The Young Journalist; His Work and How to Learn It

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1902. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. LONDON JOURNALISM. FLEET STREET is the journalist's Mecca towards which he pilgrimages from the first hour that he adopts journalism as a profession. Young reporters are sent up from time to time on special business, and then the first place they make for is Fleet Street. For the newspaper man Fleet Street extends from The Times in Printing House Square to the Pall Mall in Charing Cross Road--formerly the circle was narrower, but now it takes in Covent Garden and the Embankment. Fleet Street is a charmed area, throbbing with newspaper life, and in it the professional journalist lives and moves and has his being. Fleet Street is classic ground, and when a man becomes a London journalist, he forms one of a line in direct succession to Milton and Dryden, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Johnson and Swift, Lamb and Coleridge, Thackeray, Carlyle and Dickens. Almost every man of letters during the last three centuries has written for the press, and distinguished living men are proud to have been reckoned amongst successful contributors. For reasons ancient and modern the Fleet Street atmosphere is charged with elements wanting elsewhere, and the professional journalist feels a buoyancy in it similar to that which Alpine climbers feel in high latitudes. A young man coming up from a provincial daily, with a London engagement in his pocket, experiences a sensation of elation when he walks down Fleet Street, for the first time a recognised working member of the London press. During the last twenty years the provincial daily newspapers have taken possession of unappropriated parts of Fleet Street, and now, as in the case of the Sheffield Telegraph, are setting up establishments vieing with the palatial offices of the great London dailies. Representative papers of England, Ireland, Scotla...