tant country meeting, scribbled in red-hot | haste, and in pencil, by two or three reporters during their transit from Liverpool or Exeter by an express train; fancy this crumpled-up mass of half-effaced, half-unintelligible scribbling deciphered, set up in type, and corrected, within a few minutes over an hour! Yet such an exploit is by no means without a parallel in the offices of the London morning newspapers. For the rapidity with which news is set before the readers of a journal they are much indebted to the compositors. Passing over the commercial department of a newspaper, which presents few characteristic features, we arrive at the important class of the reporters. And of these the parliamentary corps first claim our attention. This embraces men of very different calibre, and very different views and habits. With some it is the all in all, with others merely the convenient stepping-stone. A few, and only a few, of its members have little pretensions beyond those of skillful short-hand writers; but a great majority of its occupants aim higher than this-possessing as they do the intelligence of educated gentlemen, sharpened and developed by a course of training which brings them into constant communication with public men and public events; while not a few are personages of more or less literary or political celebrity, who may well aspire one day to make the speeches they now report. The routine duty of the gallery is easily explained. Each newspaper has a regular desk, at which its representative is always seated from the opening to the rising of the House. The reporters generally succeed each other in alphabetical succession; and the period during which each remains on duty is called his "turn." These turns are of different lengths at different periods of the evening. Up to about 11 o'clock they are either half-hours or three-quarters. After that time they are generally either quarterhours or twenty minutes. Every newspaper has a distinct set of rules upon the subject in question, rules which, however, are always liable to be modified, according to certain fixed principles, by the duration of the debate in the House of Lords. As soon as a "man"-reporters are always called "men" in gallery patois-is relieved by his next successor, he proceeds to the office to extend his notes" to write out his whack"-gallery argot again. A full three-quarters' turn amounts, with the majority of speakers, to somewhat more than two columns of the close type used in printing parliamentary reports, the writing of which is seldom accomplished under four hours of severe labor. It not unfrequently happens, especially if both Houses be sitting-and the corps therefore distributed in equal proportions in the Lords and Commons-that time will not permit the full extension of the short-hand notes. A second turn looming ahead obliges the reporter to "cut down" many a flower of eloquence; and on very hard-working nights there are such things as three turns, involving, as the reader will perceive, in many instances a spell of seven, eight, or nine hours of exceedingly hard and exhausting toil. These occasions, however, are comparatively rare; and taking the average amount of the session, we should say that it is somewhat less than a column per night per man. Of course the majority of speeches made in parliament bear very considerable curtailment. The ordinary rank and file of M. P.'s are merely summarized— their endless prolixity, their ten-times repeated iteration, their masses of commonplace declamation, are condensed and translated into English grammar-often a most requisite process-so that the twenty lines of what appears to the reader to be a neat little compact speech, convey, in reality, the pith and substance, well and clearly put, of half an hour or an hour's rambling, tedious oration. When, however, a reporter, unhappily for himself, falls upon one of the crack men of the house, a minister or an Opposition leader, the case is very different. The report is then almost verbatim. We say almost, because there is hardly one man in the House who does not occasionally owe something to the reporters in the way of the excision of a twice or thrice-repeated phrase, or the rounding-off of a sentence left incomplete in the heat of speaking. As may be expected, there exists a code of oratorical criticism in the gallery of an entirely technical and professional nature, and which judges of public speakers entirely in reference to the facilities which their styles afford for being reported. Perhaps a hint or two on contemporary orators regarded in this light may not be without its interest and use. Sir Robert Peel, then, is a favorite in the gallery. He is distinct and deliberate; and when he has to deal with statistics (the mortal horror of the reporters), exceedingly clear and intelligible. Moreover, Sir Robert understands the gallery. We have heard him on very important occasions absolutely dictate rather than speak. His rival, Lord John, is generally deliberate enough, but he is not always distinct, and R 1849.] LONDON MORNING NEWSPAPERS. unless he warms and rises with his subject, I would please the political opponents of the On the whole, the reporters' gallery, al- Of the law reporters little has to be said. They are frequently young barristers, who make up in this way for any deficiency of briefs with which they may be afflicted. We now come to the irregular reporting troops, the penny-a-liners. There are perhaps fifty or sixty people in London who get their living solely by casual contributions of articles of news to the press. The body is an odd compound of all manner of waifs and strays from society, and more remarkable, we fear, for enterprise and impudence in the pursuit of its calling, than for either honesty or ability. The only notion which many worthy folks in London have of the personnel of the press is gleaned from the penny-a-liners, who suddenly start up, no one knows how or whence, upon every occasion which gathers a group of people together, boldly proclaiming themselves to be the representatives of the press, and seldom doing it much credit either by their appearance or their manners. Many a good man and able has indeed made his first advances to journalism through humble penny-a-lining, but no man of ability remains long in the ranks. The great body of penny-a-liners are either dissipated and discarded reporters, who have drunk themselves out of station and respectability, or a wonderful omnium gatherum of uneducated and illiterate men, who have been flung out of the ordinary range of mechanical or semi-mechanical employments, and have, somehow or other-one by one accident, one by anotherfallen back upon the precarious and Bedouinlike existence of penny-a-liners. Of course the "occasional reporter" is only paid for those portions of his contributions which actually appear in print; and, on an average, not one-tenth of the mass of "flimsy" manuscripts received every night by the sub-editors of the morning papers is accepted and printed. The "flimsy" in question is the technical name for penny-a-line copy, derived from the thin tissue paper which the "manifold" writing apparatus always used necessitates the employment of. A penny-a-liner always sends duplicates of his intelligence to all the morning papers, so that he has occasionally the good luck to be paid several times over for the same paragraphs, and that at the rate of a penny-halfpenny, not, as his name would imply, a penny per line. A penny-aliner may therefore, it is evident, upon such occasions as a "good fire" or a "good murder"--both common phrases with the craft- either makes a new character, or remains in an undistinguished position until the old offence has blown over or been forgotten. The best characteristic quality of the penny-a-liners is their matchless perseverance and energy in the pursuit of materials for paragraphs. Does a conflagration break out ?-they are in the midst of the firemen ; does a remarkable crime take place?-—they regularly install themselves in the locality; often they outnumber the group of individuals which forms the "numerous and respectable meeting" they report. Railway make a much more profitable week's work than the regular-salaried reporter can hope for. We have known instances in which from £30 to £40 have been cleared by a penny-a-liner in a single week. But in general the brotherhood are terribly improvident. They spend their money as fast, or faster, than they make it, and seldom or never have anything laid by for the quiet, and, to them, unlucky intervals when no political agitation causes good crops of meetings, and when there happens to be a happy dearth of accidents and offences. Then come the times for fabricated intelligence. Inquests are re-accidents afford them rich harvests. They ported which are never held, and neighbor- find out cases of suicide in a way little short hoods are flung "into a state of the utmost of miraculous; and hardly a day passes alarm and excitement" by catastrophes which which does not yield them a "remarkable no one but the penny-a-liner himself ever coincidence," or an "extraordinary catastrodreamt of. We remember Mr. Wakley pub- phe." Altogether, the penny-a-liners are licly stating that upward of a dozen inquests about the most irregularly-paid, the most were reported in one day as having taken hard-working, and the most scampishly-living place under his presidency, not one of which set of individuals in her Majesty's dominions. he ever held! The occasion which elicited this statement was a remarkable one. The suicide of a young girl, who had been seduced and abandoned with her child, was reported, and adorned with so many touching and really romantic circumstances, that public curiosity and sympathy were strongly excited. We well remember, on the night when the intelligence was handed in-in "flimsy" of course-to a daily paper, hearing the sub-editor-a gentleman, by the way, well known to the readers of this Journal exclaim, in allusion to one of the letters given, "See, there is perfectly touching and human pathos: not the greatest master of fiction who ever lived could have struck off anything half so exquisite in its simple truth to nature as the ill-written letter of this poor, uneducated girl." In two or three days the whole story was discovered to be a fabrication! And yet in all probability our friend the then sub-editor was right. These fabricated stories are seldom or never the invention of their concoctors: they are simply copied from some forgotten file of newspapers, or some obscure colonial journal, and adapted to London life and customs. Of effort is made by the conductors of journals to prevent their being duped in this manner, but they cannot always help themselves. They have no hold over the penny-a-liners but by systematically rejecting their communications; and if a fellow who has been detected in a fraud finds his copy "tabooed," he either makes an arrangement with a friend for the use of his name, or starts a new appellation altogether, under which he course every We have loitered at some length over the reporting department, which is, in sooth, one of the most interesting connected with a daily paper, and we must dispatch the foreign correspondents with a hastier notice. Our readers can well understand that theirs is a department which has of late been quite turned upside down. In the old peaceful days, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, and Augsburg, were the principal ports of continental correspondence. Now-a-days, of course, a newspaper must have its agents swarming over Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Bay of Biscay to the Sea of Azof. The duties of a Parisian correspondent, the grand centre to which the others were always subsidiary, were of a kind requiring watchfulness rather than hard work. Paris, as the centre and radiating point of continental politics, was constantly becoming the sudden seat of unexpected news, which it was the duty of the correspondent instantly to forward, often by special courier or pigeon-express to London. The routine of duty was by no means oppressive. The concoction of a short summary of the news of the day; the extraction of copious translations of the morning papers, furnished in the friendly pages of "Galignani ;" and perhaps a visit to the Bureau des Affaires Etrangeres, or that of the Ministre de l'Intérieur, where official and private information could always be got by those who knew the right way of going to work. This generally formed the day's routine of duty. The real pressure of the work, however, lay in the extreme watchfulness required, and the constant liability of the correspondent to be called upon to decide whether such and such an item of intelligence, as it transpired, was or was not worth the expense of a special courier or a flight of pigeons to London. Now-a-days, of course, the couriers are being superseded by the railways, and the use of pigeons, over one part of the journey at all events, by the electric telegraph. Nor will the most casual student of the daily newspapers fail to perceive how much more copious is the letter of the Paris correspondent than it used to be. Of the many in France who curse the late revolution, none have more cause to do so than "our own correspondent." The "war" reporters form quite a new class, which has of course risen with the exigences of the times. More than one of the gentlemen, however, who are now enlightening the English public upon the chances and changes of the Italian and Hungarian wars, have seen hot work in the Carlist campaigns in Spain, and have had a few tolerably narrow escapes from being shot or hung as spies. Indeed, not later than last summer, a friend of ours, who was in the thick of the first SchleswigHolstein dispute, found himself placed, by the arrest of a courier whom he had dispatched, in an extremely awkward situation, from which he only escaped by a most liberal expenditure of horse flesh, and by ultimately seizing the open boat of a fisherman, in which he crossed the Little Belt, and at last contrived to conceal himself in Copenhagen. It is quite evident, then, that the situation of a correspondent at the seat of war is by no means suited to those gentlemen of England who love safety and ease. Adequately to perform the duties of the post, a man must be a thorough linguist, even to the extent of understanding the patois of the district in which he is placed. He must possess, moreover, a good and plausible address, be a man of enterprise and resource, one who can cook his own dinner, and make a comfortable bivouac on the lee side of a tree. Above all, he must have the pen of a ready writer, and have enough of nerve, without needlessly or recklessly exposing himself to danger, to make up his dispatches coolly and collectedly, even should a stray shot occasionally make its appearance in his vicinity. Good folks who do not like sleeping out of their own beds, who wink at the crack of a pistol, and who catch colds in thorough drafts, had better not undertake to write a contemporary history of a war. We have now come to the editorial department of the London daily journal. By | the editorial, however, is by no means to be understood the leader-writing department: we speak of the actual working visible editors. In respect to the leader-writing corps, the strictest secrecy is, as we have said, preserved. If its members ever come to the office, they do not come officially; and though their business may be guessed at, it is never avowed. The actual acknowledged editorial body generally consists of a sub-editor and his assistant, a foreign editor; sometimes, but not always, a business editor, as we may call him, whose functions are half literary, half commercial; and an editor-in-chief, who represents the proprietors, and keeps a watchful eye over all the departments, and whose executive power is despotic. The money-article writer has an establishment of his own in the city, and generally sends the result of his labors every evening. Let us begin with the two sub-editors. They are at their posts by eight or nine o'clock P. M., and the labors of one of them at least do not cease until four o'clock next morning. To their care is confided the mass of penny-a-line matter, from which they select what is considered as of interest or importance-often abridging or grammatizing it, as the case may require. They have frequently to attend to the literary and political correspondence of the paper, picking out from the mass of "Constant Readers" and "Regular Subscribers" those lucubrations which seem worthy of the notice of the editor-inchief. To them is also confided the task of looking over the multitudes of provincial papers which every day arrive, and extracting from them all the paragraphs which may appear to deserve the honor. The principal sub-editor is also in continued and close correspondence with the printer's room, from which he receives regular bulletins of the amount of matter "set up," and of the space which remains to be filled. In many of the London papers, the rule is, that every line which is printed must go through the hands of the sub-editor. He is thus enabled to preserve a general idea of the hourly progress of the newspaper toward completion. Another part of the sub's duty is a general supervision of the reporter's room. In case of any failure in this part of the duty, occasioned perhaps by sudden illness, he puts himself in correspondence with another paper, so as to obtain the means of supplying the gap. He grants interviews to the less important class of business visitors; makes the minor arrangements for having public meetings, dinners, and so forth, reported; has an eye, in fact, to every department save that of the "leaders ;" and passes a life of constant hurry and responsibility, the major part of his duties consisting of a hundred little odd jobs, trifling in themselves, but upon his indefatigable and energetic attention to which the character of a newspaper greatly depends. The duties of the foreign editor will be obvious from his title. He performs for foreign intelligence what the sub-editor does for home news. He receives and arranges foreign expresses, summarizes the intelligence contained in them, and has frequently a great deal of hard translating work upon his shoulders. Of course the foreign editor must be an accomplished linguist. ceive and register the advertisements. At four o'clock or so, a couple of the editors arrive; the letters which may have been received are opened and run over; arrangements for "leaders" for next day are probably made and communicated to the writers thereof; and such communications from regular or casual correspondents as may be selected from the mass are sent up to the printer's room, in readiness for the compositors when they arrive. By seven o'clock P. M. the work is beginning in earnest. Three or four parliamentary reporters have already set to at their desks, and the porters are laying huge masses of "flimsy" and packets from the country upon the sub-editors' tables Meanwhile the compositors above have also commenced operations. By ten o'clock the work is in full swing. Perhaps a dozen columns of parliamentary debate have been written; the sub-editors are actively enga We have reserved the editor-in-chief until the last. His is a situation of great power, and consequently of great responsibility, To him all matters of doubt arising in the inferior departments are referred. The sub-edi-ged in prepariug for the printer the occasiontor is his aid-de-camp, who brings him infor- al and penny-a-line intelligence, and two or mation of what every body is doing, and how three writers in different parts of London every body is doing it. Printed slips of are deep in "leaders." Hardly a train now everything reckoned important in the paper arrives in town which does not convey packare from time to time laid before him. He ets of country news and country newspapers makes all the arrangements of magnitude, wet from the press, to the great centre of inrespecting the engagement of correspond- telligence. "Express parcels" from abroad ents, reporters, &c., and gives audiences to drop in, and are submitted to the foreign edthose whose business is of great importance, itor. All the office is one blaze of light and or who, from their situation in public or pri- activity. By midnight the great mass of invate life, cannot well be handed over to a telligence has arrived. The porters carry subordinate. The peculiar department of the away from the sub-editorial rooms basketfuls editor-in-chief is, however, that of the leading of rejected contributions; the master-printarticles. He may either write himself or not. er reports as to the length of "matter" in In general, an editor has plenty to do without his hands; the editor-in-chief communicates the composition of brilliant or profound po- with the sub, and finds that everything is litical essays. But he probably suggests working smoothly. The reporters are still subjects to his writers, hints at the tone to be at it might and main. Perhaps the House of adopted, carefully revises the leaders when Commons does not rise until two o'clock, so written, and generally takes care to commu- every quarter of an hour sets a fresh hand nicate to the whole executive the peculiar to work, As three o'clock approaches, the views as to business or politics entertained by master-printer gets nervous, and begins to the unseen proprietary body whom he rep-think of the early trains; the gentlemen of resents. The editor-in-chief usually transacts business in the office in the course of the afternoon. He makes his appearance again about ten o'clock or eleven o'clock P. M., and frequently remains until the paper is actually published, about five o'clock in the morning. We have now set before our readers a tolerably full account of the constituent parts of the machinery of a London newspaper. It only remains that we briefly dash off a sketch of the machine as it appears in its usual rapid motion. Nearly all day long the establishment is almost deserted; only the clerks in the counting-house ply their tasks, and re the gallery are directed to cut down at all hazards, and close up their reports: the last selection is made of the "matter" which must be flung over either until next day, or entirely, Shortly after three the outside half of the sheet is at press, for the machine-men have been getting up the steam on the engine for the last couple of hours: the last touches are hurriedly given to the "leaders" and the "latest intelligence ;" and by half after five o'clock, fast express carts are flying with the reeking sheets to the terminus of every railway to be scattered over Britain as fast as panting steam can earry them! |