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Media Problems: 1833 – 2009
Here are some extracts from an article that appeared in a publication named the Westminster Review in 1833; a year before the twenty-one year old Charles Dickens became a political journalist for the Morning Chronicle, and when Queen Victoria wasn’t a queen at all, but a princess of the awkward age of fourteen.
The terms ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ had only recently been coined, but some of the problems that the author notes are still lingering today – 176 years on.
Information Overload:
1833: ‘Newspapers are everywhere a necessary of life; multitudes of men cannot breakfast without them; after breakfast other multitudes of men resort to the club and the reading room for their perusal, with an appetite with which the hard working man seeks his dinner. Numbers of persons, both of fortune and supposed education, converse solely by and from the newspapers; and the fact of a barren journal even assumes to individuals so situated, the shape of a serious misfortune. It has even been said that suicides have been committed from a constant repetition of the announcement that nothing new had occurred – in other words that newspapers of the day were barren.’
Today:
2008: Daily Mail: Information Overload
Who Blogs Too Much? Unqualified Offerings
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Not staying on topic:
1833: ‘The Morning Paper of London aims at everything, and this may be the reason why it does nothing well. No transaction takes place which it does not perceive itself competent to report; and for reporters it is lamentable to think that it relies much on the itinerants above spoken of – persons who, if they had no inducements to be false, have no faculty enabling them to be true. The absurd style, the bad English, and the curious phraseology of that abundant crop of small and long paragraphs to be found in the morning papers, and which so often have been so often the subject of ridicule, are altogether attributable to that class of news-purveyors on whom a morning paper principally depends for its supply of facts as they are facetiously termed. The penny a line men are generally persons who are by no means qualified to report common proceedings – persons who have not had the education of decent butlers; but such is the constitution of the morning newspaper, that in these hands are the names and the characters of a large portion of their countrymen daily and hourly placed. It is they who supply the whole of that portion of the paper that comes under the head of domestic news. It is through the habit of relying on such accredited agents as these that the London newspapers are liable to be hoaxed, as they so frequently are, by pretend information…’
Today:
When good blogs go bad – Problogger
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False pretence at authority:
1833: ‘The whole of this mess is placed under the superintendence of an editor – the same person who is expected to write the dicta that are to guide the opinions of the British world for at least a day. He is to be responsible not merely his own opinion on events – event on which a secretary of state, with all the facts before him, would often find it difficult instantly to write an article for the nation… – and all this in the dead of night, when the small hours are increasing fast, in a heated factory redolent of oil and printer’s ink…’
Today:
‘Newspapers have a tradition and authority that the online world cannot yet match’ (Simon Kelner). (An article from 2006, The Future of Newspapers – The Independent)
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Burn out:
1833: ‘It is not to be denied that many of the daily papers contain articles of ability, – that some of their editors are writers of acknowledged talent; but can one man do everything? Has he the power of writing with effect daily and for ever? Is he never to read? Is no time to be given to society, to recreation, to the laying in a fresh stock of experience, to encouraging and cultivating new impressions or removing the old? So tasked is the editor of a morning journal, that he must necessarily soon be driven to the lees of his brain, and be content to foist his intellectual dregs upon the gaping world in lieu of the wisdom they have the right to expect from the pen of a public instructor…’
Today:
Blogging Burnout Prevention Tips: The Blog Herald
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The full essay can be found in this Google Book, on page 450
