The war was not reported with especial brilliancy until just before its end. In the closing months some very fine work was done, but until then dull routine narration was the vogue. Censorship, the syndicate requirement, the never ceasing congestion of the wires, the compelled reduction in the size of newspapers, were the chief causes for the moderation. A correspondent who knows that his matter is to be cut and slashed two or three times by censors before it reaches his editor loses much of the inspiration to brilliant work.
For the first time in any war, correspondents were compelled to wear a uniform--the ordinary officers’ uniform without any mark or rank, but with a green brassard around the left upper arm. Each correspondent was compelled to provide himself with everything needed in the field including his transport which meant motor car and horses. It has been estimated that the correspondent’s expenses were about eight hundred dollars a month. The correspondents were paid from four thousand to ten thousand dollars a year salary, three or four of especial reputation getting more than the latter sum.
The war involved vast additional expense to newspapers. The cost of maintaining men in the field and in news centers, the cost of transmitting dispatches, especially through the cables, as well as the enormously increased price of every product that entered into newspaper construction helped to swell the total. The increase in the price of printing paper alone cost our newspapers of large circulation an additional eight hundred thousand dollars or nine hundred thousand dollars a year. Instead of paying from seven to ten cents a word for cable transmission, as before the war, the press paid latterly twenty-five to thirty-five cents from London and Paris. Some papers paid as much as one thousand dollars for single dispatches and frequently expended ten thousand dollars a week for the transmission of war reports. In the Gallipoli drive, messages were sent to Constantinople by automobile, thence wired to Vienna, relayed to Berlin, relayed again to The Hague and again to London, whence cabled to America at a total cost of about a dollar and a half a word. Yet we failed to note any relaxation of effort or of expense on the part of American newspapers to get the news. It is an axiom of the business that the very life of the sheet depends on a lavish expenditure for the purchase of information. The big newspapers were compelled to have special correspondents in all the big centers of allied, belligerent and neutral countries, to cover the political situation and other things arising from the administrative state of the war. For example, Holland was the center of German news, being on the frontier and on the main route. Here, naturally, a man obtained the big German news first of all, the German newspapers, the narratives of persons passing from Germany. Switzerland was a news center of almost equal importance for the same reasons. Sweden and Norway had to be covered. It was very trying for the newspapers, very expensive.