AMERICAN JOURNALISTS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4368, 20 March 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

AMERICAN JOURNALISTS.

The three leading papers of Chicago would be a most interesting subject of study to any man who could spare the time for it. The Chicago Tribune is undoubtedly respectable, probably honest, and certainly well managed, for it gets nearly all the advertisements. Yet it is not read and cannot be, for its dullness is beyond description. Such profits as the paper derives come through the advertising department. The only really ably-conducted column in that paper is, by some unaccountable caprice o£ Providence, the musical column, written by a Mr. Upton, a man whose knowledge of music entitles him to a much more cultivated place than Chicago. Mr. "White himself, the editor-in-chief, is a regular sphinx, never speaking a word, with a constant smile on his lips, and with evidently no end of money in his pocket. He started as a penniless reporter on the same paper ; was sent to Washington, got on some committee; received there valuable information, upon the strength of which he speculated in whisky, and returned to Chicago with greenbacks enough in his pocket to buy the controlling interest in the paper he worked for, and to set aside two of its founders. And all this he did as quietly as the Trappist performs his devotions. He is now going to Europe with half-a-million dollars in his pocket. The Chicago Times is a filthy, sensational, unscrupulous publication, owned and edited by the above-mentioned old Storey, of whom no one has ever yet said a good word. That it is full of information cannot be questioned. That no New York paper gives such an amount of telegrams from evevy part of the United States is also beyond doubt. But outside of these telegrams and of news matter, everything is filth and rascality. Pay, and you can have anything you like said in the Times. The old and handsome Storey, with his profusion of white hair, and his white beard trimmed to a triangle, is as cold as marble to all the attacks of the outside world. He seems to delight in being an object of general hatred. Everybody is afraid of h!m, everybody buys his paper to see others abused ; consequently everybody pays him, and that is all he cares for. He seldom" condescends to fight anyone seriously. He merely gives pokes and kicks. The only man for whom he makes an exception in this respect is his rival and neighbor, Hesing (their offices are opposite each other). Of abusing this man he is as little weary as Hesing is of paying him back, and the slander which those two fellows print about each other is something so dirty that none but Amerioan papers could ever produce it before the public.