THE GREAT NEWSAGENCIES
Every man, who has had a newspaper in his hand, has remarked that
from time to time on any occasion, which seems important, two or more
accounts appear of the same event. These differing accounts to some
extent repeat themselves and are also supplementary to one another.
The most detailed one will be the production of the newspaper’s own
reporters, who often work on the skeleton story provided from outside
the office. The other accounts appear from one or other of the general
agencies, whose function it is to supply to many newspapers the
fundamental framework on which each is built up. The sphere of action
of these agencies has grown steadily, owing to the mere utility of
having the strain of competition lessened between rival newspapers.
The field, which they cover, is continuously expanding and will soon
include all that kind of news, which is expensive to gather and also
offers little opportunity for obtaining individual distinction.
Of the established organizations the most interesting, which are
also among the most important, began from the natural co-operation
of newspapers in order to eliminate ruinous competition and to save
expense. Although there are many newsagencies of all kinds, which
are out and out commercial concerns, buying news and selling it at a
profit, it is remarkable that on both sides of the water the leading
news supply company is in each case a co-operative concern. In America
it is the Associated Press, in the United Kingdom it is the Press
Association and they are both organized on similar lines. It was the
excessively daring and competitive spirit of American journalism, which
in the early forties, brought about the first attempt at co-operation.
At that time years before an Atlantic cable was laid competition for
European news was limited to sending out fast sailing vessels to meet
incoming ships and take the latest news from them. Newspapers vied
with one another as to who should sail out the farthest and catch the
news soonest, until at last it came to sending fast vessels all the
way over to Europe to get the news at its source. Such competition had
a sufficiently ridiculous aspect to bring about its own collapse and
somewhere about 1850 the New York papers organized a joint service,
which while primarily covering European news grew slowly to cover both
general news and practically all but the internal news of each city,
as subject for competition among newspapers. This was the germ of the
Associated Press, which numbers about 700 papers as subscribers and
regular members and is certainly the largest newsgathering concern in
the world. It is both a newsgatherer and a news-trader and also a news
exchange between its own members. As an exchange it receives news free
from its members and retails it at a low charge. As a trader it buys
from the great international foreign newsgatherer, Reuter’s Telegram
Company and hands over the telegrams to its subscribers. Finally it has
its own supplementary corps of editors and reporters in all important
centres.
There is one very important respect in which the Associated Press of
America differs from its English counterpart and that is that, while it
is a very large, it is not a universally co-operative body. Existing
members have a right to block the entry of new members and to that
extent it is a close corporation. For instance the _New York World_
has always vetoed the inclusion in the system of the _New York Sun_,
thus driving the latter paper to maintain its own foreign and home
service and in fact to establish a rival agency, in order, by getting
outside help, to lessen the burden of its own expenditure. This rival
agency, known as Laffan’s service, even has customers on this side of
the water.
The co-operative English newsgathering organization, called the Press
Association, had a different origin. It arose from a domestic crisis
in the newspaper world, which was coincident with the taking over of
the private telegraph companies by the State, whereby the telegraphs
at once became a public service. Up to that time the newspapers, as
the largest customers, enjoyed the advantage of a special rate for the
transmission of news but without the power of furnishing their own
services. About the fifties the telegraphs of the country were in the
hands of three companies, who used their monopoly of the wires for
the purpose of making also a monopoly of news services to all papers
out of London. As these services were without any competition and
cheaply organized for profit, the plight of the provincial papers was
distressing. It came to a point where the provincial press organized a
co-operative telegraph company of their own in 1865, so as to secure
at any rate their own supplies or force their opponents to come to
terms. This policy would have been certainly carried out, but whether
successfully or not one cannot say, if it had not been for a national
movement in favour of an improved telegraph service which culminated in
the purchase of the telegraph organization from the private companies
by the government. The provincial newspapers were led by necessity to
organize a substitute for the old and inefficient common telegraph news
services, which they did by founding in 1868 the Press Association
under the lead of the late John Edward Taylor of the _Manchester
Guardian_.
The Press Association in this country is almost as dominant as the
Associated Press in America, but it does not include the London
papers. It has for the provinces the same partnership with Reuter,
as its cousin in America. The term P.A. is as much in the mouths of
newspaper men on the one side as the A.P. is on the other. But it has
one feature, as some people think, of superiority over the American
organization in that it is a truly co-operative body; it welcomes
any new member which wishes to join its membership and except for
the London press, which remained voluntarily outside its scope, it
includes every newspaper of any position in the country.
Reuter is so much a household word that an explanation of the function
of Reuter’s Telegram Company is quite unnecessary. It was founded by
the late Baron Julius de Reuter as a telegraph and foreign newsagency
business and was turned into a public company in 1865 for the purpose
of raising sufficient capital to equip a telegraph cable from England
to Germany. This direction of development was subsequently altered
and the cable sold and Reuter’s name became the trade-mark for
semi-official foreign news all over the world.
Of domestic newsagencies in the United Kingdom there are many which
come and sometimes go without making much stir in the world. The
chief rival of the Press Association and Reuter is the Central News
covering both domestic and foreign intelligence. Laffan’s service is
also international in character and so is the Agence Havas. The chief
domestic rivals of the P.A. are the Exchange Telegraph Company and the
London News Agency, a newcomer founded by three or four experienced
reporters, who found their old livelihood made by “penny-a-lining”
being slowly undermined by the agencies. At one time these made almost
a monopoly of police-court news in London, but this with other general
news now passed almost completely out of private hands.
In addition there are the specialist agencies, whose names in most
cases proclaim their work, such as the Commercial Press Telegram
Bureau, the American Press Telegram Bureau, the National Press Agency,
the Labour Press Agency, the sporting news services and firms like
Tillotson’s, who do a great business in syndicating popular fiction
for publication by newspapers in feuilleton form. Topical photographs
are also a favourite subject of traffic by agencies for the benefit of
illustrated papers. There is no question that this form of enterprise
is largely on the increase, as the public is agog to have every sense
tickled, as well as to have information as food for the imagination.
Some of the humbler servants to newspaper production, which escape the
notice of those, who only know the big journals of the large cities on
both sides of the Atlantic, are the agencies, whose business it is to
furnish syndicated matter, supplied at a low price, not only already
written and edited but even set up in print, stereotyped and ready for
the press. Such a commodity passes in America under the name of “plate
matter” and the trade in this branch of literary wares is enormous,
especially there, where the small local papers cannot rely upon filling
more than half their columns with the real news of their own districts.
The organizations which supply this line of goods, sell the matter at
so much a column or half column with or without illustrations. General
news, fiction, truth, political opinions and jokes are all offered at
the same “flat rate.” It is as near a thing to a _Cervelatwurst_, sold
by the pound or foot, as one can get in the intellectual world.
There is one field for journalism, which is now peculiarly the property
of the enormously circulated evening press. The halfpenny evening
paper is the daily paper of the working man and especially so in the
provinces, where in the small towns none but evening newspapers exist.
For their immense mass of readers every conceivable matter of national
or personal interest is subordinated to the overwhelming predominance
of games, sports and betting. It is no exaggeration to say that
five-sixths of the circulation of all the halfpenny evening papers
is built up on amusements and gambling. The two for the most part go
hand in hand, because, with the single exception of cricket, there is
hardly any widely extended form of sport, which, so far as the masses
of the people are concerned, is not the subject, and predominantly
the subject, of betting. Incomparably the keenest competition in the
newspaper world is developed as the result of rivalry to bring out the
earliest news of sporting events. There is no indication of a reversal
of this tendency, but since the mechanical facilities, which provide
the means of this rapid production, are now the common property of
all, it is no longer possible for any one competitor to leave another
seriously behind.
The progress and development of these mechanical facilities are
probably a matter of general interest, because, although the results
of this break-neck rivalry are apparent to any man in the street,
the methods, by which it is accomplished, are due to very elaborate
devices of great technical perfection. I do not know that it is a
matter to be inordinately proud of but this form of competition was
first developed to its highest form of excellence, not in America but
in England and not in London, but in the provinces. The old and common
method of bringing out a special edition with the results of a race
was by cutting a hole in the stereoplate from which the paper was
printed and slipping in a small box with a spring, holding one or two
lines of type. The process was dangerous and inadequate because it
would be used only once for one announcement and that a curtailed one.
Mr. Mark Smith of Manchester originally invented the device now in
universal use. His invention is variously called the “late-news device”
the “stop-press box” or familiarly the “fudge.” The object of this
invention was to enable several small items of news, such as the result
of a race or football match or the score at cricket, to be rapidly
inserted in the paper, without the necessity of altering the body of
the text and of going through the lengthy operation of recasting the
large metal stereoplates from which all rapid printing has to be done.
For this purpose a blank of about half a column has to be left on the
main page, or on whichever page is selected for the latest news, so
that, as the paper passes through the printing-press, that portion
remains unprinted. Corresponding with the space thus left blank, there
is attached to the printing-press a small supplementary cylinder,
which can carry securely clamped a specially designed box to hold type
or linotype slugs, so adjusted as to print on the portion of paper
left blank during its passage through the main press. It is an easy
and expeditious task to alter the contents of this small box without
otherwise disarranging the plates and the process effected a material
increase in the pace of production over the old methods, especially
where a large number of presses were used to produce a big edition. The
two to five minutes thus gained were quite sufficient to establish a
decisive advantage over a rival not similarly equipped for publishing
news of special interest. At the present time hardly any evening paper
in any considerable town in America or the United Kingdom is without
this invention.
At one time this device was protected by a patent, which was the
property of a firm for which I was acting and I came across an amusing
experience in connection with it during one of my visits to America.
Some little time before, while my firm was engaged in difficult and
expensive litigation over the validity of the patent in this country,
there had been some question of the purchase of these patent rights
for New York by the proprietors of the _New York X_. We had been
asked in the course of this negotiation, whether we would defend this
patent, if infringed. Having our hands more than full with litigation
at the moment we declined, but offered to sell the entire rights in
the invention to the New York paper for a moderate sum. The _New York
X_ broke off negotiations and knowing that the patent would not be
defended adopted the device at once and spent a very considerable sum
of money in adapting their presses for this purpose. There the matter
was dropped for the moment.
Some eighteen months later, when we had successfully established
our own patent here through a decision in the House of Lords, I had
occasion to go to New York and found myself one evening in the office
of the _New York X_. The occasion was of exceeding importance to the
New York press. It was the night when the prize-fight to decide the
championship of the world was to take place at Coney Island--a little
way out of the city--between Jefferies and Fitz-Simmons and the island
of Manhattan was agog from end to end with excitement to a degree,
which sober Britons would hardly understand. On that occasion there
was especial rivalry between the two popular papers in New York, the
_X_, in whose office I was, and the _Y_. Both had made elaborate
arrangements for special editions and the presses in both offices were
furnished with very expensive installations of the special late news
apparatus, which was controlled by our patent.
Mr. M. the manager of the _X_ received me most cordially and showed
me all over his office and the machine room. When I reminded him of
our unsuccessful negotiation over the patent, he smiled genially and
remarked that it was all right. In introducing me to various foremen
in the building he said, jocosely: “This is Mr. D., whose patent we
stole,”--the exact phrase was his own. Before leaving him that night I
met him in his own spirit and said in farewell: “You have spent a lot
of money on equipping yourself with this patent and the _Y_ has done
the same. What good has either of you got out of it? Do you not think
it would have been better to have bought our patents for a moderate sum
and have kept out the other fellow?” He smiled: “Now that you put it
that way, perhaps you are right.” So we said: “Good-night.”