function is to furnish
reading-matter to the general public.

Nothing is so difficult for the manager as to know what news is: the
instinct for it is a sort of sixth sense. To discern out of the mass of
materials collected not only what is most likely to interest the public,
but what phase and aspect of it will attract most attention, and the
relative importance of it; to tell the day before or at midnight what the
world will be talking about in the morning, and what it will want the
fullest details of, and to meet that want in advance,--requires a
peculiar talent. There is always some topic on which the public wants
instant information. It is easy enough when the news is developed, and
everybody is discussing it, for the editor to fall in; but the success of
the news printed depends upon a pre-apprehension of all this. Some
papers, which nevertheless print all the news, are always a day behind,
do not appreciate the popular drift till it has gone to something else,
and err as much by clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not
taking it up before it was fairly born. The public craves eagerly for
only one thing at a time, and soon wearies of that; and it is to the
newspaper's profit to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling
moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse; to throw
itself into it as if life depended on it, and for the hour to flood the
popular curiosity with it as an engine deluges a fire.

Scarcely less important than promptly seizing and printing the news is
the attractive arrangement of it, its effective presentation to the eye.
Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence, identically
the same despatches: the one will be called bright, attractive, "newsy";
the other, dull and stupid.

We have said nothing yet about that, which, to most people, is the most
important aspect of the newspaper,--the editor's responsibility to the
public for its contents. It is sufficient briefly to say here, that it is
exactly the responsibility of every other person in society,--the full
responsibility of his opportunity. He has voluntarily taken a position in
which he can do a great deal of good or a great deal of evil, and he,
should be held and judged by his opportunity: it is greater than that of
the preacher, the teacher, the congressman, the physician. He occupies
the loftiest pulpit; he is in his teacher's desk seven days in the week;
his voice can be heard farther than t