Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1873 — Itemizing. [ARTICLE]

Itemizing.

Who that regularly reads the newspapers, says a Philadelphiajournal, has not been struck with those many-named columns into which the news of all tke'world is compressed? Variously styled in various newspapers, they aim to grasp and focalize the news of everything and - everybody, everywhere, and to present it in as small and telling a space as possible. They carry the reader in a breath from Indus to the Pole, and hurry him along from sentence to sentence, to conduct him in a trice to antipodes of thought. The reader never thinks, as his eyes take their rapid journey down the columns, of the care, the pains, the taste, the skill, the patience necessary to reduce those items tp. attractive shape. The scissors and the paste do a great deal of the work, it is true, but the brain kelps mqre than it is given credit for. Fancy and imagination and judgment have to play their part. The scissors dart instinctively at a “good” item, and the brains step in and decide whether its publication would be judicious. Is the item old? Has it ever appeared before? Ib it nice and fresh and crisp and sparkling? What position shall it hold with regard to the other items? Has another on the same subject been already clipped out? Might not the phraseology be changed, so as to bestow point and pith? Could a 'piquant joke be tag-* ged on? Again, when the selection is done, and the items—personal, miscellaneous, religious, theatrical and what not —are all arranged in order, will they, make a glittering and systematic whole, over which the eye will delight to rove, like a bird from flower to flower. All these things have to be considered in attending to the “item” department of a newspaper. The tastes of every possible reader must be anticipated. Since it takes all sorts of peoplo to make a world—a triiism of profounder meaning than is generally appreciated—it takes all sorts of Items to make a newspaper.— Daily Graphic. f ' !. • * . —Rose Terry* the Hartford poetess and authoress, was married recently to Rollin H. Cooke, a banker of Winsted, Conn.