The Daily Mail

“ The Daily Mail and Daily Express practically treat their foreign news, as American papers treat all their news, that is, according to its sensational value, but the former on special occasions will lavish expenditure quite on the most magnificent scale and will make almost any sacrifice in order to get a “beat.” ”

“ Formerly “news” was limited in the imagination of English editors to verbatim reports of political speeches, the daily record of police courts, and the hard facts of contemporary history, recorded in humdrum style. Harmsworth changed all that. “News,” to him, meant anything which had a touch of human interest for the great mass of folk, any happening or idea which affected the life, clothes, customs, food, health, and amusements of middle-class England. Under his direction, The Daily Mail, closely imitated by many others, regarded life as a variety show. No “turn” must be long or dull. ”

“ Nearly all who have been in his office, whether they are at present in his employ or not, will tell you he is a delightful man to work with. He will come into the reporters' room of the Daily Mail, sit on the edge of the table, smoke a cigarette, and talk to the men as if he were one of themselves. ”

“ There are fresh rumours every day, and they invariably contradict one another. The other never-failing source of news is the Paris Continental edition of the Daily Mail, which reaches the uttermost parts of the front by teatime daily and is well worth the 15 centimes usually exacted for it, and universally looked forward to daily. ”

“ Michael complained. “It’s so damned inclusive. It’s like The Daily Telegraph. It’s voluminous and undistinguished. It shows the same tepid cordiality toward everything, from a man who’s going to be hanged for murder to a new record at cricket. Why can’t you infect it with some of the deplorable but rather delightfully juvenile indiscretion of The Daily Mail?”
“The Daily Mail,” Maurice scoffed. “That rag!”
“A man once said to me,” Michael meditatively continued, “that whenever he saw a man in an empty railway compartment reading The Daily Telegraph, he always avoided it. ”

“ Thanks to Sir Edward Carson—or, as The Times prefers to put it, "the grave importance of the present political situation"—the price of The Times has fallen to one penny.
While it must be admitted that the famous journal is well worth a penny, we think it only fair to say that certain issues of The Daily Mail and Evening News last week, whose amazing editorial organisations were so freely and disinterestedly engaged in overcoming colossal obstacles in order to give information about the approaching revolution, were worth anything from fourpence to ninepence apiece. ”

“ The next morning, five or six of the great London dailies burst out simultaneously into great blossoms of eloquent leader-writing. Towards the end all the leaders tended to be the same, but they all began differently. The Daily Telegraph, for instance began, "There will be little difference among our readers or among all truly English and law-abiding men touching the, etc. etc." The Daily Mail said, "People must learn, in the modern world, to keep their theological differences to themselves. ”

“ Part of the fun about 'Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about distinguishing elaborately between the Daily Mail and the Times.* It is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are supposed to stand. ”

“ The great Paris morning journals are nothing in our young lives. They are written in a language which we do not know, and their headlines are lacking in enterprise. The Paris issue of the London Daily Mail is better. It reaches us in the form of a special American edition, which caters generously to our national predilection for type several inches high. But beyond that it does not go. Blossom and blossom and blossom, but never the promise of fruit! The reading matter below the headlines is constrained, lacking in pep—dead stuff. ”

“ Beresford put down the Daily Mail, which he was reading, and applauded with somewhat unnecessary vigour. He was politely requested by his colleague not to be an ass. ”

“ Our journalists have been visiting the Fleet, and one of them, in a burst of candour tempered with caution, declares that "one would like to describe much more than one has seen, but that is impossible." Some other correspondents have found no such difficulty. But for admirable candour commend us to the Daily Mail of December 24, where we read, "The Daily Mail will not be published to-morrow, and for that reason we seize the occasion to-day of bidding our readers a Merry Christmas"
Tommy (dictating letter to be sent to his wife) : "The nurses here are a very plain lot—"
Nurse: "Oh, come! ”

“ Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspapers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the working-classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success.” In other letters he says: “The reputation of the writings of any man, the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slightest degree serve, any daily newspaper.” ”

“ That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing is to propose practical improvements for it. ”

“ The reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions, and have descended to the level of an amusement. ”

“ The ideal of a newspaper, according to present-day ethics, is to print news. The daily press is no longer a golden treasury of contemporary literature, not even, perhaps, an exponent of political principles. Its primary purpose is to report contemporary history—to keep us informed concerning the events that are taking place each day in the world about us. ”

“ Every paper has some little connection in a special class of advertising arising out of the ineradicable habits of the public. For instance the Morning Post is pre-eminent for domestic servants, the Daily News for pressmen and compositors and I remember one provincial daily, now dead, which even in articulo mortis was the only organ through which the barbers and hairdressers of Lancashire sought for new situations. ”

“ In these days of many newspapers few readers are satisfied with merely being informed; [15] they want to be informed in a way that interests them. To this demand every one connected with a newspaper office tries to cater. It is the defense of the sensational yellow journals and it is the reason for everything in the daily press. ”

“ We have suppressed mention of all facts which Bumble would fain ignore, and utterance of all opinions likely to disturb his sacred peace; we have canted enough to nauseate the angels, and have continually lied for God as for a man to pleasure him; so our popular books are fit for emasculated imbeciles, the Times is our leading journal, and the Daily Telegraph boasts the largest circulation in the world! ”

“ By far the most important and exacting task, which falls to its lot, is the provision of a daily—or weekly as the case may be—supply of news and that not of any news nor of enough news but of all the news. The distinction is of immense practical importance because it trebles the difficulty imposed on the conductors of a newspaper. ”

“ For six months of the year a daily newspaper is a bolter, and will scarce yield obedience to the restraining hand of the editorial Chifney—for six other months it is a slug, and requires the soft incentives of whip and spur to keep it in its place. That task of weaving of the daily leaders out of one’s own bowels—as one may say—is a hard one indeed. ”

“ Here is the great brainpan of journalism; the centre of newspaper activity, the prefecture of police of the public press. Absolutely necessary is it that it should be entirely a secret police, the “awful, shadowy, irresponsible, and yet puissant we” should dominate over the columns of the daily journal. Will a time ever come, I wonder, when a man will sign his own articles in a newspaper ”

“ It is far too sweeping an indictment, for the tone of the Press generally is sound and healthy, always excepting the misleading Times, the Daily Telegraph, and Morning Advertiser.
I will quote Mr. Bailey’s clever sketch of the “great mercantile concern.”
“I think if working men are to be led to read at all, the Newspaper with its ill feeling, bad reasoning, worse taste, fallacious assumptions and distortions of the truth, is about the most objectionable school in which they could be educated.” ”

“ In full uniform, no manager—certainly no editor—of another morning paper is aware of the existence of the Daily News; the Daily News, on its part, being courageously steeped in equally dense ignorance of the existence of other journals. ”

“ It knows nothing of the many years of thankless labour in the columns of the daily press, it has never heard of our first paper in a magazine, nor of our pride at seeing our signature in a periodical of some repute, nor of the sovereign contempt with which the article and the name were received. The comfortable public has never dreamed of the wretched prices most of us received when we entered the ranks, and, to be honest, there is no reason why it should. ”

“ Thus the daily newspaper will be entirely a vehicle for the propagation of news, correctly so called: and very likely it will become almost entirely colourless, politically, because a well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selection. ”

“ They have a hot-house appearance, and are rarely octogenarians. p. 4The conscientious editor of a daily newspaper can never be free from anxiety. He has enough to do to keep all to their post; he must see that the leader-writers are all up to the mark—that the reporters do their duty—that the literary critic, and the theatrical critic, and the musical critic, and the city correspondent, and the special reporter, and the host of nameless contributors, do not disappoint or deceive the public, and that every day the daily sheet shall have something in it to excite, or inform, or improve. ”

“ The business man would think chiefly of a newspaper, as a vehicle for prices and a10 medium for advertising. Cooks, butlers, clerks and governesses look upon it as a daily registry office. The solicitor sells houses and lands through it. Housewives through it sometimes buy their soaps and more often their hats. Actors, singers, authors, artists and musicians each read their special column and wonder when the editor intends to engage some one really acquainted with the only subject worth reading. ”

“ The sporting interest (i.e. the desire to know results of racing and cricket, &c.) largely inflates the circulation of most of the London and provincial halfpenny evening papers.
Between about 1870 and 1889 the English newspapers began to pay increased attention to literary and artistic criticism; and gradually the daily Press, which formerly applied itself mainly to recording news, and to political, social and financial subjects, became a formidable rival in this sphere to the weekly reviews and the monthly and quarterly magazines. ”

“ When we consider the despatch with which a large newspaper has to be made up, how reports are caught on the wing and published without sufficient verification, how editorials have to be written currente calamo, and often after midnight when important despatches come in, we may well wonder that the daily issue of a newspaper is so well done. ”

“ As long ago as September, '74, the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph were in possession of all the additional facts here following - indeed, it is from the newspaper printer's proof of the article sent to me for revision, with a view, as I imagined, to its immediate publication, that this account is written. That it was not published in the Daily Telegraph at the time was, I still must think, scarcely just to me. ”

“ Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail. ”

“ In the editorial rooms of the country there are good fellows and true, sheer tired of the daily assassination in which they participate. Their fine delusions are spent. Their faith in the old is waning. And when the big day comes, I think you will find the press full ripe—riper perhaps than most of our institutions—for the change.
On page 149 I stated that the publisher of the "New York Times" gave a dinner to his staff, and my friend, Isaac Russell, corrected me, saying: "WE REPORTERS PAID FOR THAT DINNER." Now let me give you another glimpse into a reporter's soul:
I can understand it now. ”

“ But quick judgment and quick action are a daily necessity in the newspaper office. The biggest event of the month may explode an hour before time for going to press. The news must be prepared with frantic haste with half the staff tumbling over each other, so to speak, in the rush to be on time. ”