ciety .
intermittently to the present. At one time prison journals were
sheets giving the inmates such news from the outside world as it was thought wise for them to have,while the new prison journal
ism has given the outside world news from behind the bars.78 Modifications in the nameof a single prison journalmay be signi ficant of changes in the policy of control.79
The newspaper, when unaffected by external control, becomes everywhere a barometer indicating the fluctuating interests of society and the changing expedients in ministering to them .
" The Oldest Sporting Journal” that in 1793 80 ministered to the interests of sportsmen in England reappears in essence on the " Sporting page " of innumerable dailies everywhere aper in America ly
ab
te
sp
ts of cthe en newspaper Lew , m isthat and England . It oisfitpossible for beggars established in Paris,81 with its lists of centers where begging could
be pursued most profitably ,may have been re-incarnated in the columns and pages devoted to “ drives,” that since 1914 have so
flourished in aristocratic circles. The Mercurius Gallobelgicus that annually informed English readers of the seventeenth century concerning events on the
continent; the Annual Register that since the middle of the eighteenth century has faithfully chronicled political and literary news; the gift annuals that in the nineteenth century probably seemed to their originators the final word in periodicalmiscel lany ;82 the newspaper almanacs that for many years subordinated chronology and weather to a mass of heterogeneous information
on important subjects ;83 the Sunday newspaper that " might well be called a literary dime museum ;" 84 all these classes of periodi 78 " The New Prison Journalism ,” Literary Digest, January 22, 1916 , 52: 179- 180 ; “ Prison Journalism ,” Bookman , November, 1903, 18 : 281-290 . 79 The prison journal at Sing Sing was for some years called
The Star
of Hope, it then became the Star Bulletin , and in 1920 was renamed The
Sing Sing Bulletin . 80 H . Maxwell, Rainy Days in a Library, pp . 23 - 32. 81 New York Evening Post, January 6 , 1911 .
82 A . A . Watts, Alaric Watts, I, chaps. XV, XIX , XIII, et seq . 83 The almanac was at one time issued by many local newspapers, but as thus issued it was necessarily slight in form and in matter ; the local almanac yielded the field to that of the metropolitan press and the World Almanac is now the most important survivor, and represents in more extended and more authoritative form the earlier attempts at almanac making.
- Frank Foxcroft has discussed “ The American Sunday Newspaper,"
in the Nineteenth Century and After, October, 1907,62:6
