Page:The Newspaper World.djvu/50

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Old and New JoumaJism — London, 39 monger. The growth of the new journalism makes a new code of newspaper ethics necessary. Evening journalism has completely broken through the old traditions of the English Press, but even in an age of keen competition it may be hoped that it will remain content with adopting the best features of Transatlantic journalism, while ignor- ing those to which less praise can be given, or which are even positively objectionable. From the great development of original features, London evening journals of the new school have become more and more reviews of the day's events, and less and less newspapers. Articles, signed or unsigned, interviews, leaderettes, notes, descriptive writing, sketches, have to a large extent displaced the epitomized news gleaned from many sources which formerly made the evening newspaper valuable, because the reader could find in it a precis of intelligence and of reports with the " spirit " of the morn- ing Press. The " newspaper of the future," as the evening paper is claimed to be, becomes every day less and less a newspaper and more and niore a budget of comment and gossip about men and things. It would seem then that any anticipation that the evening Press will supplant the morning is not well founded, because he who would read with proper appreciation the comments of the evening journal must first have made himself acquainted with the morning paper, and, if he is to be on equal terms of information with the conmientator, with all the morning papers. It is one of the defects of the new journalism that it is too prone to expose to view only those events in which it is particularly interested, and that aspect of them which is seen from the editor's standpoint. Emotion in journalism has its disadvantages as well as its advan- tages. A chivalrous championship of the cause of the weak is entirely praiseworthy. Constant and embittered attacks, in season and out of season, on public characters