The biographies of the journalists of Polish press published in West Prussia in the 19th and early 20th century usually highlight their patriotic commitment and admirable perseverance in launching and running various newspapers and journals. However, we can also find in their lives episodes that did them little credit, or even were downright disgraceful.

Judging by his private diaries, which he kept for 34 years, the press as such was hardly a major concern for Michał Römer (1880–1945), a Polish-Lithuanian aca-demic and politician who occasionally took on the role of editor and journalist. Nonetheless the diaries are an important contemporary source and a veritable mine of information about the multilingual press published in Wilno between 1911 and 1915. In the second part of that decade Römer ceased to be an active player in that scene, but he kept a watchful eye over it and continued to analyze and comment on the dramatic shifts in Poland's and Lithuania's multilingual press market, a process driven by the changing fortunes of war and its political consequences.