keen political strife of the years 1704–1740. There is no counterpart to it in France until the Revolution of 1789, nor in Germany until 1796 or 1798. It was a Frenchman who wrote—“Suffer yourself to be blamed, imprisoned, condemned; suffer yourself even to be hanged; but publish your opinions. It is not a right; it is a duty.” It was in England that the course so pithily described was actually taken, in the face of fine, imprisonment and pillory, at a time when in France the public had to depend upon foreign journals illicitly circulated, when its own chief writers resorted to clandestine presses, to paltry disguises, and to very poor subterfuges to escape the responsibilities of avowed authorship, and when in Germany there was no political publicity worthy to be named. When the Mercure de France (1672), after a long period of mediocrity, came into the hands of men of large intellectual faculty, they had the most cogent reasons for exerting their powers upon topics of literature rather than upon themes of politics. True political journalism dates in France only from the French Revolution (see, for instance, Mallet du Pan), and it then had a very brief existence. It occupied a cluster of writers, some of whom left an enduring mark upon French literature. A term of high aspiration was followed quickly by a much longer term of frantic licence and of literary infamy. Then came the long rule of a despotic censorship; and cycles of licence followed by cycles of repression. In 1870 indeed the democratic government at Bordeaux issued against journals of high aims and of unspotted integrity, but opposed to its pretensions, edicts as arbitrary as the worst acts in that kind of Napoleon I., and unparalleled in the whole course of the government of Napoleon III.
In all the other countries of Europe political journalism, in any characteristic sense, was the creation of the 19th century—somewhat earlier in the century in northern Europe, somewhat later in southern. The Ordinarie Post-Tidende of Stockholm dates indeed from 1643, but until recent times it was a mere news-letter. Denmark had no sort of journal worth remark until the foundation in 1749 of the Berlingske Tidende, and that too attained to no political rank. The Gazette (Viedomosti) of St Petersburg—the patriarch of Russian newspapers—dating from the 16th of December 1702, is a government organ, and nearly synchronizes with the Boston News-Letter (1704), the first successful attempt at a newspaper in the British colonies in America. Journalism in Italy begins with the Diario di Roma in 1716, but in politics the Italian press remained a nullity for all practical purposes until nearly the middle of the 19th century, when the newspapers of Sardinia, at the impulse of Cavour, began to foreshadow the approach of the influential Italian press of a later day. In Spain no rudiments of a newspaper press can be found until the 18th century; the Gaceta de Madrid started about 1726. As late as in 1826 an inquisitive American traveller recorded his inability to lay his hands, during his Peninsular tour, upon more than two Spanish newspapers.
While originally the newspaper depended entirely on its own reporters and correspondents for news, and still largely does so, the widening of the field of modern journalism is largely due to collective enterprise, by which outside organizations known as “news agencies” send a common service of news to all papers which arrange to take it. The first of the great collecting and distributing news agencies, Reuter’s Agency, was founded by Julius Reuter, a Prussian government-messenger, who was impressed by the common interest roused by the revolutionary movements of 1848. In 1849 he established a news-transmitting agency in Paris, with all the appliances that were then available. Between Brussels and Aix-la-Chapelle he formed a pigeon-service, connecting it with Paris and with Berlin by telegraph. As the wires extended, he quickly followed them with agency-offices in many parts of the continent. He then went to London, where his progress was for a moment held in check. Mr Walter of The Times listened very courteously to his proposals, but (on that first occasion) ended their interview by saying, “We generally find that we can do our own business better than anybody else can.” He went to the office of the Morning Advertiser, which had then the next largest circulation to that of The Times, and had better success. He entered into an agreement with that and afterwards with other London journals, including The Times, and also with many commercial corporations and firms. The newspapers, of course, continued to employ their own organizations and to extend them, but they found great advantage in the use of Reuter’s telegrams as supplementary. Within a few years the business is said to have yielded the founder some £25,000 a year, and in 1865 it was transferred to a limited company. In later years this type of news-agency operating all over the world was repeated by others, and also by agencies operating mainly or exclusively only in one country.
It is no longer possible nowadays to confine the meaning of “journalism” merely to the work of those who write for the Press. Properly it may be said to include the whole intellectual work comprised in the production of a newspaper; and although the designation of “journalist” is generally applied only to editors and to writers, and would not be extended at all to the purely mechanical staff—the compositors, foundry-men and machinists—or even to the proof-readers, whose sphere is analogous rather to the sub-editorial than to the mechanical departments, the modern tendency has nevertheless been, not only to install mere reporting (q.v.) in a place of high importance, but to give increased weight in journalism to those who occupy what may be called the “managerial” offices, the business side of making a paper pay having itself developed into an art on its own account. To be a great “journalist” was once, but is hardly now, the same as being a great “publicist.” The publicist proper is he who delivers his views on public affairs in the Press; but the excellence of his articles may nevertheless, be consistent with the journal being a disastrous failure, and his reputation as a journalist is then but poor. The great journalist is he who makes the paper with which he is connected a success; and in days of competition the elements necessary for obtaining and keeping a hold on the public are so diverse, and the factors bearing on the financial success, the business side, of the paper are so many, that the organization of victory frequently depends on other considerations than those of its intrinsic literary excellence or sagacity of opinion, even if it cannot be wholly independent of these. The modern newspaper, moreover, depends for its financial success no longer primarily on its receipts from circulation, but on its receipts from advertisements; and though these can only ultimately be secured on the basis of circulation (the number of people who buy and read the paper), the establishment of the paper as the organ of a large body of readers for whose custom it is desirable to advertise often involves other capacities than those of the great publicist; and even in so far as the circulation depends on the attractiveness of its “news,” the direction given to the supply of news may be managerial rather than editorial. Thus, in the division of labour, the editorial functions, formerly supreme and all-embracing, because the excellence of the contents of the paper made its success, have gradually, by a fissiparous process, yielded some of their authority to the managerial functions, and these have grown into an independence which—since editorial possibilities ultimately depend on financial resources—has given increased importance in journalism to the business side.
It must suffice here to say therefore that the work of journalism may be broadly divided into its editorial and managerial sides. And apart from exceptional cases of a working proprietor who is both editor and manager, or of a managing-editor, or of a great manager who exercises editorial functions, or a great editor who exercises managerial functions, the ordinary course is to keep them fairly distinct. The managerial side involves the business work of a paper, including the obtaining of advertisements and all the operations directly connected with producing it and making it pay as a commercial enterprise. The editorial side is engaged—however much managerial exigencies may dictate its policy—in providing the “reading matter” which forms its contents, other than such as is of the nature of advertising. The editorial staff includes editors and assistant-editors, sub-editors (in Great Britain a term usually restricted in daily journalism to those engaged in the “news” departments),
