The Newspaper of the Future

Evening Star, Issue 20058, 26 December 1928, Page 9

The Newspaper of the Future

A WONDER THAT WILL COME Of all the wonders the world has seen nothin*; beats the newspaper. Of all the wonders still to come we may be almost sure that nothing will beat the newspaper. One thing a journalist 1 cels as he looks backward and forward in these days. He feels that the engine he is helping to drive through the world has tome like a miracle out of the past. He feels that it is moving on to some great miracle in the future. —‘ My Magazine.’ Looking a long way ahead, what is it the journalist sees? (asks ‘My Magazine’). He sees a day when the newspaper will no longer be sold in the street or in the shop; these colossal machines will no more be printing them at 100,000 copies* an hour; these great rolls of paper five miles long will no more be seen round Fleet street. All that will pass. We shall have our own newspapers printed in our own homes. We shall probably buy a screen from 1 The Times,’ and on it every day ‘The Times’ wall print.the news for us. We shall buy as many -so a-ns as we like to have papers—or perhaps we shall have blank pages of paper supplied with the screen, and the office of the paper will print the pages before our eyes as they hang on the wall of our room, THE CHILDREN WILL SEE IT. It will not come to-morrow or the day after, and we who write may never live to see it; but it will come. Television is bringing it. There is no reason except one why a copy of tomorrow’s ‘ Times' should not be flashed by wireless to print itself on a hilltop in Kent or in a farmhouse in Devon or in a hut on the top of Ben Nevis. The reason why it cannot be done is that nabocly can afford to do it. In twenty years it will be cheap tj do it, and the newspaper revolution will have come. It is well worth while thinking about. If a picture can be sent over the wires so can the image of a printed page. No effort of the imagination is needed to see that a newspaper could prepare all its pages, advertisements, and everything included in one town in England and telegraph pictures of them in a few minutes after their completion to any other town. If that, helped by developments of photographic printing, proved a profitable or economical and speedy way of distributing a 1 newspaper it would and certainly will be adopted in the future. That is not the particular feature to which we look forward. Soon the screen of the televisor will take its place in the Englishman’s home by the side of the amplifier. Besides the sounds distributed from Daventry or 12LO there will be pictures to light up the screen. The first pictures will be simple, perhaps just the face of the announcer. After that will follow, as the invention grows abler, the singers or actors whose speech is being broadcast. .As the words are heard “ ipagic shadow ” shapes will come and' go. When this happens, and most likely before it (lappens, the news and the newspaper will have taken a hand. The broadcasting station might throw on the waiting screens photographs of the occurrences of the day which the- newspapers had secured. But the newspapers will not readily part with their monopoly, a possession by that time more precious to them than are the songs and performers of music halls and theatres to-day. The newspapers i have seen in the broadcasting of a selection of the day’s

nous an Invasion of their province*. They have survived it because the public wants something more than the mere statement of fragments of news. It wants the news set out, explained, enlarged, illustrated. It does not want bread alone. Like the king in Mr Milne’s rhyme, it docs like a pat ol butter on its bread. On the whole, the broadcasting of news has been an advertisement of the newspaper’s superior powers, in much the same way that the broadcasting of music has sent people to the gramophones and _ their superior records of the best music. At first the broadcasting stations may themselves become newspapers, though it will be a sphere they will occupy with difficulty and not without opposition. On the lighted screen they may flash a page of an official newspaper. It would contain all the guaranteed nows of the day, everything that could bear the authentic stamp of official; The broadcasting stations have lately been permitted to circulate a certain amount of controversial utterance about politics or public questions. On the official pages of the first screen newspapers those would make a guarded appearance. As the screen need not limit itself to one page or two, a number of newspaper pages might appear on it at regularly announced intervals. ALWAYS CORRECT AND SOUND. If perfection could be reached in an imperfect world we might look forward hopefully to finding on the screen the newspaper that we all have hoped for but only expected to see in our dreams —a journal always correct in its (acts, sound in its opinions, reasonable in its views, written with taste and discretion and imagination, telling us all wo wanted to know in the way we should like it told, setting out nothing at all that we would have it omit. Such a newspaper, unhappily, is not for us. In the words of the old Romans —so many men, so many minds. The newspaper which would lit them all would never exist. The newspapers which tried would perish. There is an old fable of a Bagdad farmer who was given leave to choose the days on which it should rain, the days on which the sun should shine to bring up his crops—but at harvest time his crops were poorer than those of his neighbours, who had taken what Providence had seen fit to send them. The harvest of a newspaper which tried to give everything that everybody wanted would really be a failure. Another plan will have to he adopted. An official paper will throw itself on the screen, but it will have to compete with other newspapers. To every newspaper the readers who like it. Probably in days to come every newspaper will have its own screen in the home, for which it will make a regular charge. At first it may share the official screen, being allotted a special wave length to reach it and a special hour at which to display in turn its pages. Thus every looker-in, as well as every listener-in, may select his favourite newspaper, ‘ The Times ’ (which will be published the evening before instead of the morning after), or perhaps the ‘ Children’s Daily,’ which will then have grown out -of the ‘ Children’s Newspaper.’ Or we can have the Paris ‘Matin’ or the ‘New York Times’ or the 1 North China Daily News ’ thrown on our screens. There will be no end to the selection. The well-to-do people will have many screens. We can see houses of the future with libraries or picture galleries, in which, hung on the walls instead of pictures, will be screens where the pages of the newsleisure and unlimited income, but it would suit the public library. It may be that, as a* further refinement, the page as it appears will read itself aloud —but no, that would be too much. The world would he stilled by the buzz of too many newspaper voices. Let us end our vision of the future with the imagined row of screens on which the newspapers display to us just as much as we want to read and no more. The newspaper will always be man’s companion, but'if it is to remain his guide, philosopher, and friend it must know when to be silent, papers of the world will unfold themselves as they are printed. That might be too much for the private citizen, even if he were a man of