penny morning papers. With them may be bracketed the Globe and the Evening Standard, both celebrated in Grub Street for a regular daily un-editorial article, to which I have referred in Chapter VI. When you have contributed a "turnover" to the Globe, you may congratulate yourself. The Evening Standard article has less pretensions.
Save as receptacles for short stories of a lurid inferior kind, the halfpenny evening papers have little interest for the outside contributor. The Echo is an exception, showing a fondness for short, quiet, topical articles of a rather serious nature.
Among morning papers, the most attractive to the outside contributor is the Daily Mail, one of the best-edited newspapers in the world. The Daily Mail does not ask itself on receiving an unsolicited contribution: "Is it our custom to publish things of this kind"? No, it scorns precedent and is always anxious for novelty. It demands absolute freshness, a great deal of verve, and the strictest brevity. It makes a feature of very short interviews and articles on topics of the hour. On its seventh page, under the title "The Daily Magazine," room is usually found for matter of a general nature--glorified Tit-Bits confections. If the Daily Mail has a weakness, it is for statistical articles of an international character, illustrated by ingenious diagrams--articles in which Great Britain by hook or by crook is made to surpass and outvie every other country.
Another halfpenny morning paper, The Morning, has burst the fetters of precedent and usage, and willingly considers every suggestion of originality. Its methods are those of New York and frankly sensational.
The penny morning papers are difficult of access, relying chiefly on bands of regular contributors. The least hide-bound are the Daily Chronicle and the Daily News. On Saturday the former has a women's page, for which it accepts outside contributions with some freedom. The Daily News has a reputation for humorous articles dealing with the domesticities.
Of the illustrated sixpenny weeklies, Black and White and the Sketch are usually ready to consider short stories, dialogues, interviews, and light articles, the Sketch being the more exigent of the two. The Illustrated London News and the Graphic depend for matter upon their own staffs and regular correspondents, and I believe that neither accepts any fiction from outsiders. To the politico-literary weeklies, Saturday Review, Speaker, and Spectator, the aspirant need not turn her ambitious eye. They are fastidious; they demand advanced technique, and moreover they touch subjects with which women are not often conversant. Of the three, the Speaker is the least exclusive.
With the vast hordes of religious papers (it is stated that several hundred are published in London alone) I shall make no attempt to deal. But it may be well to say that many of them pay very badly and many of them do not pay at all. The best, speaking from a journalistic point of view, is the British Weekly, a Nonconformist journal which prints all sorts of things, and which is edited with brilliant skill; unfortunately it has the bad habit of not returning rejected articles.
As regards the comic weekly press, not much falls to be said. It may be separated into three divisions. First, Punch (threepence), which for several decades has stood, and still stands, quite alone. It is usual to say that Punch has of late years been steadily losing its reputation, but the truth of the statement seems at least doubtful; and however this may be, indubitably Punch is yet the foremost comic weekly. Though it depends in the main upon a regular staff, its doors are not locked against the outside contributor. Second, Judy (recently edited by a woman), Fun, Moonshine, and Pick-Me-Up (one penny). Like Punch, all these papers, except Pick-Me-Up, are noticeably conservative in their policies, and continue to move in the old grooves. They do not, I imagine, offer much opportunity to the outside contributor. Pick-Me-Up devotes itself to the humour of the music-hall, and is probably not largely beholden to women for its sprightliness. Third, the halfpenny organs of wit, represented by Comic Cuts, and twenty other sorts of Cuts. If a woman considers herself destined for the comic press, her wisest course is to collaborate with an artist. A joke may be the best and most original joke in the world, but it will not have a very safe chance of acceptance unless it is illustrated. The illustration per se may be without talent; no matter; mediocre pictures have certainly been instrumental in selling innumerable jokes. And as with jokes, so with "skits," satires, and parodies: the writer must combine with the artist if success is to be reached.
Monthly magazines divide themselves into three classes:--First, the purely popular,--Strand, Ludgate, Pearson's, Windsor, Woman at Home, Lady's Realm, &c. Second, the high-class general,--Blackwoods', Pall Mall, Macmillans' Cornhill, Longmans', &c. Third, the reviews,--Nineteenth Century, Contemporary, Fortnightly, National, and Westminster. Of these three classes, the aspirant is likely to succeed best with the second, since the first demands names of renown, and the third either expert knowledge, scholarship, or high technique.
I have left to the last the women's papers, which are, in the natural order of things, written chiefly by women. It is of course to be expected that women-aspirants should turn first to women's papers, of whose characteristics they should certainly make a special and minute study, but at the same time I must repeat the warning already given against the habit of dealing only with subjects interesting to or connected with the female sex. Women's papers are sharply divided into two classes--those which appeal to women of education and breeding, and those which appeal to women of a lower social status. To the former group belong the Queen, the Lady's Pictorial, the Gentlewoman (sixpence), Hearth and Home and the Lady (threepence), and Woman (one penny). To the latter belong Home Chat, Home Notes, and their countless imitators.
The beginner must bear in mind the essential differences between these two groups, which, in catering for quite different tastes, necessarily follow widely divergent policies. Both groups pay reasonably well, and it may be said that all women's papers of any reputation whatever give a considerate ear to the outside contributor. The sixpennies, having what amounts to unlimited room, offer to the aspirant a spacious and delightful field.
Chapter X
"Woman's Sphere" in Journalism
There are certain departments of journalism which women have always had, and probably will always have, to themselves: I mean the departments comprising fashion, cookery and domestic economy, furniture, the toilet, and (less exclusively) weddings and what is called society news. It is unlikely that men will ever seriously compete with women in the business of supplying the stuff which women as a sex are supposed to read. My own belief is that men could deal very capably with these subjects, or most of them, if they chose to assume the task; but there happens to be a superstition that such matters are beyond a man's scope; men accept the superstition, and leave them alone. Hence the distinctive "woman's sphere" in journalism.
Now almost all the work falling within this sphere is done badly--with a lack of technical skill which can only be described as shameful. I have argued (in Chapter II.) that the defect is attributable to the early training which women receive. A further explanation lies in the fact that, in their particular field, they are never stimulated to improvement by the sight of better performances than their own; the result, viewed dispassionately, is deplorable.
In the first place, nearly all women's work dealing with feminine subjects is in a special degree disfigured by slipshod writing. This is particularly true of fashion articles, which are on the whole worse written even than police reports in country newspapers. Of the scores of fashion articles appearing week by week in journals of standing, not five per cent. would pass muster as the work of men. I take up, for an example, one of the "great London dailies," containing
