There is a great deal of romance and glamour attached to war correspondents personally, to the men, who suffer hardships and risk their lives more from fever than from bullets at the front, but none to the organization which sends them unwillingly abroad. It is a plain fact however that the public at present takes less and less interest every year in either foreign or war correspondence. The great public is intelligent and quick but not at all addicted to continuous attention devoted to anything but its business and serious amusements. It has become so much accustomed to have its interest sensationally stimulated at frequent intervals that nothing will hold it very long. All news has to partake of the nature of a “story” in the newspaper sense; the fate of kingdoms, the marriage of a Gaiety actress, the trial of a clever criminal will weigh differently for the time with the man in the train and the tram car but the duration of his interest will not be appreciably different in any case. Of the three the trial will probably be remembered the longest. The amount of space now devoted to this class of special correspondence remains still more a matter of tradition than calculation but the latter is slowly overtaking it and daily curtailing it. The dictum of a leading London manager about news is, that he will not print anything that interests less than a third of his readers and such a policy is beginning to cover the whole field and to narrow news down steadily only to those things which are next door to the daily preoccupation of the majority of readers.

In any account, however brief, of the characteristics of the American method of manufacturing “stories” one cannot omit to mention that extraordinary phenomenon of their journalism; the Sunday paper. Of these there are some which consist of the daily issue with additional supplements, which are conducted on the plan of a magazine. They are on the whole the exceptions and the majority are built on a sensational scale both as to size and as to general eccentricity of character. To a stranger, even if he be English, they are almost incomprehensible and indescribable and, as criticism on these points is quite a delicate matter, it would be safer to repeat an American description of them. “The average Sunday paper is like nothing else on earth. It might well be called a literary dime museum, for the editor presents not ‘stories’ that will simply amuse or entertain, but only those which will attract attention, because of their absurdity and the pictures, which sometimes cover whole pages, are, if anything, more unusual than the text.”