paper is not
alone responsible for this: it is what the age and the community where it
is published make it. So far as I have observed, the majority of the
readers in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an
English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance at
a column report of a debate in the English parliament which involves a
radical change in the whole policy of England; and devours a page about
the Chantilly races, while it ignores a paragraph concerning the
suppression of the Jesuit schools.

Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.
The obvious remedy for this would be more intelligent direction in the
collection of news, and more careful sifting and supervision of it when
gathered. It becomes every day more apparent to every manager that such
discrimination is more necessary. There is no limit to the various
intelligence and gossip that our complex life offers--no paper is big
enough to contain it; no reader has time enough to read it. And the
journal must cease to be a sort of waste-basket at the end of a telegraph
wire, into which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossip-monger can
dump whatever he pleases. We must get rid of the superstition that value
is given to an unimportant "item" by sending it a thousand miles over a
wire.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the American newspaper, especially
of the country weekly, is its enormous development of local and
neighborhood news. It is of recent date. Horace Greeley used to advise
the country editors to give small space to the general news of the world,
but to cultivate assiduously the home field, to glean every possible
detail of private life in the circuit of the county, and print it. The
advice was shrewd for a metropolitan editor, and it was not without its
profit to the country editor. It was founded on a deep knowledge of human
nature; namely, upon the fact that people read most eagerly that which
they already know, if it is about themselves or their neighbors, if it is
a report of something they have been concerned in, a lecture they have
heard, a fair, or festival, or wedding, or funeral, or barn-raising they
have attended. The result is column after column of short paragraphs of
gossip and trivialities, chips, chips, chips. Mr. Sales is contemplating
erecting a new counter in his store; his rival opposite has a new sign;
Miss Bumps of Gath is visiting her cousin, Miss Smith