hat the newspaper is a public rather than a
private enterprise.

It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the
borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly
is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and
variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must have
something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the
other, or it will fail to please. The model editor, I believe, has yet to
appear. Notwithstanding the traditional reputation of certain editors in
the past, they could not be called great editors by our standards; for
the elements of modern journalism did not exist in their time. The old
newspaper was a broadside of stale news, with a moral essay attached.
Perhaps Benjamin Franklin, with our facilities, would have been very near
the ideal editor. There was nothing he did not wish to know; and no one
excelled him in the ability to communicate what he found out to the
average mind. He came as near as anybody ever did to marrying common
sense to literature: he had it in him to make it sufficient for
journalistic purposes. He was what somebody said Carlyle was, and what
the American editor ought to be,--a vernacular man.

The assertion has been made recently, publicly, and with evidence
adduced, that the American newspaper is the best in the world. It is like
the assertion that the American government is the best in the world; no
doubt it is, for the American people.

Judged by broad standards, it may safely be admitted that the American
newspaper is susceptible of some improvement, and that it has something
to learn from the journals of other nations. We shall be better employed
in correcting its weaknesses than in complacently contemplating its
excellences.

Let us examine it in its three departments already named,--its news,
editorials, and miscellaneous reading-matter.

In particularity and comprehensiveness of news-collecting, it may be
admitted that the American newspapers for a time led the world. I mean in
the picking-up of local intelligence, and the use of the telegraph to
make it general. And with this arose the odd notion that news is made
important by the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire. The
English journals followed, speedily overtook, and some of the wealthier
ones perhaps surpassed, the American in the use of the telegraph, and in
the presentation of some sorts of l