The Southern Press suggests that the South’s journalism struck a literary pose closer to the older English press than to the democratic penny press or bourgeois magazines of the urban North. The Southern journalist was more likely to be a Romantic and an intellectual. The region’s journalism was personal, colorful, and steeped in the classics. News was less important than narrative. Neither "public" nor "opinion" had much meaning in a racially segregated South. Paradoxically, it was this non-reformist literary tradition that produced liberal southern editors, from Henry Grady to Ralph McGill, who were viewed in the North as both explainers of and dissidents from the South.