New York Herald

“ Its New York City staff comprises a general correspondent, a political observer, a chronicler of business failures, an accomplished art critic, a fashion writer, a theatrical correspondent, and three general news correspondents, using the wires. The Herald is something more than a Boston paper. It has a wide reach, and employs electricity more freely than did the oldtime newspaper the post-horse. ”

“ The burning of the Tuileries in 1871 was an exhibition of their insanity in times of excitement.
Here is my Paris edition of the New York Herald. I bless James Gordon Bennett every time I take up this little paper, so grateful am I to him for it. After struggling with French conversation, French books, French signs, French everything, all the day, it is a delight to me to see my own language in print, to see American news, and often to see the name of some one I know or know of. Oh, we do not realize how dear America is to us until we are far from her shores. ”

“ He reads the New York Herald every day, and can hold an argument on politics or religion. He knows all the points in favor of the protection of home industries, an' has learnt every great fact in American history. ”

“ And, now that the spirit of your people has risen to their side, are these leaders to be forgotten?
“The two aviators, Genet and Hoskier, who have died since April 3, were in French uniform. Frenchmen respect them; do not Americans?
A French Mother.” The Continental edition of the New York Herald is not a mail order catalogue, or a political organ, it is a real newspaper, and the only American journal published in France. It is well printed on good paper. It records the doings of society. Its columns are open to the opinions of others. ”

“ It was he who, after the battle of the Black River, determined at any cost to keep other reporters from the telegraph office; so after having announced to his journal the result of the battle, he telegraphed for two hours the first chapters of the Bible. It cost the New York Herald two thousand dollars, but the New York Herald published the first intelligence. ”

“ I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating". ”

“ I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August 13th observed, in an obscure corner, among the "Deaths," the announcement,—
"Nolan. Died, on board U. S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11' S., Long. 131° W., on the 11th of May, Philip Nolan." ”

“ The meeting had come to his notice through Cowardin’s report in the “Dispatch.” The hearing was rich, a cluster of bright newspaper men being present, among them the “New York Herald” reporter, who endorsed Mr. ”

“ If we advert to the instructive fact, of the enormous circulation of many of the journals of New-York, as the Herald, the Sun, the Tribune, the Times, the Express, the Mirror, and others issued daily; if we calculate the copies of the Observer, the Home Journal, the Christian Advocate, and others [pg 265] of the weekly press; the circulation of the monthly and other periodicals ”

“ I am letting the World speak for itself merely as an example of what many splendid newspapers have accomplished as leaders in public movements. The New York Evening Post is another example, it having long led popular demand for vocational guidance and control. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The New York Tribune, as an example of editorial bravery, points out in an advertisement published May 23, 1922, that though “news knows no order in the making” and though “a newspaper must carry the news, both pleasant and unpleasant,” nevertheless, it is the duty of any newspaper to realize that there is a possibility of selective action, and that “in times of stress and bleak despair a newspaper has a hard and fast duty to perform in keeping up the morale of the community.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ But however great a gift, if news instinct as born were turned loose in any newspaper office in New York without the control of sound judgment bred by considerable experience and training, the results would be much more pleasing to the lawyers than to the editor. One of the chief difficulties in journalism now is to keep the news from running rampant over the restraints of accuracy and conscience. ”

“ The New York Evening Journal has the largest, highest paid and most distinguished staff of editors, reporters, correspondents, experts, writers, artists and contributors of any evening newspaper in America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The journalism of the Revolution, when for newspaper purposes no common communication existed between colonial centres, was limited in influence and circulation to the place and region in which each paper was published, and even the New York Journal, in which the Federalist appeared, had small influence outside of New York City. ”

“ The tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are, for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate. They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.
The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. ”

“ The newspaper offices all over the country, and especially in New York, are besieged by young fellows who want to try their hand at reporting, but not one in a hundred of them is taken on. I’ll tell you, though, what we will do. ”

“ They contain little information, but much amusement. The American newspaper always reminds me of a shop window with all the goods ticketed in a marvelous style, so as to attract and tickle the eye. You cannot pass over anything. The leading article is scarcely known across the “wet spot”; the paper is a collection of bits of gossip, hearsay, news, scandal, the whole served à la sauce piquante.
Nine o’clock.
We are passing the bar, and going to anchor. New York is sparkling with lights, and the Brooklyn Bridge is a thing of beauty. ”

“ We shall support no party—be the organ of no faction or coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate from president down to a constable. We shall endeavor to record facts on every public and proper subject, stripped of verbiage and coloring, with comments when suitable, just, independent, fearless, and good-tempered. If The Herald wants the mere expansion which many journals possess, we shall try to make it up in industry, good taste, brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A daily eats up "copy" very fast and the need to supply so much material began to bewilder the budding journalists. There was not sufficient local news to keep them going, but fortunately the New York news service supplied more general news than they could possibly use, and, besides, Mr. ”

“ Still, in this country, and particularly in New York, newspapers have multiplied during the last fifty years with a rapidity that has astonished not only the public but even their projectors and proprietors. ”

“ A decade after the attempt in New York City to found The World as a daily religious newspaper, The New York Daily Wit- ness, "a Christian, one-cent, afternoon newspaper," appeared. It started on July 1, 1871, and aimed not only to be religious in character, but also "to give the news of the day and much excel- lent family reading besides." It inserted no advertisements of "liquors, theaters, lotteries, or anything inconsistent with its character." ”

“ The influence of the press, too, seems to amount to little, in spite of the fact that the newspapers in New York have freely commented on the valuable work of the branch libraries and have called attention to it both in the news and editorial columns whenever occasion offered. ”

“ The Herald, feeble as it was, managed to survive financial diseases concomitant with newspaper infancy, and at the beginning of 1847 it appeared with a new dress as The Morning Herald and The Evening Herald. An editorial spoke as follows about the penny press in Boston: "The competition of the penny press has caused a mental activity among all classes; rash and impul- sive it may be, but, nevertheless, far preferable to the dignified stagnation which, in times of yore, was seldom broken by the larger and more expensive journals." ”

“ Such critics, how- ever, fail to make a comparison of the sizes of the newspapers printed during these periods. The average New York newspaper is not much larger to-day than it was then, except for advertis- ing columns often it has fewer columns devoted to the news. Yet the number of men who make speeches in that city has multiplied to such an extent that a detailed report is now quite an impossibility. Very often, the words quoted of the speaker constitute the only new thing given in the speech, devoted for the most part to generalizations often much better expressed by others. ”

“ Our daily press is just what it was. You cannot expect anything else from papers with little talent, and no courage, at the editorial helm.
“If you come across such a man as Horace Greeley will recommend as one of his own stamp, tell him Western New York wants a journalist who is up and dressed and afraid of nobody ”

“ We shall, as heretofore, make the SEMI-WEEKLY TRIBUNE a literary as well as political newspaper, and we are determined that it shall remain in the front rank of family papers.
Any person sending us a club of twenty, or over, will be entitled to an extra copy. For a club of forty, we will send the Daily Tribune one year.
THE NEW YORK WEEKLY TRIBUNE,
a large, eight-page paper for the country, is published every Saturday, and contains Editorials on the important topics of the times; the news of the week; interesting correspondence from all parts of the world ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, and now Minister to France, says: “Every great newspaper represents an intellectual, a moral and a material growth—the accretion of successive efforts from year to year—until it has become an institution and a power. It is the voice of the power that the twenty or thirty years of honest dealing with the public and just discussion of current questions have given.” ”

“ The stress of newspaper competition in New York induces the younger journals to rush anything into type that comes to hand, and the American public does not seem to mind it.
But I pity the English journal which should print one or two items of false news. The average Briton, who is a plodding, painstaking man, takes his newspaper as seriously as his breakfast, and one or two mistakes in his newspaper, or his eggs, would make him change his caterer. ”

“ Hundreds of miscellaneous weekly and monthly publications employ writers and they draw largely from the daily newspaper staffs. More than one thousand persons employed regularly in New York City furnish the copy for these miscellaneous journals. Nearly as many more are occasional or special contributors. There are scores of magazines of fiction and scores of weekly journals devoted to literature, religion, fashions, humor, science, art, music and the play-house, to sports, birds, and beasts, and fish. ”

“ All the power of American Journalism was set to keeping the workers from realizing that a nation of fifteen or twenty million people had overthrown the profit system, and was making a success of the Co-operative Commonwealth.
I have before me some letters from a correspondent in Budapesth, representing one of the most influential and supposed-to-be-respectable of the great New York newspapers. This correspondent explains that she sends her articles with the instructions that they shall be published as written or not at all—and they are not published. ”