OCR Text |
Show WHAT IT COSTS TO GET THE NEWS. The newspaper is the cheapest thing in the world, considering the money and labor spent upon it. The man who pays a few dollars per year for a paper, from the columns of which he obtains information of events transpiring in all parts of the world, rarely has the faintest conception of the cost incurred in furnishing him with the news. A correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, now in Egypt, furnishes the following startling figures respecting the expense incurred by the English press in obtaining news of the campaign now in progress in that country: There are now in Egypt about twenty correspondents. Six men do about all the telegraphing. They are the representatives of the London Times, the Standard, Telegraph, News, Advertiser and the Manchester Guardian. It is expensive business to fill a column of a London paper. At 1s 7d a word, it comes to nearly [pound sign] 200, say a short 61000. This, however, is spent nightly by at least six newspapers. It costs eighty-six cents a word from here to New York, and the London papers are out early enough to allow the Associated Press in London to send to the west, and, taking advantage of the difference of longitude, to give every morning newspaper the gist of the London press of the same day. What reader realizes that it has cost over $1,000 to obtain the column of war news he is perusing? It has cost over that by the time it has appeared in an American paper. The same writer gives the following description of the correspondents who collect, prepare and dispatch the news: The correspondents are all well mounted, some having two or three horses and two to five servants. They affect great overhanging helmets, white coarse clothes and lace boots to the knees, or leggings. They all carry two pistols, most of them three, and a few of them four and a knife. There are some bad men from Pioche among them, I can tell you. These walking and writing armories are on the defensive, except when they incautiously criticise some general and then they are on the proper offensive, you bet, and they find it out, too. A great many cablegrams have to be prepaid, hence the correspondents have to carry a great deal of money. We have just made arrangements with the pay department of the army to give their checks for ours, and these go for coin with the telegraph company. The work is never-ending, and to do it well you must work hard. The successful correspondent should never shrink from danger, although as he must frequently make haste for a telegraph office in the rear, the fact that he leads the retreat is no imputation upon his bravery. |