THE only paper from which a man can really get the news of the world in
a shape that he can understand is the newspaper of his own "home town."
For me, unless I can have the Montreal Gazette at my breakfast, and the
Montreal Star at my dinner, I don't really know what is happening. In
the same way I have seen a man from the south of Scotland settle down to
read the Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satisfaction: and a man
from Burlington, Vermont, pick up the Burlington Eagle and study
the foreign news in it as the only way of getting at what was really
happening in France and Germany.
The reason is, I suppose, that there are different ways of serving up
the news and we each get used to our own. Some people like the news
fed to them gently: others like it thrown at them in a bombshell: some
prefer it to be made as little of as possible; they want it minimised:
others want the maximum.
This is where the greatest difference lies between the British
newspapers and those of the United States and Canada. With us in America
the great thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader; in
England they get the news and then break it to him as gently as
possible. Hence the big headings, the bold type, and the double columns
of the American paper, and the small headings and the general air of
quiet and respectability of the English Press.
It is quite beside the question to ask which is the better. Neither is.
They are different things: that's all. The English newspaper is designed
to be read quietly, propped up against the sugar bowl of a man eating
a slow breakfast in a quiet corner of a club, or by a retired banker
seated in a leather chair nearly asleep, or by a country vicar sitting
in a wicker chair under a pergola. The American paper is for reading
by a man hanging on the straps of a clattering subway express, by a
man eating at a lunch counter, by a man standing on one leg, by a man
getting a two-minute shave, or by a man about to have his teeth drawn by
a dentist.
In other words, there is a difference of atmosphere. It is not merely
in the type and the lettering, it is a difference in the way the news
is treated and the kind of words that are used. In America we love such
words as "gun-men" and "joy-ride" and "death-cell": in England they
prefer "person of doubtful character" and "motor travelling at excessive
speed" and "corridor No. 6." If a milk-waggon collides in the
street with a coal-cart, we write that a "life-waggon" has struck a
"death-cart." We call a murderer a "thug" or a "gun-man" or a "yeg-man."
In England they simply call him "the accused who is a grocer's assistant
in Houndsditch." That designation would knock any decent murder story to
pieces.
Hence comes the great difference between the American "lead" or opening
sentence of the article, and the English method of commencement. In the
American paper the idea is that the reader is so busy that he must first
be offered the news in one gulp. After that if he likes it he can go
on and eat some more of it. So the opening sentence must give the whole
thing. Thus, suppose that a leading member of the United States Congress
has committed suicide. This is the way in which the American reporter
deals with it.
"Seated in his room at the Grand Hotel with his carpet slippers on his
feet and his body wrapped in a blue dressing-gown with pink insertions,
after writing a letter of farewell to his wife and emptying a bottle
of Scotch whisky in which he exonerated her from all culpability in his
death, Congressman Ahasuerus P. Tigg was found by night-watchman, Henry
T. Smith, while making his rounds as usual with four bullets in his
stomach."
Now let us suppose that a leading member of the House of Commons in
England had done the same thing. Here is the way it would be written up
in a first-class London newspaper.
The heading would be HOME AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. That is inserted so
as to keep the reader soothed and quiet and is no doubt thought better
than the American heading BUGHOUSE CONGRESSMAN BLOWS OUT BRAINS IN
HOTEL. After the heading HOME AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE the English
paper runs the subheading INCIDENT AT THE GRAND HOTEL. The reader still
doesn't know what happened; he isn't meant to. Then the article begins
like this:
"The Grand Hotel, which is situated at the corner of Millbank and
Victoria Streets, was the scene last night of a distressing incident."
"What is it?" thinks the reader. "The hotel itself, which is an
old Georgian structure dating probably from about 1750, is a quiet
establishment, its clientele mainly drawn from business men in the
cattle-droving and distillery business from South Wales."
"What happened?" thinks the reader.
"Its cuisine has long been famous for the excellence of its boiled
shrimps."
"What happened?"
"While the hotel itself is also known as the meeting place of the
Surbiton Harmonic Society and other associations."
"What happened?"
"Among the more prominent of the guests of the hotel has been numbered
during the present Parliamentary session Mr. Llewylln Ap. Jones, M.P.,
for South Llanfydd. Mr. Jones apparently came to his room last night
at about ten P.M., and put on his carpet slippers and his blue dressing
gown. He then seems to have gone to the cupboard and taken from it a
whisky bottle which however proved to be empty. The unhappy gentleman
then apparently went to bed..."
At that point the American reader probably stops reading, thinking that
he has heard it all. The unhappy man found that the bottle was empty
and went to bed: very natural: and the affair very properly called a
"distressing incident": quite right. But the trained English reader
would know that there was more to come and that the air of quiet was
only assumed, and he would read on and on until at last the tragic
interest heightened, the four shots were fired, with a good long pause
after each for discussion of the path of the bullet through Mr. Ap.
Jones.
I am not saying that either the American way or the British way is the
better. They are just two different ways, that's all. But the result is
that anybody from the United States or Canada reading the English papers
gets the impression that nothing is happening: and an English reader
of our newspapers with us gets the idea that the whole place is in a
tumult.
When I was in London I used always, in glancing at the morning papers,
to get a first impression that the whole world was almost asleep. There
was, for example, a heading called INDIAN INTELLIGENCE that showed,
on close examination, that two thousand Parsees had died of the blue
plague, that a powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some one had
thrown a couple of bombs at one of the provincial governors, and that
four thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard labour
each. But the whole thing was just called "Indian Intelligence."
Similarly, there was a little item called, "Our Chinese Correspondent."
That one explained ten lines down, in very small type, that a hundred
thousand Chinese had been drowned in a flood. And there was another
little item labelled "Foreign Gossip," under which was mentioned
that the Pope was dead, and that the President of Paraguay had been
assassinated.
In short, I got the impression that I was living in an easy drowsy
world, as no doubt the editor meant me to. It was only when the Montreal
Star arrived by post that I felt that the world was still revolving
pretty rapidly on its axis and that there was still something doing.
As with the world news so it is with the minor events of ordinary
life,--birth, death, marriage, accidents, crime. Let me give an
illustration. Suppose that in a suburb of London a housemaid has
endeavoured to poison her employer's family by putting a drug in
the coffee. Now on our side of the water we should write that little
incident up in a way to give it life, and put headings over it that
would capture the reader's attention in a minute. We should begin it
thus:
PRETTY PARLOR MAID
DEALS DEATH-DRINK
TO CLUBMAN'S FAMILY
The English reader would ask at once, how do we know that the parlor
maid is pretty? We don't. But our artistic sense tells us that she ought
to be. Pretty parlor maids are the only ones we take any interest in: if
an ugly parlor maid poisoned her employer's family we should hang her.
Then again, the English reader would say, how do we know that the man is
a clubman? Have we ascertained this fact definitely, and if so, of what
club or clubs is he a member? Well, we don't know, except in so far as
the thing is self-evident. Any man who has romance enough in his life
to be poisoned by a pretty housemaid ought to be in a club. That's the
place for him. In fact, with us the word club man doesn't necessarily
mean a man who belongs to a club: it is defined as a man who is arrested
in a gambling den; or fined for speeding a motor or who shoots another
person in a hotel corridor. Therefore this man must be a club man.
Having settled the heading, we go on with the text:
"Brooding over love troubles which she has hitherto refused to divulge
under the most grilling fusillade of rapid-fire questions shot at her
by the best brains of the New York police force, Miss Mary De Forrest,
a handsome brunette thirty-six inches around the hips, employed as a
parlor maid in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a well-known clubman
forty-two inches around the chest, was arrested yesterday by the flying
squad of the emergency police after having, so it is alleged, put four
ounces of alleged picrate of potash into the alleged coffee of her
employer's family's alleged breakfast at their residence on Hudson
Heights in the most fashionable quarter of the metropolis. Dr. Slink,
the leading fashionable practitioner of the neighbourhood who was
immediately summoned said that but for his own extraordinary dexterity
and promptness the death of the whole family, if not of the entire
entourage, was a certainty. The magistrate in committing Miss De
Forrest for trial took occasion to enlarge upon her youth and attractive
appearance: he castigated the moving pictures severely and said that he
held them together with the public school system and the present method
of doing the hair, directly responsible for the crimes of the kind
alleged."
Now when you read this over you begin to feel that something big has
happened. Here is a man like Dr. Slink, all quivering with promptness
and dexterity. Here is an inserted picture, a photograph, a brick house
in a row marked with a cross (+) and labelled "The Bung Residence as. it
appeared immediately after the alleged outrage." It isn't really. It is
just a photograph that we use for this sort of thing and have grown to
like. It is called sometimes:--"Residence of Senator Borah" or "Scene
of the Recent Spiritualistic Manifestations" or anything of the sort.
As long as it is marked with a cross (+) the reader will look at it with
interest.
In other words we make something out of an occurrence like this. It
doesn't matter if it all fades out afterwards when it appears that Mary
De Forrest merely put ground allspice into the coffee in mistake for
powdered sugar and that the family didn't drink it anyway. The reader
has already turned to other mysteries.
But contrast the pitifully tame way in which the same event is written
up in England. Here it is: