Gold Hill Daily News

CORRESPONDENCE "BURROS."

Among the most common humbugs of the present day are the so-called correspondence or news "Bureaus." They are generally composed of about one versatile individual who first resolves himself into a "Bureau," and then resolves to correspond for all the newspapers in the country. He gets a lot of pretentious, speciously worded circulars printed, and sends them to each newspaper publisher everywhere, offering to furnish letters from his particular locality—Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco, or wherever he may be, at very low rates; all the way from $3 down to nothing. This he is enabled to do by the simple process of "manifolding" all the letters. Thus by collating what few items of interest he can pick up, together with what he can steal from the daily papers, he gets up a letter which will do well enough for country newspapers or weeklies which do not publish the regular telegraphic news. The Bureau is really an enterprising chap, however, and his spunk is worthy of encouragement. Many newspaper publishers avail themselves of his services, and if he is a good, spicy itemizer, his letters are no detriment to the columns of the paper. As a general thing, however, the Bureau is a fraud in all his pretensions, and gets pretty well understood and played out before making any very heavy winnings. But the worst frauds of them all are the Bureaus in the East. They flood the newspaper offices of this coast with their circulars and propositions, which generally find their way into the waste basket, very few well-conducted newspapers publishing the manifold humbugs, even where there is no charge or consideration mentioned other than the insertion of an advertisement or puff of some big hotel or mercantile establishment in the East.