NEWSPAPER EDITORS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume II, Issue 207, 23 September 1874, Page 2

NEWSPAPER EDITORS.

The first and prime requisite in an editor is political intelligence. This is distinct from political information. It bears the some relation to politics as artistic perception does to art, which is very different, I need not say, from acquaintance with the history of painting, its technicalities and cant. Political intelligence is that faculty which enables a man to see events and policies in just relative importance to the times in which he lives, to feel with aceurraey the popular pulse, to know what is practicable and what not, to nicely appraise the effect that will be produced by any given step, and even by the tone in which it is discussed ; it is antithetic alike of the small intelligence of sharp men w'ho judge every question with off-hand dogmatism, from the standpoint of a narrow experience and defective sympathy, and of the wild haste with which strong minds, wanting in penetrating insight, mistake transitory phenomena for manifestations of enduring force. Even genius, as was seen in the case of Dickens and the Daily News, will not make up for the want of this strong, sobering gift; and where men of great reputut ion in literature and as political thinkers have taken the editorship of a paper, it has been proved, by lamentable failure, how impossible it is to dispense w’ith this rare faculty. Discomfiture and loss have followed so unerringly and speedily the appointment of specialists to edit newspapers, that it has passed into a commonplace that to choose a man who should resort for inspiration, not to those great practical questions

in which the foundations of States are laid, but to doctrinaire dreamings of dilettantism, is to foredoom the journalistic venture before it is born. Of course it follows that, in order to preserve journalistic individuality, the editor, so far as the conduct of the paper is concerned, must sink his own. Nothing is more dangerous to newspaper success than to allow small personal passions to interfere with its management. Notwithstanding what has been said about the importance of the editorial columns a newspaper is above everything else a newspaper. All the news of the past twenty-four hours should be found within its pages. To lag behind, to allow oneself to be anticipated, is fatal; and to exclude news on the ground of private pique, or to permit private friendship to flood the columns with matter of doubtful interest, and to the exclusion of news, is equally suicidal. The public soon see whether a paper is making, without looking to the right hand or to the left, for a mark held well in view, or whether it is subordinate to the whims of an irrepressible egotism—whether it is, in fact, an organ of opinion and news, or only a cage where some lively squirrel disports in the happy but delusive conviction that the world has nothing to do but to contemplate and admire his movements. There never has been a journalistic success under any conditions which would test principles of management, but it will be found, on examining the steps by which large circulation and great influence have been attained, that personal passions have been kept aside, while the policy of the paper has flown on strong and unreturning, in accordance with definite views which may have been — from the point of view of political philosophy—wise or unwise, but which in immediate purpose and ultimate aim were unmistakeable. — Canadian Monthly.