“Old familiar declining and falling off.”—Silas Wegg.

“All things earthly,” said the wit, “have an end—except Upper Wimpole Street.” And the end of the Press has been cheerfully foretold by the Jeremiahs of Fleet Street. So obvious, I have been recently informed, have become the symptoms of disintegration and decay in the institution known under the style and title of “The Daily Press” that the publicist who would call attention to the fact must be prepared to hold himself rather cheap.

Now, it is almost a truism to say that there is in the older members of any profession an intuition which compels them to regard their own early days in a calling as indicating the high-water mark of that vocation, whatever it may have been. The reason for this curious attitude of the human mind is not very far to seek. To parody Lytton, “the youthful and the beautiful are one.” And a profession regarded by one who is young, ardent, impressionable, and credulous, will not appear the same thing to him when he views it, in its new developments, with old eyes and in a spirit of detachment. That which differs in the new constitution from the conditions of the old he will regard as bad or puerile or reactionary. The old things he sees through a golden haze; the new he regards with the rheumy eyes of the valetudinarian.

In the old newspaper man this instinct to depreciate the present I have found very strong. His pose is invariably that of the laudator temporis acti. In all its departments and through all its methods he observes what Wegg calls “the Decline-and-Fall-Off” of the daily paper. Old actors are very much like old pressmen in this respect. Their early days were always “the palmy days.” And as there have always been living old actors to impress this fact on the minds of successive generations, it is obvious that all time, past and present, was and is that blessed period known as “the palmy days.”

But while I do not note in the newspaper Press, as it exists to-day, those signs of disintegration and wasting—that “old familiar declining and falling off”—which have been diagnosed by aged professors, I do observe the passing of certain stages of the evolution of the newspaper; and I can even read in those indications the foretaste of a time when the newspaper, as we know it now, will have ceased altogether to exist.

I will endeavour to explain.

It is not alleged by our Jeremiah that the newspapers have “declined and fallen off” in circulation. I write without statistics and making a mere intelligent guess when I estimate that there are at least four times as many copies of newspapers sold in a day in London now as were sold in 1870. Here, at least, there is no indication of decline; and if there be anything at all in the law of supply and demand, we are bound to infer that the proprietors of newspapers must be supplying that which the public demands. Public taste is not created or directed by newspapers. The clever editor is he who shrewdly anticipates the direction of the public taste, and caters for it. It is a flair which the editor may possess in common with the theatrical manager and the restaurateur. He exercises it in exactly the same way as George Edwardes exercises it or as “Jo” Lyons exercises it. “Find out what the fool of a public wants, and give it to ’em!” was the advice given me once by the managing director of a syndicate of newspapers of the North of England. And it was sound advice.

If this view of the whole duty of the modern editor be correct, it involves the admission that the newspaper of to-day has abandoned its ancient traditions, just as it has thrown aside the worn-out clichÉs. Half the disgust of the journalistic Jeremiah with the new order is caused, I believe, by the abandonment of those time-honoured clichÉs. He endures a pang of regret and resentment when, in reading the account of a fire, he finds no allusion to “the devouring element.” He is incapable of understanding that the public does not care any more for “the devouring element,” and that the penny-a-liner has been superseded by the crime investigator and other weird officials called into existence by the new reader of newspapers.

When our poor old Jeremiah was young, the newspaper was, primarily, the organ of a party—sometimes its official organ, but always, whether officially or unofficially, representing one of the great political parties. Nominally, indeed, it is so still. But there is no underlying enthusiasm, nor is there any continuity of conviction. Many of our “esteemed contemporaries” are, ostentatiously, rail-sitters. But the Press has ceased to have any influence with Cabinets, nor are editors any longer consulted by Cabinet Ministers. No editor will ever again hold the position with regard to Ministers held by Dr. Giffard of the Morning Herald, or John Delane of the Times. By the way, the Conservative party owed a great deal more than they were ever willing to acknowledge to the said Dr. Giffard. I suppose that they considered that they had wiped out the debt when they made his son Lord Chancellor and an Earl! One of these days we shall find politics left out of our papers save at election times, when the space will be hired by persons wishing to advertise their political convictions.

The new conditions under which the newspaper exists, and the new methods introduced by its conductors, were foreordained, though not foreseen, when Mr. Forster’s Education Bill became law, and the School Board education was offered to the youth of merry England. Paterfamilias bought his newspaper in the dark ages before Forster. The generations that developed under Forster’s Act demanded newspapers of their own, but they were not prepared to pay a penny for them. And, lo! the halfpenny Press arose at his bidding—the bidding of the Board School boy and the bicycle boy—and remaineth with us even unto this day.

Clearly, the halfpenny paper could only afford half the space to what is known as “original matter” that was accorded by its penny rival. Parliamentary and law reports were made taboo. The “snippet” habit was inoculated on to the vile body of the daily Press from virus obtained from the “Bits” papers. And so eager was the bicycle boy to swallow his tabloided doses of news that he never discovered the inroads gradually made by the advertiser on the spaces originally devoted to reading matter. Nay, so contented was he with the latest method of presenting the news of the day, that he did not even mind when further encroachments were made on his news columns, and a daily portion of the broadsheet was filched for the presentation of a solid chunk of fifth-rate fiction. In his present temper the bicycle boy appears ready to stand almost anything!

Meanwhile, and in face of this determined and successful competition on the part of the halfpenny papers, what has been the policy of the penny news-sheets? They have gone on enlarging their borders, increasing their bulk, and adding to their weight—adding to their weight, I mean, in the literal, and not in the figurative, acceptation of that phrase. The Parliamentary and law reports are more formidable in their length and particularity than ever. Book-reviewing is carried on to an extent hitherto only demanded in a literary weekly; essays on engineering, gardening, motoring, fishing, have regular days devoted to them. The advertisers are no longer satisfied with a modicum of space. The mural poster has been transferred to the pages of the penny morning paper. Oxbridge’s full pages have become an expected item in the day’s entertainment, and Coco’s illustrations of his physical perfections have become an integral feature of our daily portion. The result is that the penny paper has grown to an unwieldy bulk, awkward to handle, impossible to turn over in a train or in the open, and containing, in proportion to the small ha’pennyworth of what one does want, an intolerable deal of what one does not, and is never likely to, want.

The general conclusion to be deduced from these necessarily undemonstrable statements is that the fate of any given newspaper is in the hands of the advertisers. Editors choose to address themselves exclusively to their readers, and maintain a splendid official ignorance of the advertiser. This is the only pose possible to the well-regulated editor. Did he for a moment admit, even to himself, that his professional emoluments were derived from Oxbridge and the British and foreign tradesman generally, he would no longer be able to take the Press quite so seriously as he does; indeed, he would scarcely be able any longer to take himself quite seriously, and that would surely be a great pity.

Suppose for a moment that some other channel were discovered—we live in an age of surprising discoveries—which the advertisers regarded as more suited to their requirements than the present system. What happens? The small advertiser, whose three-and-sixpences form the real backbone of every newspaper enterprise, follows the big one. The papers shrivel up in dimensions, and down comes the price, or, in the alternative, up go the shutters. I am glad to reflect that the owners of newspapers have made such fortunes out of their enterprise that they can calmly face the future.

I have shown how the pressure of advertisers has affected the penny papers. It has induced them to increase their space and the quantity of their “reading matter.” On the chief of the halfpenny morning papers the pressure has had an entirely different effect. The astute proprietor has met increased pressure by an increased tariff. The advertiser’s scale on the principal halfpenny paper is, I believe, higher than that of the Times. Even at this prohibitive rate the public presses on with a demand for publicity for its wants. This impinging on the domain of the mere reader is skilfully masked. Always the advertiser is asking for, and obtaining, more space. The tabloids of news are more scientifically compressed. Unconsidered trifles are snipped off the stodgy chunks of negligible fiction; for the newspaper feuilleton is but a sickly growth in Fleet Street soil. The leading article is squeezed into a paragraph to admit the prospectus of a pill. Yet the paper is made to look the same as usual. There is never anything dÉcolletÉ about its appearance, no matter how much it may have been stripped. But here also there is an appointed limit beyond which it will be impossible to step without incurring the suspicion and arousing the resentment of the long-suffering reader. That limit, I apprehend, may at any time be touched.

At present the newspaper habit appears to be strong, inherent, and hereditary, in the British people. But is the habit really as deep as it is widespread? With men of the world the habit does not even now persist. The man of the world seldom reads a newspaper. He will take a copy up, and give a glance at stocks or at starting prices. In the smoking-room of his club he will use the daily broadsheet as a screen what time he is sleeping the sleep of the just-tired. Society will, however, always want to know what is “going on,” and the end of the transition period of journalism upon which we have entered will be heralded by the introduction of a contrivance, original, scientific, and up-to-date, whereby the latest intelligence shall be distributed with increased certainty and celerity, and at a moderate cost.

The new contrivance, we may cheerfully assume, will make no use whatever of paper or printer’s ink. Science will have exposed the insanitary effects of a continuous matutinal contact with these obsolete media, and the common-sense of the community will at last have discovered their curious inadaptability. The newspaper microbe will become as familiar a topic with the public as the lobster. Medical Officers of Health will “come down on” insanitary journals, even as in our own time they “come down on” defective drains. When the transition period shall have come to an end, and when the newspaper, as we know it, shall have come to an end, too, the disseminator of news will, it may reasonably be anticipated, appeal directly to the ear, and not to the eye, of the public. Nay, seeing that to science nothing is impossible, may we not be enabled to absorb our news without fatiguing either ear or eye? We may be taught to “take it in through the pores,” like Joey Ladle.

The eventual solution of the difficulty will, doubtless, come to us from the element responsible for most of our modern miracles. An adaptation of wireless methods with the telephone seems to be indicated. The newspaper office of the future will be a vast exchange, an enormous central depot, from which the news of the day will be transmitted to scattered subscribers. At these central establishments the news of the world will continually pour in. Skilled hands—the old sub-editorial hands—will winnow it, prune it, classify it, and, generally speaking, make it ready for the million receivers of the subscribers. Happily, the new order will involve little or no abrogation of the functions of the journalist. The editor, of course, is doomed, for the public will pay for news, and not for notions. But even under the journalistic order as we know it the power of the editor has become more and more circumscribed. He has been going for a long time; soon he will have gone. But the position of the staff should be enhanced. The journalist, who must reappear under some other title, will be brought more under the personal control of the subscriber. Errors in collection or transmission will, as in other departments, be traced to their source. The members of a staff will no longer find shelter behind the impenetrable anonymity of an editor. They will have less kudos, but they will have better pay. They will have become the servants of a sound commercial undertaking, and they will have ceased to talk of themselves as “the Fourth Estate of the Realm.”

The processes of evolution are very gradual, and go unrecorded. How long will this one take? A century? Half a century? Shall we tie ourselves to a date, and fix upon the year 1960 as the time of the great consummation?

Let us imagine the passage of the intervening years, and seek out Jones in the suburbs, the suburbs in 1960 meaning an area of twenty-five miles from the City. Jones descends with all his accustomed pomposity to the wife and olive-branches assembled in the breakfast-room. He acknowledges the salutes of the family with that semiregal affability which is one of his most engaging characteristics. He looks through the window, and notes with satisfaction that his aeroplane is moored to the aero-railings—shall I say? Then he seats himself at the breakfast-table, and places the “receiver and communicator” in position at his side, or, rather, at the side of his plate. This insignificant implement is of silver or of gold or of inferior metal, according to the means or tastes of the subscriber. It is the “last word”—as far, at least, as 1960 has gone. It sucks in from the ambient air the news sent circulating from the central depot, and by a most ingenious contrivance it will record only such news as is demanded of it. This selection is regulated by a curious arrangement of “stops.” There is the “City” stop, the “Parliamentary” stop, the “Courts” stop, the “Racing” stop. Jones, you may depend, turns the “City” tap on before any other. In answer to his inquiry as to the prices of certain stocks, he obtains an immediate answer. He next inquires as to the result of last night’s debate in the House of Commons. He does not seek after sporting intelligence at the breakfast-table—bad example to the boys, he considers it. Thus the news is gently murmured to Jones as he eats his ham and eggs; for, in spite of the advance of science, the middle-class breakfast-table of 1960 is the middle-class breakfast-table of the early Victorian era. Jones digests his mental pabulum as he masticates his food.

Jones rises from his place, hastens out to his aeroplane, and is soon purring along to Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Being a considerate paterfamilias, he leaves the “receiver” at home for the use of the family. His unselfishness in this respect may be discounted by a consideration of the fact that he has another “receiver” at his office in the City. The family gathers in turn round the little implement—scarcely bigger than a Jew’s-harp it is—and apply to the vibrating atmosphere, now charged with intelligence hot from a thousand sources, for items suited to the domestic hearth. The boys have, I will suppose, had a first “cut in,” clamorous about starting prices or cricket. But the interests of the ladies are more various and more widespread. They would know, for instance, who is married and who dead? What is going on at the theatres, and what at the Court? How is Society conducting itself? There is no scandal about Queen Elizabeth, one may piously hope? How shapes the gossip of the day, and is there an announcement of any Great Pink Sales?

In ten minutes they have learned all that the heart of woman can desire to know, and they have satisfied their legitimate thirst for knowledge without having had to prosecute a weary search through the unwieldy pages of a bulky newspaper. I can imagine the fond mother of 1960 fetching a sigh as she recalls the sad, bad system which was in vogue in the days of her innocent childhood. She shudders at the memory of the blurred, insanitary broadsheets of an earlier time.

And the cost? . . . I do not suppose that it will exceed the amount of the subscription at present paid for the daily delivery of a penny paper. It would probably “pan out” at something less. The cost of a penny paper totals up to something like five-and-twenty shillings a year. For an annual subscription of a guinea the little implement will probably be placed at the disposal of its customers by the great central exchange. . . . So mote it be!