Our very facility and enterprise in news-gathering have overwhelmed our newspapers, and it may be remarked that editorial discrimination has not kept pace with the facilities.  We are overpowered with a mass of undigested intelligence, collected for the mast part without regard to value.  The force of the newspaper is expended in extending these facilities, with little regard to discriminating selection.  The burden is already too heavy for the newspaper, and wearisome to the public.

The publication of the news is the most important function of the paper.  How is it gathered?  We must confess that it is gathered very much by chance.  A drag-net is thrown out, and whatever comes is taken.  An examination into the process of collecting shows what sort of news we are likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed is collected without much intelligence exercised in selection.  The alliance of the associated press with the telegraph company is a fruitful source of news of an inferior quality.  Of course, it is for the interest of the telegraph company to swell the volume to be transmitted.  It is impossible for the associated press to have an agent in every place to which the telegraph penetrates:  therefore the telegraphic operators often act as its purveyors.  It is for their interest to send something; and their judgment of what is important is not only biased, but is formed by purely local standards.  Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic operators, by agents trained to regard only the accidental, the startling, the abnormal, as news; it is picked up by sharp prowlers about town, whose pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for something spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who regard casualties as the chief news.  Our newspapers every day are loaded with accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people of whom we never heard before and never shall hear again, the reading of which is of no earthly use to any human being.

What is news?  What is it that an intelligent public should care to hear of and talk about?  Run your eye down the columns of your journal.  There was a drunken squabble last night in a New York groggery; there is a petty but carefully elaborated village scandal about a foolish girl; a woman accidentally dropped her baby out of a fourth-story window in Maine; in Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same railway train with another woman’s husband; a child fell into a well in New Jersey; there is a column about a peripatetic horse-race, which exhibits, like a circus, from city to city; a laborer in a remote town in Pennsylvania had a sunstroke; there is an edifying dying speech of a murderer, the love-letter of a suicide, the set-to of a couple of congressmen; and there are columns about a gigantic war of half a dozen politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gauger.  Granted that this pabulum is desired by the reader, why not save the expense of transmission by having several columns of it stereotyped, to be reproduced at proper intervals?  With the date changed, it would always, have its original value, and perfectly satisfy the demand, if a demand exists, for this sort of news.