AMERICANISED COLONIAL JOURNALISM.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 235, 14 March 1885, Page 3

AMERICANISED COLONIAL JOURNALISM.

If anything were wanting to prove that colonial, and especially the Kew Zealand, journals are rapidly becoming Americanised, it is clearly shown by the fashion that has lately set in of interviewing all the celebrities who visit Auckland. No sooner does a great man like Mr Froude, George Augustus Sala, Sir K. W. dimming, or some politician from the neighbouring colonies hind than he is besieged by the newspaper reporters, notebook and pencil in hand, eager to record his utterances for the edification of their readers. What the great man may say matters not so much so long as he says anything at all that will help to fill a column, and show that the reporter has got ahead of his rival.

Of course, this system of interviewing is in perfect keeping with the modern spirit of journalistic enterprise, but I cannot help thinking that it also exhibits a tendency towards toadyism. In this colony we are in the habib of boasting of our intelligence and freedom from that subservency to rank and wealth which marks the social anomalies and disparities of old countries. We laugh at the Americans, who, while professing Kepublican sentiments, and contempt for empty titles, fall down at the feet of any rich aristocrat who visits their country, minutely chronicle his movements and doings, and fill columns of newspapers with his most commonplace sayings, and then we we show our consistency by following their example. The is some excuse for going out of the beaten track of journalism in the case of distinguished literary men, but the fashion oi' interviewing may be carried too far. Was it in America that an enterprising reporter stole a march on his contemporaries by interviewing a famous hangman '? A representative of one of the Auckland papers almost equalled this feat by interviewing the unfortunate wife of a man accused of murder, an outrageous and cruel proceeding, because ifc might, in the case of a woman thrown off her guard by grief, have adduced evidence which would have tended to criminate her husband. 1 merely quote this case as an example of the imprudent lengths to Avhich an excess of zeal may carry a reporter who is too enthusiastic in his profession, not with any special reference to more recent instances of interviewing.