I've always been rather fascinated by the difference between French and English newspapers. The major French newspapers mainly consist of debates about issues by very erudite thinkers. I found this recently and I think Chesterton's comments still pretty much stand today. I left the original paragraphing. Our ideas about that have certainly changed with the trend towards shorter and shorter paragraphs.
G.K. Chesterton on Newspapers
His illuminating Comparison Between English and French Journals
from the New York Times Feb 2, 1913
In a delightful article in The Illustrated London News, in which he wages a wordy war against the militant suffragettes, G.K. Chesterton, most electric of modern writers, has a few words comparing the modern French and English newspapers. We quote a few passages below:
“The habit of getting everything thoroughly mixed up in your mind, and then calling it the Higher Unity, has a disadvantage even deeper than its superficial one. The further difficulty is this: ‘That things are not always different from each other; but are even more different than they seem to be. Compare two nations, or two sects, or two colleges; and you will often find, after much perplexity, that the resemblance is on the surface, while the difference is at the root. Thus (to take the first case that happens to occur to me) an English newspaper and a French newspaper cannot really be compared at all; and the difference between them is not one of degree. Yet because they are both printed on paper and not on vellum, because they are both printed in black ink and not in green or red, because the words are arranged in a column and not in a spiral, both an Englishman and a Frenchman would probably think that the difference is merely one of degree, and each would underrate the other. The Englishman would think his newspaper was more full, more varied, more packed with the news of the world, better produced and cheaper at the price; and he would suppose that the Frenchman had aimed at these things, but had not achieved them as well as he. The Frenchman would think that his newspapaer was more of a force in politics; told him more of the truth about his country’s condition; was more exciting to any one to whom thought is an excitement; was written by more interesting men, and in a much better literary style. And he would suppose that the Englishman had been aiming at these things, but had not achieved them as well.
But, in truth, the resemblance of the two sheets is a mere resemblance of shape, like the resemblance of a barrel of gunpowder to a barrel of pork, or the wheel of a cart to the wheel of a ship. The difference in the two things is a difference in the aim - in the whole original idea of having newspapers at all. Even if the owners of both papers are out to make money, (and this is not so universally the case in France,) they will hope to make money providing the public with two quite different things, answering two quite different human appetites. The English newspaper is a sort of scrapbook; a miscellany of all sorts of things that have happened in the world; valued as a general widening of the mind; something that is amusement and curiosity, but has also something higher in it, something of the homo sum, nihil, etc. The English newspaper is enjoyed as a Christmas parcel or a playbox is enjoyed. The Englishman opens his paper as the English boy opens a hamper. The larger the hamper the better; and the more various the things are the better. But the French newspaper is not constructed like a hamper, but like a bomb. Its first object is, not to entertain, but to arouse; nor does it aim at distributing the reader’s interest over a wider field, but, on the contrary, at pulling his ideas together and fixing them on some particular point. A real bomb may shatter your brains physically; but even a real bomb is meant to concentrate them morally. And if a French paper is short and fierce, (or, as we might say, meagre and malignant,) it is because it is primarily meant as a pamphlet--or even a proclamation. Indeed, there is a shadow of this difference between the two countries. We speak most usually of a ‘newspaper’-that is, a lot of new things that come to us wrapped up in paper, like butter or chocolate. The French more usually call it a ‘journal,’ which insists on the idea of vigilance, and of daily repeated blows and sensations. The two things can be contrasted because they look alike; but they cannot profitably be contrasted, because they are essentially different.
