineral masses are fused and wrought until the glittering chandelier or the wonder-working lens is placed before us. We know how rags may become paper, and the forest a ship. Still, there is a peculiar species of industry of which the public knows little one requiring for its successful prosecution a more peculiar union of elements than is demanded by any other pursuita branch of industry demanding the combined and constant application of highly skilled and intelligent manual labor - of vast capital of a high degree of enterprise and worldly shrewdness-and, more than all, of great, and keen, and cultivated, and flexible intellectual power, constantly applicable to the discussion of almost every question-moral, social, political, and literary which can spring up into importance amid the daily and hourly fluctuations not only of the public opinion of Britain, but of that of the civilized world. Such a union of qualities and possessions must be brought together by any one who thinks of triumph

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All the London daily-newspaper establishtents are situated either upon or close to the great artery of communication between the City and the West End. Some of those grimy-looking news-manufactories are patent to the street, others skulk in dingy and obscure alleys, as though attempting to carry out, even in their local habitations, that grand principle of the anonymous which, rightly or wrongly, is held to constitute not only the power, but the very essence and soul of English journalism.

The vast body of the employés of a London journal may be divided into six grand categories or departments, it being, however, understood that in some cases these departments blend, to a little extent, with each other, and that those individuals who, as it were, stand upon the confines, occasionally undertake somewhat mixed duties. There is, first, the important and all-supporting typographic department, numbering perhaps somewhere about sixty individuals. Then there is the commercial department, occupied in the business-conduct of the paper, in attending to the due supply of the requisite material for all the other branches, in receiving and arranging the advertisements, in managing the publication, and keeping the

general accounts of the whole establishment. |
This department, including those more or
less connected with advertising agencies, &c.,
may furnish employment for about a dozen
of persons. We then come to the reporting
establishment. Of this the principal branch
is the parliamentary corps, a body averaging
from twelve to sixteen members: next them
may be classed the law reporters, who at-
tend regularly in the several courts, and who
may come to some half-dozen more: in the
same category we may perhaps include the
regular and authorized correspondents of the
paper in the principal provincial towns and
outports: and our account would be mani-
festly incomplete did we leave out of sight
the vast cloud of irregular and unengaged
reporters, who supply a great portion of the
every-day London news, including the pro-
ceedings of the minor courts-particularly
the police-offices the inquests, the "melan-
choly accidents," the "alarming conflagra-
tions," the "extraordinary coincidences,"
and the like. This body of men, although
few or none of its members have any real
tangible footing upon the periodical press,
yet play no inconsiderable part in supplying
it with its miscellaneous home intelligence.
They form, as our readers have no doubt
divined, the often-talked-of class, called by
themselves "general reporters" or "occa-
sional contributors," but known to the world
penny-a-liners." Next in the order in
which we are proceeding we may reckon
the important and expensive department of
foreign correspondency-a department the
extent and importance of which have very
much increased since the commencement of
the present continental disturbances. A
glance at any London journal will show that,
besides having a fixed correspondent in al-
most every European capital of importance,
there is hardly a seat of war unattended by
a representative of the metropolitan press.
Wherever, indeed, gunpowder is fired in
anger, a letter to a great English newspaper
is pretty certain to pop out of the smoke.
Proceeding with our list, we approach the
editorial department, including not only the
actual executive editors, but the corps of
original writers-the mysterious authors of
the "leaders," and the gentlemen whose
pens, shunning politics, are devoted to the
chronicling and analysis of the fine arts, the
drama, and literature. Here we tread upon
somewhat slippery ground. As we have
said, the principle of the anonymous is kept
up with very remarkable strictness in the
leading journals; and even those who are

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tolerably well behind the scenes in other respects, may still know little of the grand arcanum involved in the authorship of the leading articles. No doubt the paternity of some of these is tolerably well known in press circles. Sometimes the internal evidence of style or particular opinion betrays a writer in other instances tolerable guesses and approximations are formed; but in, we should say, the great majority of cases the authorship of a leader is absolutely unknown to nineteen-twentieths of the employés of the newspaper in which it appears.

We have now catalogued the five principal divisions into which the intellectual and manual labor of a morning newspaper is thrown, and we may add a sixth general department, including the class which may be described as more strictly the servants of the establishment-the day and night porters, the messengers, the couriers employed upon foreign service, and generally the host of supernumeraries who hang on the outskirts of a great newspaper establishment.

Having thus cursorily run over the different parts of the machine, we proceed more narrowly to describe their individual conformation. The typographical department comprehends, as we have said, about sixty compositors. Among their ranks are to be found the very best, the most intelligent, and the most expeditious printers in London or the world. They are paid by the piece; and a few of them earn not less than from £3 to £4 per week. From £2 10s. to £3 is, however, we believe, the general amount of their wages. The task of a morning paper compositor commences about seven or eight o'clock in the evening, and is continued until the paper is "put to bed," as the technical phrase goes, between four and five o'clock in the morning; but occasionally his labors are even still further protracted. When an important foreign express is expected-the Overland Mail, for example— he either remains hanging about the establishment, ready at an instant's warning to commence operations upon the looked-for news, or flings himself down, all dressed, either in his lodgings or a neighboring tavern, prepared instantly to hurry back to the office should a breathless messenger warn him that the "Overland is in." A useful peculiarity of the morning paper compositor is the extraordinary skill with which he deciphers the vile congregations of pothooks and hangers with which he is frequently called upon to deal. Imagine, for example, half-a-dozen columns of report of an impor

tant country meeting, scribbled in red-hot haste, and in pencil, by two or three reporters during their transit from Liverpool or Exeter by an express train; fancy this crumpled-up mass of half-effaced, half-unintelligible scribbling deciphered, set up in type, and corrected, within a few minutes over an hour! Yet such an exploit is by no means without a parallel in the offices of the London morning newspapers. For the rapidity with which news is set before the readers of a journal they are much indebted to the compositors.

Passing over the commercial department of a newspaper, which presents few characteristic features, we arrive at the important class of the reporters. And of these the parliamentary corps first claim our attention. This embraces men of very different calibre, and very different views and habits. With some it is the all in all, with others merely the convenient stepping-stone. A few, and only a few, of its members have little pretensions beyond those of skillful short-hand writers; but a great majority of its occupants aim higher than this-possessing as they do the intelligence of educated gentlemen, sharpened and developed by a course of training which brings them into constant communication with public men and public events; while not a few are personages of more or less literary or political celebrity, who may well aspire one day to make the speeches they now report.

The routine duty of the gallery is easily explained. Each newspaper has a regular desk, at which its representative is always seated from the opening to the rising of the House. The reporters generally succeed each other in alphabetical succession; and the period during which each remains on duty is called his "turn." These turns are of different lengths at different periods of the evening. Up to about 11 o'clock they are either half-hours or three-quarters. After that time they are generally either quarterhours or twenty minutes. Every newspaper has a distinct set of rules upon the subject in question, rules which, however, are always liable to be modified, according to certain fixed principles, by the duration of the debate in the House of Lords. As soon as a "man"-reporters are always called "men" in gallery patois-is relieved by his next successor, he proceeds to the office to extend his notes-"to write out his whack"-gallery argot again. A full three-quarters' turn amounts, with the majority of speakers, to somewhat more than two columns of the close

type used in printing parliamentary reports, the writing of which is seldom accomplished under four hours of severe labor. It not unfrequently happens, especially if both Houses be sitting-and the corps therefore distributed in equal proportions in the Lords and Commons-that time will not permit the full extension of the short-hand notes. A second turn looming ahead obliges the reporter to "cut down" many a flower of eloquence; and on very hard-working nights there are such things as three turns, involving, as the reader will perceive, in many instances a spell of seven, eight, or nine hours of exceedingly hard and exhausting toil. These occasions, however, are comparatively rare; and taking the average amount of the session, we should say that it is somewhat less than a column per night per man. Of course the majority of speeches made in parliament bear very considerable curtailment. The ordinary rank and file of M. P.'s are merely summarized— their endless prolixity, their ten-times repeated iteration, their masses of commonplace declamation, are condensed and translated into English grammar-often a most requisite process-so that the twenty lines of what appears to the reader to be a neat little compact speech, convey, in reality, the pith and substance, well and clearly put, of half an hour or an hour's rambling, tedious oration.

When, however, a reporter, unhappily for himself, falls upon one of the crack men of the house, a minister or an Opposition leader, the case is very different. The report is then almost verbatim. We say almost, because there is hardly one man in the House who does not occasionally owe something to the reporters in the way of the excision of a twice or thrice-repeated phrase, or the rounding-off of a sentence left incomplete in the heat of speaking. As may be expected, there exists a code of oratorical criticism in the gallery of an entirely technical and professional nature, and which judges of public speakers entirely in reference to the facilities which their styles afford for being reported. Perhaps a hint or two on contemporary orators regarded in this light may not be without its interest and use. Sir Robert Peel, then, is a favorite in the gallery. He is distinct and deliberate; and when he has to deal with statistics (the mortal horror of the reporters), exceedingly clear and intelligible. Moreover, Sir Robert understands the gallery. We have heard him on very important occasions absolutely dictate rather than speak. His rival, Lord John, is generally deliberate enough, but he is not always distinct, and

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would please the political opponents of the orator rather than himself.

Of the law reporters little has to be said. They are frequently young barristers, who make up in this way for any deficiency of briefs with which they may be afflicted.

unless he warms and rises with his subject, is very apt to be slovenly in the construction of his sentences. Sir G. Grey is an exceedingly difficult speaker to report: he is too rapid. Sir Charles Wood, again, is often verbally confused, and apt to make lapsus linguæ, which in financial speeches are terribly embarrassing. Viscount Palmerston is a We now come to the irregular reporting capital man for a reporter-deliberate, epi- troops, the penny-a-liners. There are pergrammatically distinct, and uttering his sen- haps fifty or sixty people in London who get tences with a weighty and a telling point. their living solely by casual contributions of Sir J. Graham is also an easily-reported articles of news to the press. The body is speaker. Not so Mr. Gladstone, who pours an odd compound of all manner of waifs and himself out in an unbroken, fluent, and unem- strays from society, and more remarkable, we phatic stream of words; uttering subtile ar- fear, for enterprise and impudence in the purgument faster than other speakers rattle out suit of its calling, than for either honesty or mere verbiage. Mr. Macaulay was another ability. The only notion which many worthy dreaded orator; and for this reason, that his folks in London have of the personnel of the utterance was so rapid, as to render it ex- press is gleaned from the penny-a-liners, who ceedingly difficult to follow him; while his suddenly start up, no one knows how or diction was at once so gorgeous and so epi- whence, upon every occasion which gathers grammatic, that the omission of a word mar- a group of people together, boldly proclaimred a sentence. Much of the same remarking themselves to be the representatives of applies to Mr. Sheil, who, moreover, has to contend with a thickened, indistinct, and screaming utterance. Mr. D'Israeli keeps a good reporter upon the full stretch, but he is not generally complained of in the gallery. As for the Upper House, Lord Stanley is perhaps the most unpopular man, using the word of course in its technical sense. He is terribly rapid and terribly good. Lord Brougham is generally more deliberate. His parenthetical sentences, however, often puzzle his recorders. Lord Aberdeen, distinct, deliberate, and pure in his style, is easily reported. The same of Lord Lyndhurst. The Marquis of Lansdowne's speeches are vastly improved by the omission of a good half of the words which they contain; and to Lord Monteagle a similar remark applies with still greater force. Earl Grey is a capital reporter's speaker-distinct, clear-headed, and correct; and so, by the way, is the young Duke of Argyle, who has made a début in public life which promises to give the reporters many an aching

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the press, and seldom doing it much credit
either by their appearance or their manners.
Many a good man and able has indeed made
his first advances to journalism through hum-
ble penny-a-lining, but no man of ability re-
mains long in the ranks. The great body of
penny-a-liners are either dissipated and dis-
carded reporters, who have drunk themselves
out of station and respectability, or a wonder-
ful omnium gatherum of uneducated and illit-
erate men, who have been flung out of the
ordinary range of mechanical or semi-mechan-
ical employments, and have, somehow or
other-one by one accident, one by another—
fallen back upon the precarious and Bedouin-
like existence of penny-a-liners.
Of course
the "occasional reporter" is only paid for
those portions of his contributions which ac-
tually appear in print; and, on an average,
not one-tenth of the mass of "flimsy" manu-
scripts received every night by the sub-editors
of the morning papers is accepted and print-
ed. The "flimsy" in question is the techni-
cal name for penny-a-line copy, derived from
the thin tissue paper which the "manifold"
writing apparatus always used necessitates
the employment of. A penny-a-liner always
sends duplicates of his intelligence to all the
morning papers, so that he has occasionally
the good luck to be paid several times over
for the same paragraphs, and that at the
rate of a penny-halfpenny, not, as his name
would imply, a penny per line. A penny-a-
liner may therefore, it is evident, upon such
occasions as a "good fire" or a "good mur-
der"-both common phrases with the craft-

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either makes a new character, or remains in
an undistinguished position until the old of-
fence has blown over or been forgotten.
The best characteristic quality of the pen-

and energy in the pursuit of materials for
paragraphs. Does a conflagration break
out?-they are in the midst of the firemen ;
does a remarkable crime take place?-they
regularly install themselves in the locality;
often they outnumber the group of individ-
uals which forms the "numerous and re-
spectable meeting" they report. Railway
accidents afford them rich harvests. They
find out cases of suicide in a way little short
of miraculous; and hardly a day passes
which does not yield them a "remarkable
coincidence," or an "extraordinary catastro-

about the most irregularly-paid, the most hard-working, and the most scampishly-living set of individuals in her Majesty's dominions.

We have loitered at some length over the reporting department, which is, in sooth, one of the most interesting connected with a daily paper, and we must dispatch the foreign correspondents with a hastier notice.

Our

make a much more profitable week's work than the regular-salaried reporter can hope for. We have known instances in which from £30 to £40 have been cleared by a penny-a-liner in a single week. But in gen-ny-a-liners is their matchless perseverance eral the brotherhood are terribly improvident. They spend their money as fast, or faster, than they make it, and seldom or never have anything laid by for the quiet, and, to them, unlucky intervals when no political agitation causes good crops of meetings, and when there happens to be a happy dearth of accidents and offences. Then come the times for fabricated intelligence. Inquests are reported which are never held, and neighborhoods are flung "into a state of the utmost alarm and excitement" by catastrophes which no one but the penny-a-liner himself ever dreamt of. We remember Mr. Wakley pub-phe." Altogether, the penny-a-liners are licly stating that upward of a dozen inquests were reported in one day as having taken place under his presidency, not one of which he ever held! The occasion which elicited this statement was a remarkable one. The suicide of a young girl, who had been seduced and abandoned with her child, was reported, and adorned with so many touching and really romantic circumstances, that pub-readers can well understand that theirs is a lic curiosity and sympathy were strongly department which has of late been quite excited. We well remember, on the night turned upside down. In the old peaceful when the intelligence was handed in-in days, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, and Augsburg, "flimsy" of course-to a daily paper, hear- were the principal ports of continental coring the sub-editor-a gentleman, by the way, respondence. Now-a-days, of course, well known to the readers of this Journal newspaper must have its agents swarming exclaim, in allusion to one of the letters over Europe from the Baltic to the Meditergiven, "See, there is perfectly touching and ranean, from the Bay of Biscay to the Sea human pathos: not the greatest master of of Azof. The duties of a Parisian correfiction who ever lived could have struck off spondent, the grand centre to which the othanything half so exquisite in its simple truth ers were always subsidiary, were of a kind to nature as the ill-written letter of this poor, requiring watchfulness rather than hard work. uneducated girl." In two or three days the Paris, as the centre and radiating point of whole story was discovered to be a fabrica- continental politics, was constantly becoming tion! And yet in all probability our friend the sudden seat of unexpected news, which the then sub-editor was right. These fabri- it was the duty of the correspondent instantcated stories are seldom or never the inven- ly to forward, often by special courier or tion of their concoctors: they are simply pigeon-express to London. The routine of copied from some forgotten file of newspa- duty was by no means oppressive. The conpers, or some obscure colonial journal, and coction of a short summary of the news of adapted to London life and customs. Of the day; the extraction of copious translacourse every effort is made by the conductors tions of the morning papers, furnished in the of journals to prevent their being duped in friendly pages of "Galignani ;" and perhaps this manner, but they cannot always help a visit to the Bureau des Affaires Etrangeres, themselves. They have no hold over the or that of the Ministre de l'Intérieur, where penny-a-liners but by systematically rejecting official and private information could always their communications; and if a fellow who be got by those who knew the right way of has been detected in a fraud finds his copy going to work. This generally formed the "tabooed," he either makes an arrangement day's routine of duty. The real pressure of with a friend for the use of his name, or starts the work, however, lay in the extreme watcha new appellation altogether, under which he fulness required, and the constant liability of

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