THE KIND OF HEADING THE PEOPLE LIKE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 223, 30 August 1884, Page 3

THE KIND OF HEADING THE PEOPLE LIKE.

ONE of the religious weeklies complains that the Call on a recent Monday gave more than a column to a ra‘; killing and a dog fight, and but a quarter of a column to the sermons of the preceding Sabbath. Our religious contemporary is of the opinion that the Press makes a mistake in catering so much to the tastes of the depraved, and so little to those of the virtuous. It believes that newspapers wo”ld find it more profitable to be decent. Herein is our religious contemporary grievously mistaken. There are ten hundred people who like to read a description of adog-figh* to one who enjoys the perusal of a sermon. For the one virtuous and intelligent citizen who takes pleasure in reading what a clergyman has to say on the great subject of the soul’s salvation, there are five thousand who revel in the report of a divorce trial. The men who manage the secular Press know this. They understand what is profitable far better than our religious contemporary can tell them. The publisher regards it as his proper business to give the people in return for their money the sort of reading that they take most pleasure in. Hence the paucity of sermons and the plethora of dog-fights, man-lights, crime and scandal in the columns of our es teemed contemporaries. The late Charles De Young had journalistic genius. He could not write himself, but h< knew what ought to be written to make i paper sell. He understood human natun thoroughly, and he turned that knowledge into coin. He knew that, however earnest? men and women may protest that their tast

is for pure literature, however indignantly they may kvdgb against the printing of immoral matter, not one in a thousand of them :an resits the perusal of the unclean when it is dished up for them with the sly humour that literary skill can impart. So Mr De Young gave his remarkable energy to gathering around him a staff of bright young men vith no more moral sense than he had, and he turned them loose upon this community to irag family skeletons from their closets, tear landages from wounds, and to lift the roofs of houses and describe the interiors. The scandal seeking, God-and-decency-defyjng Chronicle immediately sprang into a large circulation, and was a success from the first. Everybody condemned it, but everybody bought it and read it. The Chronicle strove to give the public an assassinated character for breakfast every morning, and the public showed its gratitude by pouring its money into the Chronicle's till.

Our religious contemporary must confess that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Ckroicle is but one of the many instances of journalistic success won by acting on the theory that the public, no matter how strenuous its pretence to the contrary, is fond of dirt. The New York Herald, the Boston paper of the same name, the Chicago Tinies, and numerous other journals of national circulation, made their way by the same means as the Chronicle did. Like it, as they grew in years and wealth they became more quiet and decent, and some of them are now' models of propriety, though still in the hands of the same model wicked owners. The enormous sales of such papers as the Police Gazette show what a vigorous appetite for coarse filth the public has. The equally great sales of such papers as the New York Weekly and the Fireside Companion prove how widespread is the brainless liking for inane and impossible fiction. The number of men and women who have sufficient intellect to appreciate good literature is very small in comparison with the great empty-minded herd whose moral sense feels no shock at “ Sarah Barnum,” and who laugh boisterously over the dismal humour of “ Peck’s Bad Boy of which, we arc told, more copies have been sold than of any book that has come from the Press in many years. —San Franciscan.