of the Sun or the Tribune during the middle of the nineteenth century. The editor[1] and the editorial long had a growing influence as they were able to shape public opinion, but among other conventional generalizations relating to the press, none is more frequently heard than the one that the editorial has ceased to be an important part of the newspaper. The historian must therefore examine the editorial through a succession of years in order to determine how far these criticisms are justified.
How far the editor and the newspaper can be considered synonymous terms is one of the troublesome problems of the historian, but it is clear that they must be so considered during the period of personal journalism . The great age of the editor and of the editorial has been held to be the period dating from about 1830 to about 1890, although examples of them are still found. It was the period of "personal journalism "when the owner, editor, and publisher were one and the same person.
The names of Bennett, Bowles, Bryant, Buckingham, Dana, Garrison, Greeley, Raymond, suggest a period when a man acquired a newspaper and it became his personal organ . In it he fought for the causes he gave his life to promote,—for abolition, for protective tariff, for political union, for western immigration; and he fought against all forms of political corruption as well as against all who opposed his personal policies. The business organization of the newspaper gave no opportunity for "amicable but irreconcilable difference of views" between publisher and editor.[2] Irreconcilable differences often indeed existed, but they were not amicable and they existed between the different editors of different papers, not between the different parts of the same paper. When Alaric Watts was the editor of the Leeds Intelligencer, one of the proprietors of the paper wrote him from London that the new editor should be careful to refer in very gentlemanly terms to everybody "except Mr. Baines,"—the proprietor and editor of the rival newspaper.[3]
- ↑ Roscoe C. E. Brown finds the first use of the title by an American paper in the Boston News-Letter of March 7, 1728. See his interesting letter in the New York Times, March 14, 1915.
- ↑ Correspondence between the publisher and the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, daily press, January 1, 1915.
- ↑ A. A. Watts, Life of Alaric Watts, I, 163–164.
