THE LATEST EXPERIMENT IN LONDON JOURNALISM.
SITPPOSE Mr. Walter were one day to be owner of the sole political morning paper published in Great Britain. That seems a preposterous suggestion, and probably is so, as circum- stances always rebel against complete monopoly, but it is only the reductio ad absurdum of a process which has been going on for some time, and has just attained an accelerated speed. It has long since been perceived that political journalism in London, in New York, and we believe, in Melbourne, tends to become a monopoly, to end in a sort of Guild, very limited in number, and to which no new members can hope to find admittance. There are but seven morning Dailies of political pretension published in London at all, only four of them have substantial hold upon the public, and the difficulties in the way of establishing a fifth seem to be almost insuperable. So great is the pecuniary risk involved in starting a "London Daily," so difficult is it to acquire the confidence of advertisers, and so strong is the liking of the public for journals whose names and histories they know, journals to which every one writes, and in which every one can find the article he wants to buy, that the boldest capitalists shrink from the enterprise, and whole parties—as, for instance, the party properly termed "Radical"—are content to remain unrepresented in the daily Press. There is no law against new papers, no privilege, except, indeed, as regards the reporting of Parliamentary proceedings, which operates in favour of the old ones, and no such perfection of work in them as to terminate of itself all hope of rivalry_ The papers are very good, but their managers are ac- customed to keep within certain grooves, they are not specially enterprising in collecting news, and there are whole departments of life—such, for example, as the progress of scientific inquiry, or the changes of opinion and social life in countries outside the British Empire—upon which they rarely or never bestow a word. Politics are thoroughly discussed, wars, when they occur, are admirably described, and the move- ments of commerce are pictured every day with photographic precision, but when we have said that, we have said nearly all. Nevertheless new daily papers are "impossible," the old journals, as wealth and education advance, grow yearly stronger, and they are now trying to extend their influence over all the great towns. There are at least ten cities or towns in Great Britain with more than 300,000 people----though most of them are given in gazetteers as having but half that number, the compilers of statistics adhering to their legal instead of their real boundaries—but hitherto it has been difficult for London newspaper-owners to treat them as suburbs of the capital. They can only get a secondary sale in them. The British newspaper reader is a peculiar being, and as a rule, will net buy a newspaper which he cannot get before ten o'clock. He is not accustomed to read it on a boulevard after lunch. He is not going to be bored with it in the evening. He wants to read it before business, at breakfast or in his railway train, so that he may begin work thoroughly posted up, as he fancies, about all that is going on. A newspaper at noon is not a necessity to him. Consequently the journalist at a distance from the capital has had for his own locality a "pull" or advantage of from two to four hours, and by spend- ing great sums upon telegraphic reports, by keeping offices in London, and by an elaborate mechanism for forwarding news in the small hours of the morning, he has hitherto made his paper sufficient for the majority of his readers. He can give the news of the world by breakfast as fully as the Londoner. Of course he has prospered. New energy, new capital, and new brains have been thrown into his business, and at least ten cities now possess papers which, if not quite so good as those of London, are indefinitely superior as vehicles of infor- mation and thought to the majority of those published in any other capital. The London newspaper proprietors, however, have long perceived the profitable field which these great centres of population afford for their capital and their energy, and they have now made a determined effort to occupy them. By sending special trains of their own—which start before 5 .a.m. and travel fast—by new arrangements with the Post Office, and by steadily ignoring anything which Parliament may do after its proper bed-time, they contrive to tap the Northern cities, with an aggregate population equal to that of London, by half-past 10 o'clock. The Times, we imagine, is a little earlier, and all want another .80 minutes ; but by the time the system is perfect, London papers should be ready for
distribution in Birmingham by 8, in Manchester by 9.30, and in Liverpool by 10 a.m. The whole middle and north of England up to the Humber will be open to the London journals, and this must be but the beginning of new enterprise. The special railway train is a very bold, but an extremely clumsy expedient for distributing papers. If the managers of the Times find that the millions North and West of Birmingham will buy their paper before breakfast, as the millions in London do, there is nothing to prevent them from furnishing it at 6 a.m. There is no reason in the world why the Times should not be flashed entire to any great city in England by 6 o'clock, set up, and given out for distribution by 9,—should not, in i fact, for practical purposes, be published simultaneously in every great city in the country in which there exists a sufficient demand. The cost of telegraphing long messages is by no means great, the cost of resetting is easily calculable, and the quantity of the matter which it is possible to telegraph is a mere matter of multiplying wires and clerks. Journals already wealthy may not care to take such trouble, or the people of the provincial cities may not care to buy London papers in sufficient quantity, but it is clear that if it pays the Times to sell, say, 100,000 copies in London and pay all the enormous expenses of production, it must pay to sell another 100,000 in the North-West and pay the comparatively smaller expenses of reproduction. The effort may be post- poned for years, but the feat will, we are convinced, be ulti- mately accomplished, and the Times or some other great London journal be sold in the streets of the great cities as early as it is sold in the streets of the metropolis,—and sold, too, in all pro- bability, with whole columns of local advertisements and news. The local journalists will, in fact, be exposed to a competition such as they have never yet been called upon to face, a compe- tition in which capitalists of superior wealth, greater hold upon the sources of political information, and a metropolitan prestige will meet and fight them upon ground they have long con- sidered sacred from intrusion. They cannot revenge themselves, for they cannot invade London, where their specialty, local in- formation, is not required, and they cannot defend themselves, except in a way which we will point out presently, and which will, as we conceive, decrease their influence for good.
Whether the new effort of the London Journals will succeed we cannot tell, but it is said to be succeeding, the prima facie probability lies that way ; and if it does succeed, it seems to us scarcely possible that the result should be bene- ficial. Up to a certain point, it is, on the whole, advantageous for a free State that its political journals should be rich. Wealth places their conductors under social restraints, gives them sym- pathies with order, enables them to secure ability, and releases them both from the temptation of bribes and the temptation to an unworthy subservience. Half the corruption known to exist in the journalism of the Continent is the result of poverty, of that contrast between a man's power and his personal com- fort which is so often found to demoralise whole Services. But wealth once secured, as it is secured to any prosperous daily paper in London, there is little benefit in a mere exaggeration of its amount, which always or almost always ends in diminish- ing energy and courage. Why try new plans when the dividend is so large?—may they not end rather in reducing it? If, indeed, exaggerated profits produced competition, they might be bene- ficial; but this, as we have often shown, is, from a variety of causes, not the case in the English Newspaper trade, the success of one competitor depressing, rather than stimulating rivalry. On the other hand, the exaggeration of power is always dangerous, and usually injurious to the possessor. The power of the Press in London, owing to many circumstances, some of which are fortuitous, is very cautiously and temperately used ; but it is very great, it is in the hands of very few men, and if, as might happen, those few were bad, it might become an insuffer- able nuisance. There are contingencies, as we once before pointed out, under which one man might become the dictator of London journalism—the discovery of a really cheap material for paper would for a time place the proprietor of the Times in that position—and such a power, so vast, so hidden, and so irre- sponsible, would be sure, sooner or later, to be abused. The possession of the great cities must enormously increase the power of the London journals, and it is already as great as it is good for the country that it should become. Already it overshadows the power of the statesman, and rivals that of the representatives of the people, while it has an influence on commercial affairs distinctly dangerous to newspaper integrity. Four men in London, if they chose to combine, could stop or create a new commercial mania. On the other hand, the provincial jour- nalist, if forced into direct competition on his own ground with his metropolitan rival, must be driven in self-defence to cultivate his reserved field, local politics, and will tend, therefore, to return to that localism, with its narrowness, its bitterness, and its favouritisms, out of which he has just succeeded in emerging. The Times may publish in Birmingham if it likes, but the Times cannot whip that Mayor, or pet that Councillor, or show up that Coroner as the Birmingham journalist can do ; cannot find space for such work, even if it possessed the information, and such work is always irresistibly attractive. The tendency of every man under competition is to cultivate the field of which he still retains a monopoly, and provincial journalism will not be exempted from the general failing. If the result of that localism were to increase the vitality of the cities, to give them more and more of separate vigour, till each was proud of its own distinctiveness, it would not be a bad one ; but the effects are much more likely to be seen in a deepening of all local animosities, an exaggeration of all local criticism, a recklessness about any national interest which competes with a local one. American journalism suffers terribly from the absence of a capital, and so will English journalism from any change which drives the journals of the great cities back upon their local interests for their main support. Their readers now look to them for general politics, and that makes them generous ; they will then look to them for local politics, and that will make them mean. Of course the new experiment is unavoidable, and may develops results quite beyond our cal- culation ; but so far as we can see, we cannot altogether rejoice in this new development of the wealth and the spirit and the far-reaching aggressiveness of London journalism. Some day or other science will find a cheap material for paper, the Times will drop to a penny, and be published in every city at once, and then the only thing left for political Englishmen to do will be to raise the House of Walter to the Throne. There only can we apparently be sure that power will remain latent, and yet be content.
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