New York Evening Post

“ The New York Evening Post appeals to another constituency, and is made accordingly. The World and the Journal have a far different plan, and ‘play up’ stories that are mentioned briefly, or ignored, by some of their contemporaries. So the writer on the metropolitan paper is trained to sift news, to choose from his wealth of material that which the paper’s traditions demand shall receive attention; and so abundant is the supply that he can easily set a feast without exhausting the market’s offering. ”

“ They only obey the will of editors and publishers. The one and the only conclusion is that the "great dailies,"—excepting those which do have a measure left of honor and dignity, of which, thank Heaven, a few are yet published—are on a grade far below many things which they would not themselves dare to sanction. As the "New York Evening Post" says, "If it be true that journalism is really a calling in which men must do or say anything which will [Pg 560] increase sales, it is the lowest occupation, not absolutely criminal, known to modern society." ”

“ Gavit, managing editor of the “New York Evening Post,” wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation “as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity,” what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to. ”

“ With a precocity extraordinary, even in a country where precocity is the rule instead of the exception, he began to write and publish at the age of thirteen, and has, therefore, been full forty years before the American public, and that not in the capacity of poet alone—having for more than half that period edited the Evening Post, one of the ablest and most respectable papers in the United States, and the oldest organ, we believe, of the Democratic party in New York. He has been called, and with justice, a poet of nature. ”

“ A story of the Sun would be incomplete without a sketch of its little sister. The Evening Sun was established by Mr. Dana nearly twenty years after he bought the Sun. He saw a place for a one-cent evening newspaper, for the only journal of that description then published in New York was the Daily News, which was largely a class publication. The leading evening newspapers were the Evening Post, the Commercial Advertiser, and the Mail and Express, selling for three cents and catering to a highbrow or a partisan clientele. ”

“ For the past quarter of a century the New York Evening Journal has attracted the largest readership of any evening newspaper in the United States on the sound principle of greatest service to the greatest number of men and women in every substantial walk of life. ”

“ Talent, the most expert and brilliant that money can attract, as exemplified throughout the pages of this booklet, gives you the secret of reader interest and reader confidence in the New York Evening Journal—an overwhelming public preference over one hundred per cent greater than the next largest standard size evening newspaper in New York City. ”

“ None of them has gone to such lengths, but the tendency to literary, mental and moral dissipation induced by a hitherto unknown form of competition has swerved and largely recast the methods of every New York daily save only the Tribune, Times, Commercial Advertiser, and Evening Post, while the converse side of securing business clientage is illustrated in a way that would be amusing if it were not pathetic, by that abnormal and fantastic cross between news and pietetics which mails and expresses itself to the truly good. ”

“ Improvements have been constant. The aim has been to give the public a better and still better newspaper, to make the New York Evening Journal more attractive and interesting to every member of the family. ”

“ The “Thimble Theatre” in the Evening Journal plays to the largest audience of evening newspaper readers in America. That means nearly half of all the people in New York who buy any New York evening newspaper. ”

“ SUMTER has fallen at last. So much may be accepted. Before many hours I hope to stand amid the ruins of a spot which will probably become historic, and has already made more noise in the world than its guns, gallant as the defence may have been. The news will produce an extraordinary impression at New York—it will disconcert stock-jobbers, and derange the most ingenious speculations. ”

“ New York Daily Evening, 114, 135,
141, 280, 308, 368, 398, 433 New York Evening, 39, 42 New York Morning, 186 Pennsylvania Evening, 90, 93 San Francisco, 337 Postal organs of Massachusetts, 29
regulations, 75, 95, 112, 161, 314,
347, 394 Post-Boy, Boston, 26
New York, 74 Post-office printing, 305 Post-offices as advertising agencies, 74 Post vs. press, 95 Post-riders, 113 Poulson, Zachariah, Jr., 155 Prentice, George D., 340
460
INDEX
Present state of New-English affairs, 8 Press, Grand Rapids, 359
Philadelphia, 276, 336
Pittsburg, 358
St. ”

“ The Editor of the New York Evening Star is so well known and so highly estimated as a political writer, that we believe there is no party which does not feel the stronger for his friendship—or does not experience some dread from his opposition. His genius, however, does not exclusively delight in the carte and tierce of political strife. ”

“ New York, more than any city in the world, unless it be Paris, loves to be amused, thrilled and surprised all at the same time; and will accept with outstretched hand any one who can perform this astounding feat. ”

“ One good picture is worth ten thousand words, says an old proverb. The Evening Journal is invariably first in serving its readers with accurate, informative, illuminating and exclusive news pictures. Each picture must pass the scrutiny of the most critical staff of experts to be good enough for reproduction in the Evening Journal. New Yorkers know they get better and more interesting pictures in the Evening Journal than in any other New York newspaper.
[Pg 7]
MEANS LIFE TO THE NEWS
You may have the news beat of a century on your desk. ”

“ Why, that isn't the way to do at all—in New York. It is easy to see you are a stranger, and don't read the papers. The correct thing nowadays is for the guest to criticise his entertainers. Mayor So-and-So always does it. And only last year—it was at an Irish banquet, too—the speaker of the evening, a Down-Easter like yourself, just spilled boiling vitriol over the whole company, and rubbed it in. ”

“ The excitement is kept alive by daily notices. Paper vies against paper in describing and commenting on her European antecedents and her life since she landed, until some new star appears, or until, often the case, the poor lady, in spite of the press assertions that all this homage delights her, is fairly driven out of New York. ”

“ It is a blaze of lights and mirrors at night, and there is a cliquetis of steel, plate, and glass, a coming and going of ladies and gentlemen in evening dress, a constant movement and an animation in the corridors and approaches, which make one think that, if they be always in force, New York must be in a state of perpetual festivity and luxurious enjoyment. ”

“ For a moment he stands locking from the window at the newsboys howling the afternoon papers. The crowds in front of the bulletin boards grow more vociferous. New York at large is preparing to succumb to its once-in-four-years period of hysteria. ”

“ It is such as no one could have written except one who was part of it and saw it all, and who with his greater love of literature still makes us realize that in New York it has always been not the superior but subordinate of journalism. ”

“ I feel, as I write, that any remarks I make on New York society cannot be perfectly free from bias, owing to the overwhelming kindness and glowing hospitality which I met with in that city. I found so much to enjoy in society, and so much to interest and please everywhere, that when I left New York it was with the wish that the few weeks which I was able to spend there could have been prolonged into as many months. ”

“ In addition to these fifteen daily papers there were eleven semi-weeklies and thirty-one weeklies in the city. New York, like Athens of old, has always been ready to hear the new thing—especially in newspapers. ”

“ CANNED journalism of the New York variety is already familiar to readers of husky tomes put out in recent years by the larger papers, but the angle of the fellow right in the midst of the business of canning news seldom gets publicity. ”

“ But he wasn't thinking about that; it was what he had to do when he arrived there: watch a woman—whom he considered a very nice woman—in a lawsuit with a shoemaker; have a talk with each of them, get both sides of the matter, and write a good story, with facetious, satirical touches in it, for New York to smile over the next morning at breakfast. ”

“ I trust I know better than to say anything uncomplimentary about the Press of New York, which compiles, or constructs, news for the whole Continent, not only before our slower communities have heard of the things chronicled, but often, with commendable enterprise, before they have happened. ”

“ I know no other journalist in New York City, during my own journalistic career of thirty-three years, who has made so many and such diverse publications, or put so much originality and force into the detail of his work. The World, and particularly the Sunday World, which was the foundation of the Sunday newspaper, the New York illustrated Graphic, the Round Table, and other journals were built up by his energy, and owed their most striking and successful features to his suggestiveness. He was particularly unselfish in his estimate of other men and his appreciation of their work. ”

“ I have been on the Elevated—the huge shuttle of the great city—hour by hour, had my soul woven into New York on it, back and forth, up and down, until it was hardly a soul at all, a mere ganglion, a quivering, pressed-in nerve of second-story windows, skies of clotheslines, pale faces, mist and rumble and dust. “Perhaps I have a soul,” I say. “Perhaps I have not. Has any one a soul?” When I look at the men I say to myself, “Now I will look at the women,” and when I look at the women I say, “Now I will look at the men.” Then I look at shoes. Men are cheap in New York. ”

“ It is coruscating in wit, daring in love, and biting in its palpable caricature of many well-known persons in New York society; but it is so very much more than a clever society novel making the bid of audacity for ephemeral craze. ”

“ At a small dinner-party or a big reception, in one of the great mansions of New York, or in a suite of rooms high above the traffic of the street, conversation was free-and-easy, with or without the aid of a cocktail, and laughter came in gusts, and American men and women spoke of the realities of life frankly and without camouflage, with a directness and sincerity that touched the essential truth of things. ”

“ There is a stirring vitality of busy life about this your city of New York, striking with astonishment the stranger's mind. How great is the progress of Humanity! Its steps are counted by centuries, and yet while countless millions stand almost at the same point where they stood, and some even have declined since America first emerged out of an unexplored darkness which had covered her for thousands of years, like the gem in the sea ”

“ I was born there, and when I wish to rest and get away from the noise and turmoil of New York, I go there and grow a younger and a better man amid the Sunday stillness which reigns perpetually in its streets. ”

“ On the morning of the fourth of that month, after an anxious and most perilous but safe journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a FREE MAN—one more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway. ”

“ It is true that, after a few days of embarrassing publicity, your photograph vanishes from the daily sheets, your hotel ceases to be besieged by public emissaries asking your opinion of Mr. Roosevelt, Baked Beans or Twilight Sleep; you discover (with a pang) that you are forgotten, and a French Scientist or an Italian Futurist, or a Russian Nihilist has taken your place. But that, after all, may be the extent of your merits. You have had your show. [Pg 375] New York has given your hand a jovial, welcome squeeze. The most hospitable hosts cannot forever regard you as a new arrival. ”

“ She bought a "ten o'clock edition" of the Telegram, some of "Match Mary's" wares, that perennially middle-aged woman who haunts the theatre region, and suggested that we have ice-cream soda at a particularly glittering drug store, but this desire was switched into hot bouillon by Evan, who retains the Englishman's dislike of chilling his internals.
New York is really a fine city by night, that is, in parts at least, and yet it is very strange how comparatively few of the rank and file of its inhabitants walk abroad to see the spectacle. ”

“ But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic beauty in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new, vigorous, fearless republic—and whether you do or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts referred to—not a stone's throw farther up the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York. ”

“ One word only of any seriousness about your toast; it says: "The Press—right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right." Gentlemen, this is your affair. A stream will not rise higher than its fountain. The Hudson River will not flow backward over the Adirondacks. The press of New York is fed and sustained by the commerce of New York, and the press of New York to-day, bad as it is in many respects—and I take my full share of the blame it fairly deserves—is just what the merchants of New York choose to have it. If you want it better, you can make it better. ”