American Reporting.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 224, 15 October 1887, Page 8

American Reporting.

The American style of reporting is most novel, displaying as it does a curious mixture of facts, and comments written with a grim humour. Take for instance the following, which was reproduced in a contemporary :—": — " John Smith, in Nebraska, said ho could handle a rattlesnake' the same as a snake charmer. The churlishness of the undertaker in demanding pay in advance delayed the funeral four days. — Few men would try to dry gunpowder in a kitchen stove. A man in Canada did. His afflicted family would be glad of any information as to' his whereabouts. — A man in New Hampshire the other clay ate fifteen dozen nw .oysters on a wager. The silver trimmings alone on his coffin cost twelve dollars and thirty - five cents. — A boy in Detroit disregarded his mother's warning not to skate on the river, as the ice was t thin. Sis mother don't have to cook for so many as she did by one." This is, of course,- a caricature, but still it gives a t very good idea of the tendency manifest -in the American pres3. Occasionally we see r this sort of thing in pur own papers, an instance of - which occurs to our memory. A provincial paper appeared with heavy black column rules, sitch as are used as a sign of mourning, which was explained by an "editorial," or we may fairly suppose "sub-editorial," stating, "Last week we gave a,n account of a fashionable wedding, and, by the oversight of our {-reader, wero made 1 to speak, of the costly ' trousers' of the bride. The bridegroom' has called-— and 1 our editor'^, light has gone out." , An Eastern editor said that a man in New , York gat'Hriinsolf into trouble by pmrrying, tWo 1 wives,' to which a western edjtor 'replied by assuring his contemporary that a gootf'iriany men in that section had done the same by marrying one. Following upon thw' came a- statement from a northern editor that quite a number of hia acquaintances had found trouble enough by

barely promising to marry, without going •any further, whereupon a southern editor said that a friend of his was bothered enough when simply found walking with another man's wife.