Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 May 1893 — Journalism and Literature. [ARTICLE]

Journalism and Literature.

A writer on a New York publication asks if journalism is literature, and very promptly answers that it is not. As journalism is a business, an effort, a means, and as literature is a result, an accomplishment, an achievement, it is evident that journalism is not literature any more than a speaker is a sermon or a blacksmith the horseshoe he hammers out on his anvil. Journalism is a cause and literature an effect. But our able literary friend moans to deny that the matter published in the newspapers is entitled to classification as literature. This is not much more sensible than the other. A great deal that is published in the newspapers is fiery bad literature —especially when criticisms are being written by persons with an inadequate knowledge of the English language. But, that aside, it is an undoubted fact that the newspapers are doing more to encourage and disseminate good literature than all other agencies combined. The greatest productions of the greatest minds of the age are published in the newspapers, very often in extenso, and where it is not possible to publish them fully, still, in such abstracts and with such excerpts as will give a fair idea of their scope and character. As far as general literature is concerned, it would be badly off, indeed, were it not for the newspapers; the magazines being controlled in the interest of the publishing houses that issue them and being thus under bonds not to give too much *encourment to anything that bears the imprint of a rival house. In poetry, in fiction, in the literature of the tine arts and of science, in biography and in history, the newspapers, by what they publish as well as by what they call to the attention of their readers as it appears in books, are doing incalculable service in the cause of good literature. It is said with some approximation to truth that much of what they publish is incomplete, hut on the otheT hand they publish much that has been worked out with the greatest care. But above this, the most important work to be done through literature is to suggest ideas, and in power of suggestion pn every subject that is occupying attention in any port of the world the newspapers are not equaled now, nor have they ever been, nor are they ever likely to be. The use of literature is to bring the minds of all men into contact, into fuller understanding of each other and into greater sympathy with each, Through what other agency is so much accomplished in this direction as through the newspapers?