AMENITIES OF JOURNALISM.

Dunstan Times, Issue 318, 29 May 1868, Page 3

AMENITIES OF JOURNALISM.

Jfo years of training will make a good sub-editor of a man who has not the peculiar journalistic instinct—the faculty which enables him to see at once what is important—what is likely to interest, not a class merely, but the public at large, and what will only weary and disgust them. And so rare is this faculty, that when a really good sub-editor is discovered, and obtains a first class newspaper, he has no chance of rising from that position. Leader-writers can be had in abundance, but sub-editors are born, not made ; and a man who has once become a sub, and shewn that he is a good one, finds a great gulf opened between himself and the superior rank of journal, ists. He is too valuable to be allowed to escape from his position, and I have even known in such a case the leaders of a subeditor refused insertion, simply because the proprietors were determined to give him no encouragement in his efforts to rise to the higher dignity. There is the greasy date box on the chimney piece, the dingy old maps hung against the wall, the clumsy volumes of the ' file ' piled in hopeless confusion in the rack, the little book case stuffed wi'h works of reference—Dictionaries, Peerages, Encyclopaedias,—the labyrinth of speaking-tubes gathered on all sides of the sub-editor's seat, and the huge heaps of old newspapers, over which the unwary visitor stumbles. This, far more than the room of the chief leader writer, or of any other member of the staff, is the real heart and centre of the great machine whose influence is felt all over England ; and the man wdio labors here is he who approaches most nearly to the popular ideal of a newspaper editor. It is into whose hands that the epistles of ' Paterfamilias,' 'an Indignant Traveller,' ' A Volunteer,' ' A Constant Subscriber to your valuable Journal,' and the other variously named writers who rush to the press for the redress of their grievances, fall; he it is who knows the night before what the paper of the next morning is going to contain; who decides whether the ' copy ' which poor Flimsy, the penny a liner has dropped into the box with fear and trembling an hour before, shall be accepted and paid for, or flung carelessly into the waste basket ; who writes the stinging notes at the end of letters of disagreeable or wearisome correspondents, which are invariably signed 'Ed' as though they alone, of all the original matter in the paper, had coine from tho hands of the editor ; who compiles the readable summary of the day's news, where by in five minutes you may make yourself acquainted with all the more imporrant contents of the paper ; and under whose directi in the whole of that vast array of close reading, the law reports, accounts of meetings, accidents, ceremonies and races, letters from foreign correspondents, and miscellaneous items of information, which make up the bulk of every modern newspaper, are gathered together, condensed, digested, and arranged in the convenient form in which they are subsequently presented to tho public.