“OWN CORRESPONDENTS.”

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 175, 20 May 1864, Page 6 (Supplement)

“OWN CORRESPONDENTS.”

Tiieee are two kinds of “Own Correspondents,” —the conscientious and the unscrupulous. The conscientious correspondent is a person who rewrites every item of news of consequence he finds in the newspapers of the town in which lie belongs, and sends it off to the editor of some other newspaper at a distance, who pays him for the budget as it it were original matter. The unscrupulous correspondent is a person who takes a column or two ot news out of a local paper, and introducing it with a few lines, scuds it somewhere else for publication as his own narrative of events of which he has no personal knowledge whatever. We have representatives of both classes of correspondents in Auckland. It is many mouths since we observed our own special war news reprinted in Dunedin newspapers as the original matter of their “Own Correspondents” in Auckland. Kcmonstrance, in such cases, is useless. The mischief is done, and may bo repeated before expostulations could reach our contemporaries ; and then, what can they do ? As Auckland is the seat of war, of course it is necessary for every newspaper in the colony to have its “Own Correspondent in Auckland, and although our fellow-citizens are aware that only a limited number of people have any means of knowing at first hand what transpires at the Front, second-hand intelligence passes current at a dLtanco as the sterling metal. Wo rather approve of the unscrupulous correspondent, however. Although he is a bare-faced pilferer, he sticks to the truth, which is more than can be said for the conscientious correspondent—'the man who improves upon the facts before him for the sake or preserving something like originality. Many of those cooked despatches have gone the round ot the English papers, and have rendered many points obscure and others ridiculous, which, in the original letters wore neither obscure nor ridiculous. An illustration of this kind of writing is before us in the Hawke's Bay Herald , May 7, which we may take by way of illustration as well as anything else. It is a description of the capture of the Gate pa by the Auckland correspondent of that paper, and although we can recognize the source of the letter to bo the narrative which appeared in our own columns, the story is so incorrect in some points, and so confused and embellished by the writer, that it ought to bo looked upon as entirely original. It is needless to say that the exciting incidents about Colonel Booth and Captain Hamilton, as told in the extract which wo subjoin, are purely imaginative, and that the “diabolical yells” have been thrown in to heighten the effect. Neither Colonel Booth nor Captain Hamilton suffer in their reputation from the simple truth being told, without the addition of the “sound and fury” which characterizes the extract. —Daily Southern Cross , May 11. [The extract above alluded to is then appended. —Ed. H. B. T.~\