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Garnell University Library
Ithaca, New York

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FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

COLLECTED BY

BENNO LOEWY

1854-1919

BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY
wien
THE
COMING-.NEWSPAPER

Edited By
MERLE THORPE

Professor of Journalism in the University of Kansas

 

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1915
A GO7 VFL
CoryricxT, 1915,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

 

Published July, 1915

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRES
RAHWAY, N. J
FOREWORD

Tue material in this book was prepared upon
assignment by the editor, who had obtained, by
means of a questionnaire sent to one thousand men
and women in public and private life, suggestions
as to the most vital problems connected with jour-
nalism today. Some of the chapters were used
originally in the form of addresses and discussions
during Kansas Newspaper Week, held under the
auspices of the University of Kansas, May 10-14,
1914.

Two hundred and fifty-one editors who enrolled
for the week’s course were quickly responsive to
the plans set forth for the betterment of their pro-
fession. Mr. Waldo’s “Second Candle of Jour-
nalism ” inspired the Kansas publishers unani-
mously to request the University to pass on the
truthfulness and cleanliness of the advertising car-
ried by the Kansas papers, and a committee was
appointed which is now working out the details of
the plan. From the suggestion of Mr. Perry grew
the organization of the Kansas Daily League, and
the editors indorsed with one accord the Fair Play
and Accuracy Bureau proposed by Mr. White.
To quote a writer in the Independent, “ the week

iii
iv FOREWORD

marked an awakening of a professional conscious-
ness on the part of Kansas newspaper men.”

The first chapter, from which the book takes its
title, not because of its virtue as a “leader,” but
because it seems to cover the scope of the later
chapters, is the result of an intensive study of
journalistic conditions during the past eight years
while the writer was a teacher of journalism at
the Universities of Washington and Kansas.
Practical experience preceding this on both the
editorial ‘and business sides of rural and metropoli-
tan journalism brought to the study a sympathetic
point of view.

It is the hope of the editor that the book may
serve to give lay readers a glimpse of the many
problems underlying newspaper making, and that
it may carry to newspaper workers some inspira-
tion of the professional aspect of the newer jour-
nalism.

Mere Torre.
University oF Kansas,
CONTENTS

PAGE
Tue Comine NEwspaPer ‘ fe 48 em OR 1
‘ By Mertz Tuorp:, Dadoandiin of Kansas
{ Tanren Journatism, Goop ano BaD. wwe
By Dr. Wasuincton GLappen
v Some WEAKNESSES OF Movern Journatism .. 51
By Oswatp Garrison Vittarp, New York Rooe
ing Post
Tue CiLusser in JOURNALISM. we we BL
By Isaac D. Wuitr, New Fork World
Unto Wuomsoever Mucnu ts GIvEN . ‘ ‘ . 91
By Metvirtz E. Stone, Associated Pian
A Movern Tyre or Country JouRNALISM . , . 112
By Ratpw Tennat, Atchison Globe
A Stare License ror Newspaper MeN. : 148
By Barratt O'Hara, Lieutenant-Governor of
Illinois
Tue ENGLIsH SuBsTItUTE ror THE LicensE Prawn  . 162
By Percy S. Burren, London Telegraph
Y A Cope or Eruics ror Newsparern Men . ‘ . 17
By James Metvin Lez, New York University
GovERNMENT REGULATION FoR Press Associations . 189
By Roy W. Howarp, United Press Association
Community SERVICE . . . 205
By Franx LeRoy Bian cxann, Editor ana Pub-
lisher
Symposium: Givinc THE Pustic WHat Ir Wants . 223

By Norman Harcoop, Harper's; Dr. Lyman
Asznotr, The Outlook; Grorce Fircu; Dr.
Cuartes M. Suetpon; H. J. Hasxeir, Kansas
City Star; Hamitton Hott, The Independent;
Oswatp Garrison Vittarp, New York Evening
Post; Lawrence F. Axnsort, The Outlook.

Vv
vi CONTENTS

Tue Seconp CanpDLe or JOURNALISM
By Ricuarp H. Warpo, New York Tribune
NationaL ADVERTISING FoR THE CounTRY Press .
By Georce Hovcu Perry
Turncs to TELL tHE Mercuant
By Manco Morrow, The Capper Publications
CircuLtation Prosiems . ry
By F. M. Baur, New Fork Peibane
Aprenpix: Bureau or Accuracy anp Far Pray
By Isaac D. Wuire, New York World

PAGE
248

- 262

280

298

321
THE COMING NEWSPAPER
THE COMING NEWSPAPER

Jovurnatism along with big business, legal and
medical practice, education, and even government
itself, has not been overlooked in the present-day
popular sport of social vivisection. While most
of the critics of the newspaper are sincere, not a
few are “fireside critics’? who lack that sympa-
thetic viewpoint which comes only with an inti-
mate understanding of the conditions under which
newspapers are made. Such fault-finding is worse
than worthless because it arouses in the practical
newspaper man a cynicism, or at least an apathy,
toward all well-meaning efforts at constructive
criticism. The worst offender is the man who con-
tinually harks back to the grand old days of
Greeley, and who has not recently seen a copy of
the old-time Tribune, or who fails utterly to appre-
ciate how impossible it would be for the newsless,
violently partisan journals of the fifties to find a
place in our present-day life, unconfronted, as it
is, by any great moral crisis.

Journalism is infinitely more purposeful today
than ever before; it has assumed greater responsi-
bilities; it has acquiesced in the general feeling
2 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

that it is at least a quasi-public utility, all of
which has, in the very nature of the case, made it
an easy target for popular criticism. The purely
personal business undertaking, admittedly run on
selfish principles, may be attacked for violations
of the law, but no one has thought to attack the
motives of tradesmen and artisans.1 But when a
business announces that it is professional in spirit,
that its object primarily is to serve, then it invites
a more searching analysis. The gray newspaper,
blowing neither hot nor cold, like the gray in-
dividual, receives little of praise or censure.
The dynamic press, the purposeful press, openly
heralding its purpose to serve its community and
state, lays itself open to a daily scrutiny of its
methods and motives by every thinking and, sad
to say, every unthinking citizen. Moreover,
it is a shining mark for the attacks of vicious
forces.

One of the effects of having the searchlight
turned upon journalism is a plethora of hurry-up
legislation, both state and national, offered by
eager reformers looking to the regulation of the
press. At least twenty states considered news-
paper regulation in one form or another in 1913,
while Congress has had before it several bills de-
signed to the same end. Most of the proposed
state legislation has concerned itself with adver-

1Cf. “Business as a Profession,” by Louis W. Brandeis,
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 3

tising.? The Illinois Legislature considered a plan
to license newspaper men much after the manner
that doctors and lawyers are licensed.? In an-
other state a bill was proposed which provided for
a state board to handle all cases of newspaper
errancy,* and in Colorado the people were asked to
vote on the question of placing the press under
control of a utilities commission.’ Congress, in
the teeth of newspaper opposition, has required
newspapers to publish twice a year sworn state-
ments of ownership and to label all paid matter
“ advertisement.” | Another bill was introduced
to place the telegraph wires of the country under
the Commerce Commission, with the obvious intent
of dissolving the Associated Press.° The govern-
ment, through the Post Office Department, has
made stringent regulations as to the publication of
sworn circulation statements. Senator Works, of
California, has twice fathered a bill to prevent
newspapers in the District of Columbia printing
details of crime. Most states in the past five years
have in one way or another made their libel laws
more drastic, one Supreme Court ruling that if a

? Kighteen states have passed honest advertising laws.

8 Introduced at the instance of Lieut.-Gov. Barratt
O’Hara, who discusses the question in “ A State License for
Newspaper Men.”

* Pennsylvania.

* Defeated by a 3 to 1 vote. ‘Killed in committee.
4 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

paper publish court proceedings, heretofore privi-
leged, it must be prepared to prove the truth of
statements of witnesses.® Another state has held
that a plan to increase street sales is constructive
malice.*®

These are a few straws which show the direc-
tion of the wind. The agitation in legislative
halls, muckraking magazines, and on Chautauqua
platforms has led many to believe that the Ameri-
can press is on the broad road to the demnition
bow-wows,’* when as a matter of fact, despite the
phenomenally rapid development of American
journalism in a material way during the past
decade, it has been more than ever responsive to
the newly found ideals in business, and has at the
same time come to a more thorough appreciation
of its professional obligations.

Four main faults are laid at the door of the

® Colorado.

*° Michigan.

11 Sad-hearted critics may gain courage by a retrospect
into 17th and 18th Century journalism. Ben Jonson ex-
claims against the conscienceless faking of the day, de-
claring journeys were “made all at home, and no syllable
of truth in them” (“The Staple of News”). Gaspardo
says, “they will write you a battle in any part of Europe at
an hour’s warning, and yet never set foot out of a tavern;
describe you towns, fortifications, leaders, the strength of
the enemies, ... nothing destroys them but want of a
good memory” (“Love Tricks”). Henry Walker, a suc-
cessful (?) journalist, who reported a wholly imaginary

account of the flight of Charles II and falsified the death-
bed sayings of Oliver Cromwell, was called by George Fox
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 5

press today:** a carelessness that amounts to

criminal negligence in the handling of news; ?*'a
suppression of important news to the advan-
tage of certain interests; a conspiracy with ad-
vertisers to mislead honest buyers; and finally,
a pandering to the non-social instincts of its
readers by what is commonly known as yellow
journalism,

No one more than the newspaper man appre-
ciates the impossibility of getting the exact truth
and printing of the truth.** He knows that it is
possible only to approximate the truth, and he is
striving far into the night in an effort to reduce
the amount of inaccuracies in his columns. He
has established fair play and accuracy bureaus,
by which men who have been injured by inaccurate
statements may get quick reparation, and through
which, at the same time, a punitive system is es-
“a liar, and forger of lies,” and J. B. Williams, in his
“History of English Journalism,” declares the appellation
would describe faithfully the other prominent journalists
of the time, John Harris, George Wharton, and Marcha-
mant Nedham. Mrs. Hutchinson, according to the same
authority, charges the journalists of the day with writing
up or down anybody’s reputation for a pecuniary con-
sideration.

22, One thousand men and women in public and private
life were asked what they considered the crying faults in
American journalism. Their answers corroborated the con-
clusion of the writer’s study and observation.

28 See “Tainted Journalism.”

14'The human element enters so largely into the matter
of reporting, of writing, and of reading.
6 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

tablished which makes for greater carefulness on
the part of reporter and sub-editor.* A few years
ago it was practically unknown for a newspaper
to print a correction,”® or to publish a communica-
tion which did not agree with the paper’s policy;
today we find editors urging readers to send in cor-
rections *” and displaying a broad policy as to the
publication of communications. Another tendency
to the credit of the press is the eagerness with
which it welcomes today the college educated and

trained newspaper man,** and the policy that is

*® See “The Clubber in Journalism.”

2° It was not many years ago that a man appealed to a
Boston editor to correct a statement which had appeared
in his paper to the effect that he had died. The editor
assured him that the paper’s policy was never to print a
correction. “But I’m not dead and you have placed me
in an embarrassing position!” “ Well,” replied the editor,
“we can’t print a correction, but as your case seems to
warrant some action, we’ll print your name in the birth
column!” A pleasant narrative and no doubt fiction, but
the relish with which it has been told—and enjoyed—by
newspaper men is significant of the custom.

17The Baltimore Sun since September 18, 1912, has dis-
played permanently on its editorial page a notice asking
readers to call attention to any errors appearing in its
columns, and has run a correction column at frequent
intervals. It urges readers to call attention to errors no
matter how trivial and always makes corrections. The
Sun claims credit for being the pioneer in this newspaper
reform.

28 Statements from twenty metropolitan editors show
there has been from one hundred to four hundred per
cent increase in the percentage of college men from 1900
to 1915.
THE COMING NEWSPAPER A.

prevailing in many offices of employing specialists
in various lines.’®

One of the blanket indictments brought against
the newspaper *° is that the editor suppresses im-
portant news when it is to his interest, personal or
financial, to do so. It is no uncommon thing to
hear a critic say that the press is venal because
such and such a piece of news about a department
store did not appear in its columns. As in art,
the question of selection is the big one in news-
paper making. When an editor is guided by a
sense of duty to the best interest of his community,
the question of what not to print demands the
larger part of his time as an executive, and often
fault-finding critics will see in the suppression of
a department store item a grave matter of policy
when in reality a dozen other items of minor ac-
cidents or petty thievery were excluded from the
same issue as being purposeless. Suppression or
publication of news often depends upon the edi-
tor’s judgment as to the relative weight of con-
flicting obligations. What would the reader do if
as editor he had the report brought to him that
there were thirty cases of infantile paralysis in
the city? It is one thing to say with a wave of
the hand “ Print all the news.” It is another to

1° Such as medical, scientific, legal, civic, political, finan-

cial, etc. ;
20% The Suppression of the News,” by E. A. Ross, is

typical.
8 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

say “Leave it out, it will serve no good purpose;
it will only bring panic to thousands of mothers.”
Suppression of news on a large scale is seen today
in the censorship of war news. No one questions
for a moment that war news which puts a state in
jeopardy should be suppressed. But no such
credit for good motives is given the editor when
he censors and eliminates matter which would only
bring on dissension and bitterness in the com-
munity family. Moreover, the past ten years has
seen the radical broadening of the vision of a
formerly violent partisan press, so that today it
is no unusual thing for a newspaper to set aside
space for each of the various political parties.

It has been charged that advertising columns
are untruthful, but the doctrine of caveat emptor
was a healthy young rascal when journalism made
its bow two centuries ago, and so far as can be seen
it is very much in good form in business circles
today. It was recognition of the professional
status of journalism that caused reformers to level
their guns at the advertising columns while dis-
regarding the plain counter-lies heard in every
store. Thirty years ago, long before the present
awakening of business to its professional obliga-
tions, an editor of a large farm publication **
unceremoniously kicked Mr. Caveat Emptor into
the street. Good Housekeeping, the New York

*1 Farm Journal, Philadelphia.
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 9

Tribune, and others have taken the lead in guaran-
teeing their selling talk, and loudly and persist-
ently announce, “ Your money back and no ques-
tions asked if dissatisfied.”” Already two news-
papers, the Bridgeport (Conn.) Standard and the
Lynden (Wash.) Tribune, are claiming the distinc-
tion of being second in the field. This is a marked
tendency, and it will not be long until newspapers
as selling forces will be held to the same rules of
conduct that are applied to the ordinary sales-
man.”

But it must be kept in mind that long before
the searchlight was turned on business methods
publishers were excluding unclean and untruthful
selling talk from their papers. Two hundred
Kansas editors, according to statistics gathered by
the University of Kansas, threw out of their pub-
lications in 1914 one hundred and twenty thou-
sand dollars’ worth of undesirable advertis-
ing. And what merchant in the United States
will put his truthfulness to the test of eliminating
the superlative, as a national magazine has done
for its advertising columns! **

Sensational journalism is quite generally mis-
taken for yellow journalism. There is a wide dis-
tinction. The sensational paper appeals to the
emotions, while the so-called conservative publica-

22.Cf. “The Second Candle of Journalism.”
28 Good Housekeeping.
10 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

tion makes its appeal to the intellect. Those of
us who can be aroused to right a wrong by cold-
blooded reasoning constitute a small percentage,
indeed, of the community. The ninety per cent
must be made fighting mad or fanatically glad be-
fore great reforms or noble sacrifices are accom-
plished. The conservative press, coldly intellect-
ual, too often following its constituency, deplores
change, dislikes to unsettle present conditions, pre-
fers a longtime evolution to revolution because
noise and bad breath and Tea-parties disturb the
existing order. The sensational press, however,
turns a somersault if necessary to get attention
and then by mechanical devices and rhetorical ap-
pliances strives not only to convince its read-
ers that certain conditions are wrong, but to
urge them to set about—and at once—to right
them.

The successful evangelist is a good example of
the sensational journalist. He advertises himself;
he exaggerates, but in the name of rhetorical hy-
perbole; he appeals to the emotions; he uses the
language of the street; he muckrakes, going out
of his way to find evil to attack; he overempha-
sizes, he underestimates, he caters to the public, he
is spectacular, unusual; he relates sensational tales
of vice and the sporting world; he flays the
church ; and for all this he is not averse to princely
profits! The ten per cent of us attack his motives
THE COMING NEWSPAPER il

and hold up our hands in holy horror; the ninety
per cent hear, gather, listen, and are perhaps,
moved to live better lives. Who shall judge his
motives or place an estimate on his work? Surely
not the conservative minister who has been for
these many years dispensing orthodox intellect to
his chosen few, nor yet the sensitive critic whose
nerves have been set atingle by the spectacle of
hurrah and bad taste. And so it is with the sensa-
tional journalist. He has reached and moved
thousands hitherto unmoved. Bad judgment, low
motives, mistakes, have sometimes slipped into his
work, but where purpose has been unselfish and
worthy results accomplished the institution as a
whole should not be condemned. The audience is
always visualized by the successful speaker. The
Fifth Avenue minister would be more tactful than
to use the manuscript of his morning service before
the afternoon audience on the East Side.

Now there are poor imitations of the sensational
journalist just as there are vulgar imitations of
the worthy evangelist. Yellow journalism is a
rank offshoot of sensational journalism. Its
worthy purpose is questionable.”* Its handling of
crime does not deter, but suggests. It screams,
attracts a crowd,—and has nothing constructive
to offer. Its account of folly in high life is not a
ridicule but a pander. It appeals to hate only for

24Cf, “The Weaknesses of Modern Journalism.”
12 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

hate’s sake. It attempts to fool us by an occa-
sional stumbling into righteousness. We applaud
when it gives the people cheap gas. It delights to
unearth scandal, but its methods do not show it
to be concerned in preventing a repetition of that
scandal. The malicious coloring, faking, cruel
and pitiless publicity, all are stock in trade of the
“Yellows.” These poor imitations often cause
us to condemn out of hand purposeful, sensational
journalism ; we judge superficially by the big type
and spectacular makeup.

With a clear eye then to distinguish the sensa-
tional from the yellow press, we perceive that the
evils of yellow journalism are passing. It is find-
ing itself, and falling back on old moralities is
learning that the long run policy wins. There is
less faking today than ten years ago; there is
less salacious criminal and divorce court news;
there is less clubbing;** there is less of unworthy
purpose. Yellow journalism still has many un-
desirable features, but it is patent to the student
who has the files of ten and fifteen years before
him that it is working out its salvation, according
to its best lights, in the peculiar field it occupies.

Considering the subject more specifically, it is
evident in both rural and metropolitan journalism
that there has come about during the last decade

26 Cf. “The Clubber in Journalism.”
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 13

a distinct change in the editor’s attitude toward
his calling, toward his competitor, and toward
his community. With this change has come
the awakening of a professional consciousness,
and in it lies the hope of the journalism of the
future.

Rural journalism in the United States, includ-
ing as it does 19,000 weeklies and 1,000 dailies in
towns with populations ranging from 500 to
20,000, has always made a poor showing in the
business world. The country paper, speaking
generally, stands at the foot of credit ratings.”®
Bankers regard the small newspaper office and
printing plant as one of the poorest risks that can
be submitted to them. Kansas, possibly the most
prosperous of newspaper states, with publishing
ranking sixth in production, had 82 per cent of
its publishing business under mortgage in 1912.
These figures are typical of rural journalism in
the United States and justify the common belief
that the average country newspaper lives from
hand to mouth and is regarded as a community
charity, tolerated as a necessary evil.

Some of the underlying causes of the business
disrepute into which the country press has fallen
are (1) the ease with which a small weekly could
be started. “A pocketful of type and two dol-
lars worth of paper C.O.D.” is a familiar state-

20 Thirty-seventh in 1912.
14 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ment of the necessary equipment of a country
editor. The type foundries have until lately en-
couraged a man, without a glance at his editorial’
capacity or business fitness, to start a paper, fur-
nishing him a $2,000 plant, for ten per cent down,
and the remainder on long time. The ready print
companies have been known to set up a man to
compete with an all home print paper. Supply
houses, taking advantage of the novice, have over-
equipped him to the breaking point. While a dif-
ferent policy has been adopted by these agencies
during the past few years, yet they have much to
answer for when the economic status of rural jour-
nalism is considered. (2) It has proved a recruit-
ing ground for the misfits and failures of other
trades and professions. Many printers have
started a little paper as a by-product and with no
other qualification than the possession of type,
press, and ink, have added to the ranks of ineffi-
cient rural journalism. With them have come
mediocre teachers, lawyers, doctors, butchers,
bakers, and candlestick-makers. I am not un-
mindful that many of our successful journalists
today were recruited from other activities; in fact,
with no training offered anywhere until the last
decade, there was practically no other way to get
into the editor’s chair. The facts set forth here
are not to the discredit of the men in the country
field; rather it is remarkable that so much has been
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 15

accomplished in the rural communities in social
and civic betterment, when the editor-publishers
have striven against such great odds in an eco-
nomic way. (8) Another reason for the demor-
alized business condition of rural journalism is
that many men have bought or started papers to
further political desires. They have pursued no
“long run policy ” but have kept a precarious
financial course until a political job is annexed,
and then have either gone on coddling a com-
munity liability or passed it on to another novice.
Then there is the “spite” paper, started to vent
someone’s spleen on individual or institution.
Many a newspaper proposition has been launched
with an eye single to the county printing, and the
recent political change developed throughout the
country symptoms of the old disease. (4) Finally
the country editor’s hang-dog estimate of his call-
ing, his lack of confidence and independence, bred
in him by his constant appeals to subscribers and
business men to “ support the paper,” his knowl-
edge that he did not really know the cost of the ar-
ticle he was trying to sell, all tended to break down
his self-respect, and this feeling quickly, if not si-
multaneously, passed over to the community. All,
from banker to preacher, beat him down in his
printing prices, the merchant and foreign adver-
tiser set their own figure on his newspaper space,
and the subscriber traded out his dollar a year with
16 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

a load of wood, a sack of potatoes, or most usually
laughingly refused to pay at all, knowing full well
that the editor did not have backbone enough to
stop his subscription.

Small wonder that country journalism, from a
business standpoint, has not been rated a success!
Publishing is not, as is generally thought, the
simplest of all businesses. It is the most intricate.
There is not a science taught at a university which
calls for more exhaustive analysis and research
than the printing industry. It took Joseph Pu-
litzer, master publisher, eight years to approxi-
mate the cost of a line of white space in the New
York World. One of the biggest publishers in
the United States is authority for the statement
that the publishing industry in New York City
is less than sixty per cent efficient! And yet
men, and women too, have blithely entered into
the printing and newspaper business without any
training or experience, when they would have re-
fused to operate a popcorn stand, pleading lack
of knowledge!

This lack of system, of scientific management,
has handicapped the country paper editorially,
impairing its usefulness as a community adviser
and leader.

A survey of Kansas country journalism by the
University department of journalism in 1911,
brought forth the astonishing fact that each of
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 17

the 213 editors ** who furnished statistics was not
only working fourteen and fifteen hours a day,
seven days in the week, and for a wage that aver-
aged about $15 a week, but that five-sixths of
their time was taken up with soliciting jobwork
and advertising, setting type and running the
presses, while one-sixth was devoted to gathering
and writing the news. Little opportunity is there
for such an editor to comment intelligently on the
news, to study municipal questions, and to offer
anything like constructive leadership.

The country paper is the nucleus of community
life, and the country must measure its progress
by the community. The country editor exerts
more of an influence on the community than any
other agency. He is the advance agent of its civic
progress, the stimulus of its social life, the big
brother of the church, the patron saint of the
school. But an economic condition, brought about
by years of neglect, has tied the poor editor’s
hands. No matter how willing he might be to
serve his community, it is next to impossible for
him to do so when his hours are long, his pay poor,
and the greater part of his time taken up with
hand and foot labor.

27 Two hundred and thirteen out of 690 replied to a
questionnaire. Some of those who did not reply regretted
that an entire lack of any sort of record made it impos-
sible to answer the questions even in round numbers!
18 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

But we find a striking tendency today on the
part of the country editor to break away from
time-honored, slipshod methods by the adoption of
cost-finding systems and efficiency plans. For a
decade he has been urging the farmer to apply sci-
ence to his calling; for a century he has told Con-
gress how to run the government efficiently, but it
has not been until the last year or so that he has
been inclined to take some of his own medicine. The
trade journals, which have had only a limited cir-
culation in the rural field, have exhorted and
cajoled and ridiculed the country editor in an
effort to get him to adopt efficiency methods; the
departments of journalism in the state universities
have bombarded him with literature, and, in three
8 at least, have offered to assist him in the
installation of an up-to-date cost and accounting
system. And doubtless he has been influenced by
the general trend of business of every kind along
scientific management lines. Financial independ-
ence must precede editorial independence, and this
movement by country publishers will result in a
more virile and intelligent state press. Already
its effects are seen in a more efficient handling of

states ?

the news, in a more scientific counseling of the
merchant in the use of advertising space, in trans-
ferring the circulation from the liability to the

*8 Kansas, Wisconsin, and Washington.
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 19

asset column,” and in a better, because a more in-
telligent, salesmanship in the job-printing depart-
ment.

Fifty-four newspapers in the United States
were consolidated during 1914.*° This is a sig-
nificant tendency. There are to be fewer and
better newspapers. The increased cost of pro-
duction in every department will drive the weaker
and less efficient papers either to merge with the
stronger or suspend. The adoption of efficiency
methods and the application of scientific manage-
ment is making competition keener and is giving
the advantage to the better newspaper. In other
words the gap between the good and bad paper,
to speak in terms of service, is becoming wider.

In this connection it is to be noted that the past
decade has seen not a few publishers divorce the
print shop and the newspaper. The two under
present economic conditions must go together and
the divorce in most cases has been only on paper.
This, however, is enabling the editor to know what
each of these two important branches of his busi-
ness is doing. Some are finding that the print
shop is supporting the paper; others that the
paper is carrying the load of a losing back-office.

29 The Post Office Department helped stiffen the country
editor’s backbone by refusing to accept papers at second-

class rates if the subscriber was more than a year in

arrears,
5° Quoted from statistics gathered by the Fourth Estate.
20 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

The intelligence gained is assisting him materially
to readjust his business, to stop leaks, and to force
profitable operations.

When this divorce decree is carried out literally,
when the publishers of two papers in a town of,
say, one thousand people, consolidate, one taking
the paper, the other the printing business of the
town, each devoting his entire time to his single
duty, then there will be rapid advance in rural
journalism. Already where this has been done,
there has resulted great satisfaction to editors
and public. The editor of a country paper is a
dual personality; he must be master of an intri-
cate business and at the same time exercise edi-
torial qualities. The two jobs require different
temperaments and it is the exception when a coun-
try publisher is found who is successful in chang-
ing from réle to réle. But with the division of
duties, with one concerned with the single prob-
lem of editing a dynamic, purposeful paper; the
other concerned with the profitable operation of a
printing industry, then both will prosper ** and
likewise the community.

This willingness to co-operate on the part of
editors is possible because of a change in the atti-
tude of the editor toward his “esteemed but

81 Two editors at Plainville, Kansas, got together in
this way in 1913, and each is highly pleased with the
results,
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 21

loathed contemporary.” There are no tears to
shed over the passing of personal journalism.
The backyard squabbles carried on by both city
and country papers did more than any other
agency to destroy the public confidence in the
press. If the custom should become general for
doctors to stand on the corner and attack the
motives and personal lives of fellow-doctors it
would not be long until we should lose faith in the
works of all doctors. For a century and more,
we have had a similar spectacle in which editors
have thrown mud and filth at each other and in all
the category of the foolish short-sightedness of
the newspaper man there has been nothing more
foolish than this. Facts, and conclusions drawn
from facts, are legitimate material for correction
and comment, but to assail motives of a contem-
porary, merely to make a Roman holiday—a de-
lusion by the way,—is not only poor journalism,
but poor business. Happily, it is rapidly going
out of date and the new order will permit of all
the fruits of healthy co-operation.

Not only in the metropolitan field do we find
this tendency toward business efficiency *” and co-
operation, such as the pooling of interests in the
collection of city news, the syndicating of features,

22 The Seattle Times last year effected a saving of sev-
eral hundred dollars a month by discovering a more effi-
cient method of handling copy by combining departments.
22 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the application of scientific management to pro-
duction, but the new professional note is apparent.
The old idea of law and medicine and the ministry,
was that the cash register was not a measure of
success. Service was the standard.** So in jour-
nalism the movement is toward service to its
readers and advertisers. Advertising is obtained
today not by a plea for charity, or by the gentle
use of a club, but by studying the merchandising
problems of the merchant and counseling with
him.** A greater service is done for the readers
today because the business announcements are
more truthful, are cleaner, and published more
with an eye to the best interests of the subscriber.
And in that other branch of the business depart-
ment circulation is more responsive, and circula-
tion statements are more truthful.

*2 It is quite significant to note that the time-honored
professions of medicine, law, and the ministry started
out with the vision of service, and should have the cumula-
tive power of generations. Journalism not having so aus-
picious a beginning has only lately caught the vision, and
while coming up from behind, is coming fast!

8¢ The Chicago Tribune will furnish a prospective adver-
tiser a commercial and sociological survey of the city, and
will go any length to co-operate with him in the elimina-
tion of the gambling element in advertising. It will put a
cost system in a Chicago store, regardless of size or whether
it is a customer of the Tribune, will design and carry out
window displays for merchants, and assist in many ways
in the solution of their merchandising problems. While
this work of the Tribune is not typical, yet it indicates
a marked tendency.
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 23

On the editorial side the partisan and personal
is passing. Accuracy bureaus and correction
columns are making for fair play, which is a dis-
tinctly professional trait. Campaigns are waged
to unify community interests; there is less atten-
tion paid to news that makes only for dissen-
sion; papers are promoting culture by awakening
latent interests in literature, art, science, and the
best in the drama. And, in addition to community
service, the press is more than ever seeking to be
of personal service,** such as maintaining legal
and health bureaus, and the various other helps
known and used,** but seldom appreciated in the
abstract, by every newspaper reader.

Schools of journalism are a factor in stimulat-
ing this professional consciousness. There are
thirty-nine universities now offering journalism
courses, with a faculty of seventy-two teachers
and 2,040 students. ‘There is no standardization
as yet, each school doing the work at hand. At
the University of Kansas, with whose work I am
most familiar, three-fourths of the students’ time
is taken up with study in such subjects as history,
English, political science, philosophy, psychology,
the natural sciences, and law, while the rest

35 The Chicago Tribune has probably done more in this
line than any other paper. See “Newspaper Work,” by

James Keeley.
26 Poems asked for, information desired, lost relatives

advertised for, etc.
24 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of their time is devoted to thirteen courses
in technical journalism. These cover news-
gathering and news-writing, news-interpretation,
newspaper administration, advertising, editorial
problems, comparative journalism, history of
journalism, and editorial practice. A laboratory
is maintained where students apply the theories of
the classroom to the practical publication of a
six-column, four-page daily newspaper.

This laboratory, operated as it is under scien-
tific management, gives opportunity to carry on
advantageously state service work, whereby the
seven hundred newspaper editors of Kansas can
get help from their university on all problems
affecting their business. The department of jour-
nalism furnishes scientific cost-systems and latest
record blanks to any publisher and assists him in
installing this system in his office; it acts as ar-
bitrator in disputes involving legal printing; it
furnishes estimates on intricate jobs of printing;
it maintains a clearing house whereby sellers and
buyers of newspaper properties may get together ;
it provides instruction to country correspondents
with an eye to making the small paper’s country
representatives more efficient; it publishes a
monthly magazine, in which are discussed current
questions of the profession. The department uses
its monotype at odd hours to recast the country
editor’s worn out type; it has only lately taken on
THE COMING NEWSPAPER 25

the work of assisting the editor in selecting his for-
eign advertising. During November, 1914, at
least $3,000 in worthless advertising was excluded
from the state on the recommendation of the
University.

That this service is appreciated is shown by the
fact that when the University of Kansas did an
unheard of thing in May, 1914, in announcing a
short course for journalists, 251 state editors en-
rolled at the University for the week’s work. As
in the regular work, the idea of service was em-
phasized in the short courses. Fourteen editors,
including William Allen White, Henry Allen, and
Arthur Capper, started off the week by appearing
in the local churches and preaching on the rela-
tion of church and press, and as one editor ex-
pressed it, in the words of Dr. Washington Glad-
den, who delivered one of the lectures, all went
away with the idea that whether in pulpit or
editor’s chair there is no difference in the atti-
tude of the man toward his work.*”

And this is the part schools of journalism will
play in American journalism. Not content with
sending out technically trained men, they will in-
spire the new generation of newspaper workers
with a realization that while there is great ethical
value in the truthful gathering and printing of
news, there is a greater goal in publishing a

87 Cf. “Tainted Journalism.”
26 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

dynamic and purposeful newspaper. The coming
newspaper man will take Kipling’s phrase for his
motto: “I am of service to my kind.”

In conclusion, just as every man in the United
States—and every woman for that matter—knows
how to run a newspaper or a hotel, just so every
man, woman, and child feels free to attribute mo-
tives to the workers in journalism. Journalism
is the most jealous mistress in the world, partak-
ing as it does of the nature of a business, highly
intricate and of professional attributes. Unlike
any other profession or business, it lays bare its
soul every morning or afternoon; the mechanical
difficulties it overcomes are tremendous. The
nervous age demands its news red hot. It has
been judged too often by the shysters ** in the
profession, rather than by the great mass of
earnest, conscientious men who realize not only
the power but the great responsibilities of this
modern agent of publicity. It deserves less care-
less criticism; it merits more helpful consideration.

38 Cf. “The Clubber in Journalism.”

 
TAINTED JOURNALISM:
GOOD AND BAD

BY DR. WASHINGTON GLADDEN

Tue subject which has been assigned me is
“Tainted Journalism.” I accepted the assign-
ment in good faith, but I fear that the phrase does
not suggest the spirit of this discussion, which will
not, if I can help it, be satirical or censorious—
critical in the best sense, I hope it will be; for
criticism, as Walter Pater admonishes us, is not
depreciation, but appreciation.

With this business of journalism I have been
implicated more or less for a good many years.
When a boy on the farm before the middle of the
last century, in the days of the first Mexican war,
I began reading the New York Weekly Tribune,
’ and “ H. G.” was my first oracle. The arrival of
that sheet was the weekly event; and whatever else
I failed to read I never omitted the editorial pages.
When the long discussion in Congress followed,
the discussion of the Clay Compromise, I read
most diligently all that was reported of the
speeches of Clay and Calhoun and Webster and
Benton and Seward, with Greeley’s caustic com-

a7
28 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ments thereon, and so got my initiation into po-
litical journalism.

A year or two later a little knot of young fel-
lows, some of them just out of college, began con-
tributing to a local newspaper a series of sketches,
descriptive, historical, poetical, which greatly in-
terested me. They were digging up some of the
Indian legends, and recalling the memory of the
Pioneers; they were exercising their gifts as
humorists; they were dropping into poetry; and
every number of the paper brought me a new
thrill. Here was literature in the making, and one
was permitted to look on. I knew some of these
young fellows, by sight, and used to have sensa-
tions when I saw them on the village street; sur-
reptitiously, in my bedroom, or in the hayloft,
with a pencil and scraps of brown paper, I used
to try to imitate them. Access to type became a
dream, which I never told to anybody.

In my sixteenth year the chance came to me.
The Owego Gazette wanted a boy, and I got the
job. I was apprenticed to the owner of that
paper to learn the trade of a printer. Four years
was the term; board, washing, and, for clothes and
spending money, thirty dollars the first year,
thirty-five the second, sixty the third, and one
hundred the fourth—this was the compensation.
Sweeping the office, keeping up the fires, running
errands, rolling the forms of the old Washington
TAINTED JOURNALISM 29

handpress, and working at the case as occasion
offered—this was the occupation. But it was in-
teresting, in spite of the drudgery; the mechanical
side of it appealed to me; the technique of the
printer’s art was fascinating; it is on the border-
land between the material and the spiritual realms
where thought takes form, and something like
creation happens.

Six months after I entered the office I made
bold one day, in the editor’s absence, to lay upon
his table about a column of local miscellany,
news, anecdotes, jokes, loosely organized under
the head of “ Vital Statistics.” When he re-
turned he read my contribution, and promptly
brought it out to me, laying it upon my case with
the words: “ That’s good, Washington; set it up.”
“ Vital Statistics ” became a feature of the news-
paper for several months: and a little later a small
corner room in the office was furnished with a pine
table and a kitchen chair, and I was told that
when I preferred spending my time there to work-
ing at the case, I was at liberty to do so. Such
was my entrance upon a journalistic career. For
a year or two I assisted the editor in some trifling
ways with his local work, reporting meetings now
and then, and writing up neighborhood happen-
ings. The best of my training, however, was in
the mechanical work; one whose calling is going
to be that of a writer will be the gainer all his
30 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

life, by knowing something of the printing busi-
ness.

During my third year in the printing office the
way was opened for me to go to college, and my
thought was turned toward the Christian Min-
istry. My college life kept me, however, in con-
nection with type. I became one of the editors
of the college magazine, and the college corre-
spondent of the Springfield Republican, to which
I sent not only the daily college news, but also
occasional contributions in verse and prose, and
through which I formed two lifelong friendships
—with Dr. J. G. Holland, later the founder and
first editor of Scribner's Monthly—now the Cen-
tury Magazine, and with Samuel Bowles, one of
the great American editors. To the kindness of
both these men,—to the encouragement and help
they gave me,—lI owe more than I can ever repay.

When I found my way into the ministry, in my
first permanent pastorate in a suburb of New
York, the editor of a newspaper offered me a
column, which I filled weekly, thus keeping my
connection with the types. In my next parish at
North Adams, Mass., I was again within the
diocese of the Springfield Republican; and my
first book was made up of a series of articles con-
tributed to its columns. From North Adams, I
was called to an editorial chair in the New York
Independent, which I occupied for four years,
TAINTED JOURNALISM 31

putting the strength of my life into work in which
my personality was submerged.

From New York I returned to the pastorate at
Springfield, Mass.; but here again the open door
of the sanctum invited me, and for three years I
had a magazine of my own, which I edited in con-
nection with my parish work, doing all the edi-
torial writing—ten pages of minion, every month;
conducting all the correspondence, reading all the
proof, and making up the pages in the composing
room. That was really worth while. I never had
a better time.

When my connection with that periodical closed,
I found myself in very close relations with the
magazine which is now the Century; to the edi-
torial departments of which, under the reign of
Dr. Holland, and afterward, under Mr. Gilder,
I was for many years a constant contributor.

I have gone into this biography thus more fully
than might seem necessary, for two reasons: first,
I want you to see that I have had some little ex-
perience in dealing with the practical problems
which confront the journalist. Secondly, and
more seriously, I want to bear this testimony ;—
that in making these frequent changes from the
one kind of work to the other, I have never had any
sense of essentially changing my vocation. I gave
my life in my youth to what is generally called the
ministry, and I have stuck to my calling—ministry
32 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

is service; it is the whole meaning of the word;
a minister is a servant; the minister of the church
is the servant of the community; the servant of
human need. When I resigned the pastorate of
the First Congregational Church in North Adams
in March, 1871, and accepted an editorial posi-
tion on the staff of the Independent, I did not feel
that I had forsaken a sacred calling for a secular
one; the new work was just as truly the work of
the ministry as the old had been. I could sing the
old hymn just as fervently as ever:

To serve the present age,

My calling to fulfill;

O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master’s will.

I preached nearly every Sunday somewhere; but
my Sunday’s work was not any more sacred than
the week-day work at the editor’s desk in the Park
Place office. And this was not because I was al-
ways writing upon technically religious themes,
for I was writing about a good many subjects,
but because I had learned the first and rudimen-
tary of the Christian commonplaces, that it is
every man’s big business in the world to do what
he can to make a better world of this, and that
whatever he does with that honest purpose is
sacred work.

I have to go back about once a day and touch
TAINTED JOURNALISM 33

the first base in my game—to keep myself ori-
ented,—and that is simply this primary obliga-
tion: “ Seek first the Kingdom of God.” That is
the rule which measures every act and every mo-
tive. To recognize that there is a Kingdom of
God in this world,—or as Dr. Elisha Mumford
calls it, a “ Republic of God ”—and that the high
calling of every man is to discern it and keep in
touch with it and do what he can to promote it—
this is the foundation of all wisdom.

Now the motive power of the Republic of God,
like that of every other republic, is public opinion.
It is when the men and women of the community
have right thoughts about one another, and right
feelings and purposes toward one another, and the
right attitude toward the unseen Power whose
Fatherhood makes us one and to whom all our
loyalties are due—it is then that the Republic of
God flourishes in the earth. To generate and dif-
fuse a sound, sweet, vigorous, generous, wholesome
public opinion is, therefore, the way to promote
and advance the reign of the Republic of God in
the earth. It is the best and biggest business in
which any human being can engage. It is your
business and mine—yours as much as mine, mine
no less than yours.

Of course it is every man’s business, in a de-
mocracy, to contribute to the creation and main-
tenance of a sound public opinion. It is one of
34 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the primary duties of every citizen to be intelli-
gent, with respect to common concerns, and to
speak his mind about them. If every man spoke
his mind, frankly and fearlessly, not only when he
agrees with the crowd, but more especially when
he disagrees, we should see a great improvement
in public morals and in civil affairs. Too many
of us hold our tongues, from policy or from timid-
ity, when we ought to speak. Such silence is often
little short of traitorous. The weakness and per-
verseness of public opinion is not the fault of any
particular class of citizens; we are all to blame
for it.

But on some of us the responsibility of keeping
this motive power strong and efficient does rest
more heavily than on others, and it is perhaps true
that on the editor’s calling and mine—his rather
more than mine—this great obligation rests. No-
body has any business in a commonwealth who
isn’t a producer of something that the community
needs: and the editor’s product and mine is good
healthy public opinion. The community does need
this; it is one of its deepest needs, and we have
undertaken to supply this need’ How have we
succeeded? By their fruits ye shall know them.
What can we say, in a general way, about the
state of public opinion in the American Common-
wealth?

That it contains some strong and wholesome
TAINTED JOURNALISM 35

elements may be taken for granted. On the whole
I think it has solved most of our great problems
wisely. When discussion is free and extended and
thorough; when any question is kept before the
people long enough to be fully debated, the peo-
ple are apt to come to just conclusions upon it.
But there are phases of the common mind that
may well cause us solicitude. It is not always
sane; it is fickle and fluctuating; it is liable to
sudden gusts of brutal passion and cruelty. We
cannot forget how one day it thronged about the
Prince of Life with Hosannas, and five days later
was shouting “ Crucify Him.” We have seen good
men more than once deserted by the applauding
multitude and covered with contempt for simple
fidelity to their convictions. And you remember
Browning’s Patriot entering the town in triumph,
with “ roses, roses, all the way,” and church-spires
flaring with flags,—and a year later riding to the
gibbet through a hail of stones. And those of us
whose faith in democracy is firmest are never
without twinges of misgiving. How utterly rea-
sonless the crowd can be—very often! It might
be so much wiser and saner: it will be some day;
surely it would be now if all of us were faithful
to the light we have; but just as it is, public
opinion is an umpire from whose judgments we
have much to dread; a ruler whose decrees often
leave us mourning. Let us try to appraise soberly
36 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

but not too somberly, the defects which we cannot
ignore in the common mind of our countrymen.

First, to name one of our lightest faults, shall
we not confess that the popular thought and
speech is marred with the vice of extravagance,
of exaggeration? Is not the tendency almost uni-
versal of overstating facts? How many towns are
there in which the truth about the population is
ever told? How many ministers are there who
ever tell the truth about the capacity of their
churches or the size of their congregations? How
many public meetings, concert audiences, political
assemblies ever have the truth told about them?

All this is, of course, in part, the efflorescence
of hopefulness, and enthusiasm, and we cannot
judge it too severely; but it is prone to grow into
an untruthfulness which vitiates popular judg-
ments and weakens the bond of veracity on which
the social order depends.

Now I do not think it can be denied that the
newspapers are doing a great deal to cultivate this
vicious habit of exaggeration in speech. They are
not the only propagators of this vice; the
churches and the ministers, as I have said, are a
good second; and when the churches and the news-
papers combine together to give the statistics of
the current sensational evangelism, you get results
that make Munchausen hide his diminished head.

It is clearly not in the interest of sound and
TAINTED JOURNALISM 87

sane public opinion that these habits of exaggera-
tion in speech are cultivated. We must learn, if
we would prosper as a self-governing common-
wealth, to see things as they are, and tell the truth
about them. We must stop bragging, and vapor-
ing, and train ourselves to form judicial opinions
and utter them in restrained and temperate speech.
And I don’t see how we are ever going to do it,
unless a different code is adopted from that which
generally prevails in the reporters’ room.

A cognate vice is the habit of fierce and san-
guinary terms to describe actions which are
utterly devoid of sensational character. A dis-
cussion which is perfectly amicable may be char-
acterized in the headlines as a hot fight; and peo-
ple are represented as denouncing one another
when they have merely ventured to express, in
courteous words, a difference of opinion. I re-
member an instance which illustrates my point.
At the National Congregational Council, held in
Kansas City last October, a new creed was pro-
posed, and the discussion of it occupied two or
three short special sessions. The report tele-
graphed to all parts of the country gave the im-
pression that there was a fierce and bitter contro-
versy. I do not remember the phrases but this
was their purpose. The fact was that the whole
debate was of the most friendly character. There
were differences of opinion as to words and

~
38 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

phrases, but none that were not easily adjusted.
How violent this combat must have been is re-
vealed by the fact that when the Council came to
vote there were about six hundred affirmative votes
and one negative vote.

I am sure that the high color which is often em-
ployed in reportorial phrases must often convey
to the public quite erroneous impressions with
respect to the temper manifested in human inter-
course; that it greatly exaggerates the antag-
onisms of men. If it can be made to appear that
a fight is going on, the story will have much more
news value. I think that if I were a managing
editor, I should make up a long list of those terms
of carnage which reporters use so freely,—flay,
score, rap, roast, excoriate, lambast, and such
like, and forbid their use for any purpose what-
ever.

Secondly, public opinion is greatly vitiated by
the emotional mutations in which it ceases to be
opinion and becomes mere sentiment, unorganized,
highly volatile and inflammable, keeping no steady
course but, like the wind, blowing where it listeth,
possessing tremendous force, but having no assign-
able direction. Public opinion should mean thez
concurrent judgment of reasoning beings; but
that definition does not fit the action of the crowd
or the mob. We often find people acting together
with great violence when it is evident that very
TAINTED JOURNALISM 39

few of them have any definite reason for their
action. Most of them are saying it or doing it,
because all the rest are saying or doing it. “The
crowd self,” says Professor Ross, “ is irrational.”

Now it is pretty clear that the crowd self
is getting to be a portentous figure in our demo-
eratic civilization. And while the multitude was
perhaps quite as suggestive in former times, as in
modern times, we have ways of developing mob
mind without the propinquity which, in older days,
was the conditional “mental touch,” says Pro-
fessor Ross. No longer bound up with physical
proximity, with the telegraph to collect and trans-
mit the expressions and signs of the mood, and the
fast mail to hurry to the eager clutch of waiting
thousands the still damp sheets of the morning
daily newspaper, the people are brought, as it
were, into one another’s presence. Through its
organs the excited public is able to assail the in-
dividual with a mass of suggestion almost as vivid
as if he actually stood in the midst of an immense
crowd.

Formerly, within a day, a shock might throw
into a fever all within a hundred miles. The next
day it might agitate the zone beyond, but meanwhile
the first body of people would have cooled down and
become ready to listen to reason. And so while a
wave of excitement passed slowly over the country,
the entire folk was at no moment in a state of agita-
40 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

tion. Now, however, our space-annihilating devices
make a shock well-nigh simultaneous. A vast people
shares the same rage, alarm, enthusiasm or horror.
Then, as each part of the mass becomes acquainted
with the sentiment of all the rest, the feeling is gen-
eralized and intensified. In the end the public swal-
lows up the individuality of the ordinary person in
much the same way that the crowd swallows up the
individuality of its members.’

Now this is the sort of thing with which our
American democracy has to reckon. This is the
force that carries elections, that sweeps adminis-
trations from power, that lifts some to fame and
hurls some to oblivion, that cripples industries,
that breaks banks, that makes wars. Sometimes
we get good out of it as we do out of hurricanes
and earthquakes, but it is a dangerous kind of
energy; we are never safe while such forces may
at any time be let loose. In government by public
opinion I do believe; it is the strongest, sanest,
safest kind of government there is; but in govern-
ment by public rage or public craze I do not be-
lieve; it is the worst of tyrannies.

What relation has the newspaper to this social
inflammability? That is a question to which I
will not attempt to give a comprehensive answer.
My purpose is served by asking the question.
You can answer it far more accurately than I
can. But we shall all admit that the existence in

+ Social Psychology,” p. 63.
TAINTED JOURNALISM 41

society of such a depersonalized and demoralized
agency, is a source of great peril; and that one
of the great duties of all public teachers and
leaders is to discourage all those crazes and fads
and rages in which people exchange reason for
passion, and judgment for imitation. Whatever
tends to develop the mob mind tends to make gov-
ernment by public opinion impossible. Whatever
tends to keep people reasonable, and thoughtful,
and self-controlled, and fair-minded is cultivating
in the public mind those qualities and habits on
which we must rely to bring in the fullness of the
Kingdom of God.

Now there are newspapers which are doing this
kind of work, and nothing better is done in the
world today; while there are others who are doing
more than any other agency now at work to de-
velop the mob mind; and nothing more mischievous
has ever been done in any generation. If you are
looking for tainted journalism you will find a bad
sample of it right here.

Thirdly, the public opinion of this generation
is defective in the estimate which it puts on ma-
terial gains, as contrasted with spiritual realities ;
in the preference which it is inclined to give to
possessions above character. The central delusion
of mortal men—that which devitalizes manhood
and decomposes society is the habit of exalting the
means of living above life itself. Ask how much
42 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

any man is worth and everybody begins to try to
tell you how much money he has. Nobody ever
thinks of answering it in any other way. But it
doesn’t answer the question at all. What the man
is worth to his family, to the community in which
he lives, to the God who gave him life, is what
you really want to know.

How much are the newspapers helping to
straighten out the minds of men, upon this vital
issue? I don’t think that the preaching of the

newspapers on this subject is the main thing,
ov I do not despise preaching! I am sure that
by bearing constant testimony to the fact that
character and manhood are the central values of
human existence; that money and station and
popularity are well lost in keeping truth and in-
tegrity and honor—may render most effective
service in keeping public opinion sound on this
central issue.

But practice is more than preaching—in the
newspaper as in the church—a newspaper is a
business enterprise, and if its management makes
plain the fact that the dollar is the paramount
consideration; that it is ready, in the conduct of
its business, in the shaping of its policy, to sacri-
fice decency and honor, and truth and public wel-
fare to revenue, not only will its preaching be
vain but its influence will be pernicious and de-
structive.
TAINTED JOURNALISM 43

The newspaper stands before the community in
the réle of a public teacher. And the first quali-
fication of a public teacher is that he shall be sin-/
cere and disinterested. When it becomes evident
that a journalist or an evangelist is out after the
shekels, his power to aid in eradicating the root
of all evil will be greatly lessened. It will be evi-
dent to most that he, himself, is a part of the thing
that needs to be reformed.

The fourth and last of the particulars which I
shall mention in which there is shown us the need
of a better public opinion, is the tendency to fasten
the gaze on the evil that men do—to take a
pessimistic view of human character and conduct.
There is evil, of course, that needs to be censured ;
the only question is a question of proportion,—
whether we do not think and talk too much about
the evil that men do and too little of the good at
which they are aiming. I shall not stop very long
to prove that the pessimistic habit of judgment is
quite too strong among us; that it greatly vitiates
and poisons public opinion; gendering suspicion
and hatred and fear where confidence and affec-
tion and hope ought to prevail; making men think
ill of one another when they ought to be thinking
well of one another; leading us to put the worse
instead of the better construction on the conduct of
our neighbors, and thus weakening the bond of good
will which is the very foundation of social order.
44 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

What now is the newspaper press doing to
bring to earth this reign of good will? I know
of some that are doing much. The newspapers in
my own city, I am glad to confess, are actuated
by a good spirit; they are disposed to discern the
good and to rejoice in it; they cultivate gracious
speech and kindly judgment of their fellowmen.
I find many others, as I go about the country,
which seem to manifest the same spirit.

And yet I fear that it is true that in collecting
and presenting the news of the day, the habit,
which, as I have shown, so largely prevails, of fix-
ing the attention upon the evil of society; of
keeping the seamy side of life uppermost, of ex-
ploiting crime and vice and scandal, furnishes to
quite too large an extent the common notion of
the function of journalism.

We are often told that publicity is a cure for
social evils, and to a certain extent this is true;
but publicity can be made, and, I think, often is
made, a most effective means of propagating vice.
and crime.

Of course there are vast differences among
newspapers in their ways of presenting the dark
side of life; it may be presented in a way that is
instructive and monitory, or it may be presented
in a way that is suggestive and demoralizing.
One of the great mistakes in dealing with it is in
making too much of it; giving it a place in the
TAINTED JOURNALISM 45

news of the day which is wholly out of propor-
tion to its real importance. I think it is quite
possible that the newspaper which avoids salacious
and disgusting details, may still, in the dispropor-
tionate emphasis which it gives to the facts of vice
and crime, encourage its readers to think worse of
their fellowmen than they ought to think, and
may thus strengthen that unsocial tendency of
which we are speaking.

Is it not a deplorable fact that anything which
tends to discredit one of your fellowmen should be
regarded as good stuff,—while that which tends to
remove such discredit, even when it is known to
be unjust, is much less likely to find space in the
news column? Let me tell a little story, in which
this rather disturbing fact was brought very close
home to me.

Three years ago my church acceded to my re-
quest and called a man to be my colleague in the
ministry with the understanding that he was to
be my successor. To prepare the church for his
coming I sent to every member of the church a
pastoral letter, in which I explained that this
would be the last time that I should thus address
them as their sole pastor; and speaking a few
affectionate words of counsel and admonition. In
our church, as in most churches, there are a few
members who, for no disaffection toward the
church or the minister, have dropped out of the
46 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

church’s life, and need to be led back to their
allegiance. To these I addressed a few words ex-
pressing my sorrow at their absence, and my hope
that they would come back and, under the new
leader, take up their work. The letter made it
plain that the bond of loyalty to the old pastor
was as tender and strong as it had ever been. It
was not intended for the public; it was a confi-
dential letter to my people.

A news-gatherer got hold of it; some busy young
fellow probably, who was in a hurry to get off
his dispatches; he did not read it through, but he
managed somehow to extract from it the news that
I had resigned my church in discouragement ; that
my people had deserted me; that I had been
preaching to empty pews; that I could endure the
humiliation no longer, and had thrown the burden
down and retired from the ministry.

The fact was that my congregation for the last
few months had been larger than ever before; that
the church was in a most prosperous condition;
that the affection of my people had never been so
manifest or their support so generous.

This report went by the Associated Press to
every part of the United States; all the papers
took it, I think; it was read the next day by
many millions of readers.

I tried at once to get a correction of it started;
a short statement of the facts was prepared, and
TAINTED JOURNALISM 4g

was sent out, I think, by the Associated Press
agent at Columbus; how far it got I do not know.
It may have been suppressed, as of no importance,
by the main office at Chicago; but if it was put on
the wires, then the telegraph editors of the thou-
sand journals who readily took the first report, of
course, blue-penciled this; that was good stuff;
this was not. I doubt if a dozen papers in the
United States printed it.

The editors of the daily papers, many of them,
treated me very kindly, saying a good many quite
too flattering things about the work that I had
done,—and expressing a generous sympathy, for
which I was very grateful, but of which, just then,
I did not greatly feel the need. When such a
paper came to me, I wrote at once to the editor
and of course he printed my letter, which helped
to make the matter right with his readers. Many
of my truly orthodox Christian brothers in the
denominational papers, improved the incident by
pointing out that such an end as I had come to
was the proper termination of the life of one who
had sometimes ventured to deviate from the
straight and narrow ways of tradition; and some
of them were very reluctant, when the error was
exposed, to make the necessary correction.

In fact the report never was corrected; not one
in ten probably, of those who had read the original
telegram, has ever heard it contradicted, and
48 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

wherever I go, between the two oceans, I find peo-
ple who assume that it is true, and by some com-
miserating word or look manifest their sympathy
with one who is down and out.

It was a great injury to me—the greatest in-
jury I have ever suffered. One who is drawing
near to the end of a busy life does not like to be
reported to the world as confessing that his life
has been a failure, when he has made no such con-
fession and has no such consciousness. If you will
try to put yourselves in my place you may be able
to understand that the predicament is not a happy
one. It was something more than a sentimental
grievance. It was, no doubt, a considerable finan-
cial injury. A report of that nature could not
have been otherwise than detrimental to one who
depends on his pen and his voice for his liveli-
hood.

But there was absolutely no malice or unfriend-
liness in it. The young fellow who made up the
original dispatch was careless, but he was not un-
friendly; the men who printed it had no grudge
against me; the men who declined to print the
correction were not my enemies; but when I put
myself out of the case and try to consider it in a
purely objective and impersonal way, it seems
rather appalling that such a wrong as that can be
done to a man, and that he should be absolutely
helpless to get it set right. It is all the direct
TAINTED JOURNALISM 49

result, you see, of the prevailing estimate of news
—that whatever reflects discredit upon a fellow-
being is news, and whatever tends to remove that
discredit is not news. I think that the tendency
to follow that estimate is pretty strong in jour-
nalism, and that it results in a taint upon the
business which calls for a pungent prophylactic.

I have told my story because it helps to raise
the question whether the men who gather the news
should not be trained to see that a statement which
repairs an injury is quite as “ good stuff” as the
statement which inflicts the injury. The question
seems, ethically, somewhat elementary, but I be-
lieve that it needs consideration.

Summing up all that I have tried to say under
this last division of my subject, is it not true that
one of the deepest needs of our social life is the
need of a kindlier judgment of our neighbors; the
need of a disposition to see the good side of every-
body ; the need of cultivating faith in men, and the
habit of saying the best things we truly can about
everybody we know? Would not a public opinion
suffused with such generosity and good will give
us juster laws, a more stable social order, a more
prosperous and peaceful commonwealth? And has
not the newspaper a very large responsibility in
securing such conditions?

Have I not pointed out four great and worthy
tasks of American journalism, in the performance
50 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of which it may greatly aid in purifying and in-
vigorating public opinion?

First, to teach the people to avoid exaggeration
and violent speech, and to cultivate moderate and
rational modes of expression.

Second, to resist the tendencies which demental-
ize democracy, and which substitute the mob-mind
for the deliberative habit.

Third, to hold the popular judgment firmly to
the truth that character and manhood and not
money and popularity are the central values of
human existence.

Fourth, to turn the thoughts of men more and
more from the negative virtue of detecting and
exposing the evil to the positive virtue of discern-
ing and praising the good. fe

These are the elements of a noble vocation. If
I have succeeded in putting into intelligible words
of my own the deepest purposes of many news-
paper editors, I have accomplished what I set out
to do. I offer them the right hand of fellowship
as builders here on earth of the Republic of God.
SOME WEAKNESSES OF MODERN
JOURNALISM

BY OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD

Ws are met, I take it, to counsel primarily with
one another as to the spiritual health, the welfare
of our beloved profession, to measure its progress,
or its retrogression; to search our hearts and our
consciences, to scan the heavens for portents. Is
all well with us? Are the omens favorable? Can
our soothsayers and oracles declare the populace
content, our rulers well disposed, the gods propi-
tious? Or do we bow down before the shrines of
false gods? What say the historians of the
twelvemonth?

We of the East hear them assert that all is not
well; that ‘there are widespread mutterings among
the people; that our rulers, unsatisfied, discuss
anew the question of fresh laws to search our busi-
ness; that the omens declare the gods veil their
faces as of old when offended. Somehow or other
it would appear that we have to a considerable
degree lost the confidence of the public. The
slogan no longer reads: “It must be so because
I saw it in the newspaper.” Instead, we hear: “I

51
52 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

saw it in the paper, but I suppose it is not true.”
Embittered or disappointed politicians are the
quickest to berate the newspapers, leading the
hue and cry. Let a Roosevelt or a Bryan feel
their sting, and, in our section, the easy answer
for them is: “‘ See how the hireling Wall Street
press obeys the lash of its master.” The public in
large measure believes it, partly because the
charge is so easy to make, the disproval so diffi-
cult.

If we have not heard this as often in 1913 as
previously, it is only because we have had no im-
portant political campaign to chronicle. But the
charge of conspiracy to suppress the truth is rife
on every hand. If one could believe all that one
heard, a true picture of the heads of the press
would portray them perpetually behind the arras
arranging some plot or other. Men who scent
wholesale conspiracies in other individuals usually
wind up in the observation wards of our hospitals,
but your next-door neighbor is privileged to be-
lieve in day and night conspiracies of the press
without fear of having his sanity questioned. In-
deed, he may be exalted by his doubt. And so
we hear of agreements among newspapers to ig-
nore this happening, to suppress that and to vivify
this or that defender of the rights of the people.
In New York City, so deep are the clefts between
the various newspapers, that you could never pos-
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 53

sibly get their heads to sit down around a table,
much less break bread together. Yet I hear con-
stantly that we have all agreed to perpetuate this
outrage or that wrong, to accept bribes aggre-
gating millions, or to sit silent in the sight of sin
for our own pocketbook advantage. I was myself
asked the other day in a mass meeting: “ Is it not
true that you are owned by Wall Street? ”

Although the law has compelled us of the metro-
politan press to print the names of all the stock-
holders and bondholders for a year past, it did not
surprise me to read an article in a current maga-
zine by a distinguished citizen of Indiana to the
effect that newspapers ought to be compelled to
tell the influences behind them. I have so often
heard this rumor that I have mortgaged myself to
Wall Street, with the name and address of the
banker, that I am surprised at nothing. Not if he
should throw his private books open to a Bristow
or a La Follette, could a New York editor hope to
down this entertaining fiction. He would only
hear that his books were doctored, or that he was
hiding behind somebody else’s skirts, or that it was
the point of view of the men he associated with
that really did the mischief—so discredited are
newspaper managers with certain sections of the
people and certain cross—very cross—sections of
the politicians.

If you think I exaggerate, please bear in mind
54 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the bitter attacks on the Associated Press the
present winter has witnessed. It has been assailed
as a monopoly, and on one forum after another
attacked as an organized conspiracy to suppress
every happening that affects Progress or Radical-
ism—with a capital P and R. Socialists, labor
men, and Progressives alike denounce it, because
it does not “ carry ” their propaganda. Negroes
criticise it because it brings out of the South news
only of their crimes, and never of their honorable
achievements. Some Congressmen never fail to
berate it when their other hobbies are for the
moment exhausted.

Curiously enough, the bona-fide malefactors of
great wealth equally denounce it as an association -
controlled by the mob, and, therefore, fearing: to
tell the truth about them. At least, this was the
excuse offered by a bribe-giver who thought he
was buying some New York newspapers for a
Trust; he merely wished to secure justice for his
clients, to get their side of a famous case into
print—all this when the other side to the contro-
versy was protesting that the Associated Press
was being sold out to the Trust.

With the Associated Press it is truly a case of
being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
It is berated by Catholics for being subsidized by
Protestants at the moment that anti-Catholics are
sure that they have convincing proof that the
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 55

head of the Associated Press draws a post-office
order for $268.75 a month from the Pope in Rome.
No amount of iteration seems to make anybody
understand that if there are grave defects in the
Associated Press, the fault lies with the 895 news-
papers which comprise its membership; that it is
a co-operative organization, which makes no
money profits, and is Argus-eyed in that each
newspaper is watching the service, ready to make
the telephone bells tingle if a happening is over-
looked or anything improper is put over the wires ;
that there are hundreds of honest newspaper men
in the Associated Press who would as soon sell
their wives and children as to knowingly let any
one use the service to grind an ax or feather his
nest,

It all avails not; the answer is: You can tell
by the trend of it that it is capitalistic—as if
there were not every shade of opinion in the Asso-
ciated Press. Its very president is, I am told, a
Socialist, at least in theory—but of what use is
that? Every man with a propaganda to further
is convinced, if his copy is rejected because it is
argument or assertion, and not news, that he has
tilted against the stone wall of corrupt wealth.
I personally have examined one mare’s nest after
another, only to find that each was due to igno-
rance of the technique of the profession or of the
facts. Most of them would never have been heard
56 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of had the suspicious ones gone to headquarters
to inspect the records. It is only in the tenth or
one hundredth case that I have found that there
was a genuine error. And it goes without saying
that I have yet to learn of a constructive sugges-
tion as to something better to take the place of
the Associated Press.

And what is true of the Associated Press is true
of the individual newspaper. Every gossip knows
that its inner actions are controlled for a sinister
purpose, of which money-making seems the least
evil. Let there be a failure to print some happen-
ing by oversight or because of a technical difficulty,
and the proof is perfectly apparent that you have
taken your thirty pieces of silver. The verdict in
the case of Collier’s Weekly against C. W. Post
of Postum Cereal was rendered at 5 p.m. on a
Saturday, and the New York Evening Post, which
had gone to press at one o’clock, naturally did not
have the news.

It attracted a lot of attention in the Sunday
and Monday morning newspapers, but it was quite
stale when we appeared again on Monday after-
noon, and so in accordance with regular practice
we printed nothing about it. That issue, how-
ever, contained an advertisement by Post bearing
on the case—and the evidence of our guilt was
complete, at least in the eyes of an old friend of
mine, a splendid clergyman, who wrote me how
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 57

sorry he was that he could now no longer doubt
that I had sold my journalistic soul for the beg-
garly dollars of Post, which, by the way, were
scarcely enough in a year to take care of one of
our weekly pay-rolls. I have cited this case at
length because it is so typical of the way laymen
are led unwittingly to do a newspaper injustice.
But the fact remains that for the moment the
thumbs of the public are turned down. Or, to put
it another way, we of the press are to be muck-
raked and uplifted as some of us have been muck-
raking and uplifting others. In our hearts we
must confess that as a profession we are gravely
under suspicion; that there is much truth in the
repeated assertions that we have lost our power to
influence the masses even though, paradoxically
enough, we hear at the same moment indignant
complaints that this has become a government for,
by, and with the newspapers. You in the West
may have felt this less; the very circumstances of
publication in Emporia or Salina or Hutchinson
make it unnecessary for you who are known by
everybody in town from the hostler in the livery
stable, the small boy in the street, to the bank
president, to explain that you are not a rascal;
that your bank accounts are not crooked and that
you are not in the pay of ring politicians. But in
large cities of the East, where the editor can only
be personally known to a pitifully small fraction
58 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of the community, the finger of suspicion is ever
pointed at him.

Why? Let us be honest with ourselves and ex-
amine the reasons for this suspicion and distrust .
and see how much of it we have earned. To mei
there are some glaring faults, and as I have noted
the chief complaints of the public, they have taken
form in my mind as follows:

(1.) The persistent refusal to right a wrong
done editorially.

(2.) The suppression of news for profit, or be-
cause of fear of some powerful interest.

(3.) The laying of false emphasis upon the
news because of criminal or unworthy motives.

(4.) An amazing and often criminal lack of
accuracy in reporting.

(5.) Indefensible attacks upon public men
coupled with shocking invasion of privacy of both
public and private individuals from which not
even women are exempt.

(6.) Deliberate falsification of news and facts.

Let us examine each of these individually:

I have recently received from the members of an
anti-vivisection society some forty or fifty letters
of thanks for the retraction editorially of a state-
ment injurious to that Society which had appeared
on the editorial page of our newspaper. In al-
most every case the letters run to this effect: “I
want to thank you for your unusual action in con-
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 59

fessing your fault and righting publicly the in-
justice that you did us; it is most unusual in the
newspaper world.” A distinguished Brooklyn
lawyer wrote: “I have myself been so often mis-
represented and misquoted by two of your con-
temporaries that I have been on the point of
commencing legal proceedings against them in the
interest of fair play. It does seem as if a great
New York daily paper should feel it beneath its
dignity to habitually misrepresent and misquote
a reputable citizen with whom it happens to differ
in opinion, and to refuse to correct the misstate-
ments when called to its attention, but unfortu-
nately such is often the case.” To my mind, a
refusal to confess error is due either to a bad
conscience on the part of the editor or a survival
of the old tradition that the newspaper is infalli-
ble and therefore it must not admit that Homer
could ned even in a trifling matter.

As to the suppression of news when it is to the
advantage of the newspaper to do so, the public is
even more wrought up about this than its belief
that the editor takes an unfair advantage of his
position to have the last word at all costs and to
mangle the replies and defenses of those whom he
has criticised before printing them. While the
public, as I have pointed out, often errs in its
judgments, it cannot be denied that it has sub-
stantial basis for its complaint that news is
60 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

twisted and colored to suit the convenience of the
editor or the owner. We have seen a wonderful
improvement in the reporting of political news of
late years, but it is suppression of facts which
worries the public.

Thus, the newspaper upon which I served in
Philadelphia, although owned by Protestants, had
a Catholic managing editor, and not a single word
unfavorable to the Catholic Church could creep
into its columns. I brought into the office one
night a scoop which would have been worth a
column and a half on the first page if it had not
had to do with a peculiar case of intolerance and
bigotry on the part of some good Catholics. AI-
though murder had been averted only by the fact
that a bullet went less than six inches wide of its
mark, the item was cut down to an inconspicuous
five lines.

The department store advertiser continues to
assert his right to dominate the news columns, and
it is only a brave and powerful newspaper like the
New York World which can answer the demand of
an advertiser that a murder or an accident in his
store be omitted from its columns by printing it
on its first page with most conspicuous head-
lines. The weaker newspaper to whom that con-
tract is vital is very apt to overlook the necessity
of presenting this particular piece of news. Is
the profession making much headway against this
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 61

fault? You who are more distant from the cen-
ters of intense journalistic competition are, per-
haps, better able to judge than I.

I can only say that progress in this direction
seems to me to be very slow, yet I am convinced
that the advertiser is becoming more tolerant, and
that the profession is beginning to realize that
the newspaper which thus sells its soul cannot in
the long run be either a moral or a financial suc-
cess. At least the newspaper in Philadelphia to
which I have referred, which used to send me to its
large advertisers with the statement that they
could have as much space in the news columns at
any time as they wanted, is an almost hopelessly
wrecked undertaking, and the entire press of that
city has never recovered from the blow to its pres-
tige received when it unitedly refused to tell the
story of a crime of a member of one of the large
dry-goods houses.

The laying of false emphasis in headlines by
presenting a fragmentary account of a happening
or by taking from a story a statement which be-
comes distorted when removed from its context—
all of these are tricks of unscrupulous journalists
about which the public is in no doubt. Because of
them it very often includes the entire profession
within its criticism. It is not always deliberate
intention to deceive which is at the bottom of the
wrongdoing. For instance, there is one newspaper
62 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

in New York which prints a Sunday edition; the
task of the editor is to produce big headlines for
it which will result in the sale of the paper. If a
story is not in the office to warrant this procedure,
then one must be promptly faked to meet the emer-
gency. A few Sundays ago this newspaper and
one in Washington, D. C., printed positively dia-
bolical issues deliberately calculated to infuriate
the public against the people of Mexico, for they
contained terrible stories of massacres of Amer-
icans in the City of Mexico, which were, of course,
wholly without foundation. There was, naturally,
no apology to the public the next day for being
thus imposed upon. It was a clear violation of
the laws of the State of New York in regard to
the dissemination of false information, but the
authorities take no action in such cases.

Is it any wonder, in the light of such happen-
ings, that public distrust steadily grows or that
strong adjectives are applied to owners and edi-
tors guilty of such misconduct? In these and
other offices every sense of responsibility to the
profession or to the public is thrown to the winds;
the one idea is to sell the newspaper or to inflame
the public in the interest, the policy, or desire of
a proprietor. Should we not ask ourselves how
much longer this sort of thing is going to be
tolerated by the public without interference by
Legislatures?
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 63

Deliberate misquotation frequently occurs in
the reporting of some “yellow” newspapers.
But let us deal for the moment with the really
high-class morning newspapers of a great city. It
is but the simple truth to say that no meeting can
be sure of an accurate representation in them
unless some figure of great national importance is
present. Jt has become the policy of many news-
paper men in the East never to print a speech at
any length. Hence, some of the most important
meetings in New York City, like those of the
Chamber of Commerce, of influential labor organ-
izations and reform bodies, are scarcely noticed,
or in such a fragmentary manner as to make the
sponsors of the meeting regret that reporters
were asked to be present. Only the President of
the United States is certain that his speeches will
not be garbled or mangled so that the disjecta
membra bear no relation to the unfortunate body
of oratory from which they have been detached.

It was my lot the other night to take part in
a debate on the merits of the Associated Press at
a Cooper Union meeting in New York City, where
the charges against the newspapers were well aired
by the able president of the Free Speech League.
He dwelt upon the constant misrepresentation of
radical meetings in New York, and the fact that
every reporter is trained to take from a speech
of such a man as W. D. Haywood the one foolish
64 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

or inflammatory utterance of the whole and to
give him no credit whatsoever for any sound argu-
ment or appeal to reason which he might have
argued. He prophesied that the meeting at which
we were speaking would be badly presented the
next day, and he was right. In the Tribune the
following morning there was a glowing account
of my speech, and the erroneous statement that I
had won over by the merit of my address a hostile
audience; my opponent’s address was dismissed
with two lines. As a matter of fact, I did not con-
vince the audience of the correctness of my posi-
tion, and Mr. Schrader received the long and gen-
erous applause which was credited to me.

I have myself been the victim of deliberate mis-
quotation on a vital matter. An absolute reversal
of a statement made by me in regard to the At-
lanta riots was transmitted all over the country,
and, of course, the lie once put upon the wires
could never again be caught up with. Now, it is
difficult enough at any time to record a happen-
ing accurately. Take ten ordinary citizens who
witness an encounter on the street, and no two will
give the same version of what they have beheld.
Newspapers may truly pride themselves on being
much more accurate than the ordinary observer,
and this in the face of the fact that they are often
deliberately misinformed or have to rely upon un-
trained witnesses for their facts. All the more
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 65

reprehensible is, therefore, the newspaper which
does not do its utmost to make its reports as re-
liable as human ingenuity can bring about in the
short space of time given for verification. But
it is a fact that in the metropolitan press a great
trouble is the total lack of emphasis upon ac-
curacy. The average city editor does not care
whether the story he prints is letter accurate or
not provided that it starts off with a catchy phrase
or sentence out of a speech, or some striking allit-
erative or humorous utterance to catch the read-
er’s attention. He is apparently convinced that
the day of serious readers has gone by, and that
the public desires merely to be entertained and not
informed by the journal of today, and he governs
himself accordingly.

The case was far different fifty or more years
ago. Let me illustrate it by the story of a Cooper
Union meeting in New York to protest against the
execution of John Brown, at which Wendell Phil-
lips was the chief speaker. It was engineered by
Abolitionists, and the editor of the New York
Herald hired a gang of political thugs to
go into the meeting and break it up in the
interest of the South. The next day there
appeared in his pro-slavery journal three and
a half columns of the most obviously accurate
stenographic reporting of a meeting that it has
ever been my fortune to read. Every interruption
66 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

by the editor’s henchmen is therein recorded, and
every one of the scorching replies of Wendell Phil-
lips. This, moreover, was done in the days when
there were no telephones, no typewriters, and no
rapid transit, when every transcription of steno-
graphic notes had to be done in longhand. Yet
the pro-slavery Herald’s account was superior in
length and fullness of detail to that of the anti-
slavery Tribune. Not a single meeting since I
have been in New York has been reported with
similar accuracy.

Personally, I do not believe that it is bad policy
to report meetings at considerable length; at least,
it would seem to me so if I were running a morn-
ing journal. I should insist on stenographic re-
porters whether the schools of journalism turned
them out or not, for I believe that nothing has
done more to injure the standing of the press than
this simple failure to report meetings accurately.
Everybody who is at a meeting wants to read
about it the next morning, and if the reporting is
false or inadequate, he or she knows it at once.

It was only the other day that the President of
the United States sent for the newspaper corre-
spondents who have access to the White House to
warn them solemnly against the continued misrep-
resentations in regard to the women of his family
which were appearing in the press, and to say to
them that he might have to use drastic methods to
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 67

stop it did not the papers of their own accord come.
to his rescue. One of the worst offenses of the press|
is this exploitation of the individual. There is far

greater license in Europe in the matter of print-

ing disgusting details of crime, in looseness of

caricature and jest, and in the portrayal by pen

and pencil of the vices of the day. We can be

proud of the comparative cleanness of our Amer-

ican journalism.

But nowhere else the world over is there such
exploitation of the private life of the individual,
whether he be in the White House or in public life
or a private individual. Let there be a family mis-
fortune over which most people are only too glad
to draw the mantle of charity, and the sufferings
of the family of the wrongdoer are increased a
thousandfold by its being blazoned from every
housetop. In this aspect the sensational press has
become the chief ally of the social blackmailer. It
is no exaggeration to say that millions of dollars
are wrung out of people by threats of the sale of
a story to the press, and not merely the wrong-
doer is thus victimized. For him we could have
little sympathy ; it is the innocent people affiliated
with him in whose name we must protest.

There is a member of a distinguished New York
family which recognizes the responsibility of
wealth, and lives up to the highest obligation of
social duty, who is hopelessly corrupt. Whenever
68 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

possible the deeds of this black sheep are trum-
peted on all the street corners with endless exag-
geration, with endless dwelling upon the wealth of
the malefactor and his family. It is enough to make
many people of means shrink from public service
and the giving of their means, this incessant por-
trayal of their homes, their servants, their chil-
dren, their country places, their carriages, their
good and their bad members, their everything. If
the rich are the chief sufferers those less equipped
with worldly goods are not spared, and the in-
justice bears, if anything, more heavily upon them.
But to take up our Sunday newspapers in New
York is enough to make any foreigner believe that
the only thing people care to hear about is the
rich, the rich, the good rich, the bad rich, the dis-
solute rich, the wicked rich, the automobiling rich,
but always the rich. It sells the papers well, but
it does a fearful injury to the community, and no
possible excuse as to the public wanting such mat-
ter can justify the numberless cruelties that go on
day by day.

Mr. Charles V. Stansell, who recently addressed
an inquiry to twenty-five college presidents asking
them to point out three defects of the American
newspaper, reports that the general drift of the
letters lies along the line of this reply from Presi-
dent McVey, of the University of North Dakota:
“The chief fault in the American newspapers is
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 69

their failure to appreciate proportion in the pres-
entation of news; the second fault is their over-
use of headlines, and the presentation of startling
and sensational matter really detrimental to pub-
lic morals.”” To which President Wheeler, of the
University of California, also adds: “We do not
want news written up, we want news.” ye

As to public men, it is essential in a republic
that there shall be the freest and fullest criticism
of their deeds. But it must not be an incite-
ment to crime; it must be based on sincere,
well-considered, and honest difference of opinion.
Few public men in our American political life ob-
ject to honest criticism; they do and they ought
to object to the wicked misrepresentation of public
officials by our chief apostles of yellow journalism.
After the Triangle fire, in New York, the principal
degrader of the press of the nation portrayed
three of the best city officials that New York has
known, standing beside the gallows made ready for
their alleged crime. It was necessary to guard
these officials. There is a violence, a viciousness
about attacks like this which make the tolerance
of the public nothing less than amazing, and
cause one to wonder how it is that such offenders
against public morals have escaped mob wrath.
It is believed by good lawyers that this constitutes
a breach of our statute laws.

The worst traitors of journalism are beyond
10 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

doubt the “yellow” journalists. There is no
professional chicanery that cannot be laid at their
doors. For them the gutter has no terrors; to
embroil our country in a needless war is to them
a sport and no more important than the ruining
of a woman’s reputation. To delude, to prejudice,
to mislead, to falsify, if necessary, these are the
tenets of this school of journalism. To pretend
to virtue in order to achieve one’s ends and then
to mock and flaunt is a regular procedure. No
one else has as cynically espoused the people’s
cause to as cynically betray the public when it
paid to turn about. No one else has as success-
fully worn the mask of public spirit to conceal the
fangs of the wolf; no one else has so skillfully made
people believe that an insatiable appetite for pub-
lic office and public power was really a touching
desire to serve the commonwealth.

Politicians galore have bowed down and wor-
shiped at this shrine than which there could be
none more vulgar. Without conscience, without
even the saving quality of grace and mercy,
yellow journalists, the country over, have gone
their way as cynical, broad-hatted, high-booted,
long-bearded pirates in their profession as ever
sailed the Spanish Main. How can our profession
hold up its head when such as these are unwhipt
of justice? When their craft are never without
their full crews selling their all for heavy doub-
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 171

loons? How can we who would honor its responsi-
bilities, its duties, and its opportunities assert the
worth of our profession when there is no crying
out against these abominations among ourselves
—no casting out of the devil that has come among
us?

Does it help us in the face of this veritable
plague of Egypt to recount our virtues; to tell
wherein we are better than before, to count our
gains year by year? They are there beyond
doubt. With the majority of us our columns are
cleaner than they were. Whether it be because of
the exemplary punishment of James Gordon Ben-
nett for his illicit advertising, or whether the re-
form spirit within our cities has made itself felt,
notably those new ideas dealing with the social
evil and certain kinds of medical advertising, there
has been a notable change for the better. The
magazines and weeklies have helped greatly by
their criticisms in this respect, and are still help-
ing by pointing out wherein we still fall short in
our country weeklies as well as in our large
dailies.

We are becoming more and more wary of
crooked or misleading financial advertisements
under the stimulus of laws here or there and of
public opinion elsewhere. We have even seen of
late in Chicago one of the greatest of its dailies
throwing out all liquor advertising, either because
72 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of a genuiue spasm of virtue or because of a sud-
den discovery that the larger battalions are on the
side of temperance, and it is well to have an anchor
to windward. In New York some of my contem-
poraries have made a virtue of necessity by parad-
ing a blue label or white or red label form of in-
vestigated advertising and sought to increase their
revenues, while thereby admitting the duty of the
press to censor, supervise, and investigate, so far
as possible, its advertising.

Our news columns we may fairly boast are
cleaner, as we have suddenly made them broader
by discovering that to deal with women’s news and
women’s special interests is to aid our treasure-
coffers. Best of all, we can pride ourselves upon
a steadily growing freedom from political par-
tisanship. No one who has witnessed the revolu-
tion which in this respect has gone on in the
American press since the days of that far-reaching
bolt of the Mugwumps from the Republican party
in 1884, can be hopeless about achieving any
great journalistic reform. Nor can it be said that
this is due to the break-up of party lines through-
out the country, for in this great political advance
the press has led, not followed, until today it is
hard to find a single newspaper, not even the New
York Tribune, which does not occasionally at
least leave the party fold. So with our advance
as a whole I believe it would not be just to lay
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 13

it all to self-interest coinciding with popular will.
There are too many cases of voluntary relin-
quishment of profit; too many cases of public
spirit and public service to make possible any
such charge. Yet if it were true the fact remains
that the advance is still there.

How may it be accelerated? How can we of the
press best help to restore it to its lost prestige?
That, I take it, is at bottom the question that
brings us, or most of us, together today. We
have a sailing chart; it is the Golden Rule rein-
forced by every bit of ethical teaching, every new
development of social responsibility to our fellow-
men. But have we written down for ourselves a
code of newspaper ethics based upon a recogni-
tion of the fact that we can no more perform our
functions without admitting that we have a silent
partner in the public than can any public service
corporation the country over? Newspaper pro-
prietors can less and less say to themselves, the
public be damned. I could prove to you, I believe,
that the newspaper that sells its honor, its opin-
ions, and its news columns cannot in the long run
pay. Look what happened to the Boston Herald,
under its former management, and the St. Paul
Pioneer Press, which were caught printing bogus
news of the Hughes Insurance Inquiry. See what
has happened to the Philadelphia Press and the
New York Tribune, when the public became con-
14 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

vinced that political considerations controlled
their editorial pages. Sooner or later the char-
acter of a newspaper is established in the public
eye. Sooner it is going to be in the future; how
else can it be with our quickened public conscience
in every other field of public, social, economic
activity?

Has not the time then come for us to codify the
public opinion within our own ranks, to begin to
deal in our press and editorial associations, our
publishers’ organizations, with other things than
errors of technique or increasing our gross in-

Vnames® Shall we not soon begin to visit upon the
offenders within our ranks the punishment that is
their due? Shall we not be compelled to, in order
to prevent the sins of the minority from being
visited on the heads of the majority? Is it not
time for the Associated Press, which has incor-
porated itself as a membership corporation for
news-gathering purposes, and is therefore beyond
the laws controlling money-making corporations,
to establish higher standards of conduct in the use
of its news? It punishes now for premature pub-
lication, and can expel for demonstrated willful
violation of its by-laws or corruption. Then why
not for corruption of the news for general conduct
prejudicial of the public welfare?

Are we to evolve nowhere an ethical tribunal
comparable to the grievance committees of our
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 1%5

Bar Associations or the committees of our Medical
Associations that run to earth the physician who
is guilty of mal-practice? Shall we have no Synod
or Conference to deal with our wrongdoers? So
long as we do not, we shall bear the burden of
public suspicion, for we shall fail to recognize our
public obligations ; we shall be “ silent in the pres-
ence of sin” which is ours. Trace our evils as we
will to public weaknesses—these can no more be a
valid excuse than the one-cent price which has led
so many of us into every possible error of taste
in order to achieve the large circulations which
we are beginning to find our own undoing—veri-
table petards to hoist us, their own creators.
Fellow-journalists, for us the handwriting is on
the wall. If we do not profit by it, if we do not
set our house in order ourselves, our glorious free-
dom from a hateful supervision and control will
crumble away, and with it many of the present-
day splendors, powers, and opportunities of our
craft. At best, we shall be compelled to find in a
more and more sordid rush for wealth a miserable
substitute for unqualified public approval and re-
gard, for the right to count ourselves as the fore-
most force for culture, for morality, for civiliza-
tion, the greatest bulwark of liberty, the source
of an inspired and enlightened patriotism, the
chief medium through which our laws and our in-
stitutions shall be modified or strengthened for a
76 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

fairer, a purer, a nobler democracy in the genera-
tions to come.

All of which, my friends, would be the more
regrettable if one but considers the nobility of the
profession itself. Perhaps I am biased because of
my family’s long association with it—my father,
my grandfather, an uncle, and I have been for
ninety-six years, newspaper workers, editors, and
owners, in length an unsurpassed family record in
this country, I think. I yield to no other profes-
sion, unless it be the medical], the palm for nobility
of opportunity, for its ability to forward human-
ity and all its works. But to me the power of the
journalist seems wholly outweighed by the call
for service. It is a semi-public position, I repeat,
which the editor holds, and therefore his is a semi-
public responsibility to serve the public well and
faithfully. But even this responsibility shrinks
in my mind before the opportunity to do good,
to attack evil, to spring to the rescue of the weak,
the poor, the oppressed, and the unfortunate, to
assail those intrenched in privilege, or wrong-
doing, to tear from faithless servants of the peo-
ple their garments of hypocrisy or unrighteous-
ness.

No commercial returns, however great, can com-
pare with the moral satisfaction attained by the
editor whose lance is ever ready for the public
enemy, however armored. No achievement of
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM ‘%7

huge circulations can compensate for the lack or
loss of public respect. To sell oneself and one’s
opinions either for hire or for dividends seems to
me utterly base and utterly treasonable to one’s
country—far more despicable than what goes by
the name of treason in war-time. The most con-
temptible figure in our American life seems to me
the editor whose salary runs to enormous propor-
tions, and who accepts it as a retainer cynically /
to advance the fortunes, political or otherwise, of |
his employer. He is the chief prostitute of our
profession, he is the one who injures it most, how-
ever great the audience to which he boasts his
daily appeal. At his door and his master’s lies
chiefly the responsibility for the lack of popular
confidence in the press of today. You cannot de-
ceive everybody all the time, or even the majority
of your readers all the time. Amuse them you
may, sway them in times of excitement; blind even
the altruistically inclined for a while if they try
to believe that good may come out of evil; to win
their respect is impossible. But even if hypocrisy,
cynicism, and corruption combined could achieve
all they set out to, beyond dollars it has no re-
wards and no satisfaction, certainly none that is
lasting and worth while.

It is the honest editor, however small the circle
of his readers, who reaps the greatest rewards in-
tellectually and spiritually. What financial or
78 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

circulation success could compare with the satis-
faction which came to a New York editor a couple
of years ago who felt himself compelled to an-
tagonize an obviously unfit candidate for the
United States Senate, a mere tool of what are
known as “the interests.” The candidate sent
word to this editor that there was locked up in
his safe information which would drive that editor
out of town and put his newspaper out of business.
No money, I am sure, could represent to that edi-
tor the equivalent of the thrill that came to him
when he received this message, sent for his manag-
ing editor, whose desk was loaded with ammuni-
tion with which to oppose this political tool, and
to say to that managing editor and executive
officer: “Mr. Smith, you may fire when ready.”
The newspaper is still there, and so is the editor,
but the candidate is still a candidate, and the
office is filled by some one else.

To that same editor came the opportunity to
drive from public life one of the highest officers of
the State, a notorious corruptionist, whose defi-
ance of the public was surpassed only by the
threats he made to the editor when he discovered
that proof of his guilt was about to be published.
As the form was going to the stereotyping room,
the editor received, from one of the brightest crim-
inal lawyers in the East, a notice that if one single
word appeared against his client the editor would
WEAKNESSES OF JOURNALISM 179

be held civilly and criminally liable. Somehow,
prison seemed very attractive at that moment, and
the form went in. The explosion which occurred
drove the corruptionist into private life, and the
editor, unfortunately, continues to write on prison
topics without that personal experience which
alone is supposed to fit a man to deal correctly
with a social institution. He is never so discour-
aged that the recollection of that crowded hour
does not cheer him; he has been ready any time
since then to lay down his work, believing that
that incident alone has demonstrated his patriot-
ism and fully rewarded him for any sacrifices or
any efforts for public betterment he may have ex-
pended without apparent result.

Believe’ me, the thrill of exposing the wrong-
doer and the demagogue, even though he be in the
highest place and the idol of the nation—these are
precious experiences which no one who has once
known them gives up willingly. They constitute,
together with the privilege of upholding the
righteous, the real lure of the profession to him
who enters it without thought of self, but obsessed
with the precious privilege of pleading for others.
Charles Sumner once said of the anti-slavery
struggle: “ Our cause is nobler than that of our
[Revolutionary] Fathers, inasmuch as it is more
exalted to struggle for the freedom of others than
for our own.” The editor who is true to himself
80 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and to his profession and to his clients, who are
all mankind, and not merely the fellow who buys
his wares, is sure to profit by that nobility of
purpose which invariably exalteth.

Let me here record solemnly my inmost, most
earnest belief that only as the profession to which
we belong lives up to this ideal shall its influence
with the public wax, shall it regain its lost pres-
tige, shall it in full degree exercise its functions
of serving the people, of controlling their serv-
ants, the politicians, of keeping our moral and
our national life pure by bringing forward the
new, modernizing the old, by giving vent to every
appeal for aid, to all fault-finding, to every in-
justice, as a social safety valve, as the guardian
of our liberties.

I have always thought that the words of the
dying Cyrano de Bergerac typified best the atti-
tude of the independent journalist, who is true
both to himself and his public duty and his moral
responsibility :

Now, who are these—a thousand thronged about me?
I know you well—You are all ancient foes:
Falsehood! There, there! And Compromise!
Bigotry! Cowardice! Shall I make terms?

No, never, never!
THE CLUBBER IN JOURNALISM
BY ISAAC D. WHITE

Wuew the well-seasoned journalist hears of
some proposed new law designed to affect the
newspapers, he is quite certain to resent the idea
without stopping to consider whether it is good,
bad, or indifferent. Nimbly he jumps behind the
“ Bulwarks of our Civilization,’ hoists the Star
Spangled Banner and lets go an editorial broad-
side on the Freedom of the Press and the fate that
awaits the Republic that curtails it.

We seldom consider seriously the other side of
the proposition, that a lawless and licentious press
might prove worse for all concerned, and particu-
larly so for ourselves as journalists, than no press
at all. When we dissect and analyze Freedom of
the Press and look up its pedigree and see it tried
out in the courts, we discover that, after all, it has
very well-defined limitations like all liberties must
have under a popular government.

In just so far as our system of government pro-
tects us, as individuals, in our rights, in just so
far are we a free people. Freedom in a band of
barbarians would consist in everyone doing, so far

81
82 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

as lay in his power, exactly as inclination dictated.
Might would be substituted for right and freedom
would be enjoyed, if at all, by a very limited num-
ber. In civilized communities the individual vol-
untarily forfeits some measure of personal lib-
erty in order to enjoy the greater freedom that
comes from association and mutual agreement.
The idea is expressed comprehensively and clearly
by Montesquieu in his “ Spirit of the Laws,”
written about the time the American colonies were
beginning to chafe under British rule.

“Tt is true,” he wrote, “ that in democracies the
people seem to act as they please; but political
liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom.
In governments—that is, in societies directed by
laws—liberty can consist only in the power of
doing what we ought to will and in not being con-
strained to do what we ought not to will. We
must have continually present to our minds the
difference between independence and _ liberty.
Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws
permit, and if the citizen could do what they for-
bid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, be-
cause his fellow-citizens would have the same
power.”

What are our natural rights?

We cannot go to a better authority for an
answer than to Blackstone. Regardless of all
human laws and constitutions, ancient or modern,
THE CLUBBER IN JOURNALISM - 83

a man has a natural, absolute, God-given right
to his life, to his limbs, to security from
corporal assaults and violence, to security of
health against acts which tend to endanger it,
AND TO SECURITY IN HIS REPUTATION. I have
written the words “anp TO sECURITY IN HIS
REPUTATION ” in capital letters because I wish
to emphasize them as the foundation stone of
the law of Journalism. The natural rights just
enumerated are classified by Blackstone as the
rights of personal security and in his commen-
taries they are given first place in what he was
pleased to term the “three primary rights of
mankind.” Subordinate to these natural rights
of personal security he placed the natural right
of personal liberty and the natural right of
property.

“Life is the immediate gift of God,” says
Blackstone, “a right inherent by nature in every
individual. . . . The security of his reputation
or good name from the arts of detraction and
slander, are rights to which every man is entitled
by reason and natural justice; since, without these,
it is impossible to have the perfect enjoyment of
any other advantage or right.”

We all have moral rights.

In a broad sense a moral right is such a right
as would be backed up by the approval or ac-
quiescence of public opinion. You or I, in other
84 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

words, have a moral right to do anything that
would meet with the approval or acquiescence of
the public generally, and the interference with
which by anyone would cause general public dis-
approval.

Newspapers are said to “mold” public opin-
ion, and there is no doubt many of them do. But
newspapers are themselves subject to public
opinion and dependent upon it for whatever power
or influence they possess.

Public opinion is the opinion of the majority. It
is the greatest force and the highest court in our
land. Popular government, such as we have in the
United States, is government by public opinion.
Public opinion, voiced by representatives elected by
the people, makes our laws. It puts in office by
popular vote the persons who enforce the laws.
The laws are written expression of public opinion
designed to protect us in our rights and to redress
our wrongs. To be in harmony with public opin-
ion, newspapers need only to keep within the law,
which is the written expression of public opinion.
Whenever existing laws prove inadequate to pro-
tect the citizen in his rights public opinion will
change them.

The journalist has the same rights under the
law that are enjoyed by his fellow citizens—no
more and no less. Liberty of the Press is not
intended to condone or permit the wanton violation
THE CLUBBER IN JOURNALISM = 85

of your rights or mine. There is nothing in our
constitutions, state or Federal, that permits the
violation of any man’s right to his good name and
reputation unless there be some legal justification
or excuse for it.

At the time the American colonies threw off the
British yoke and placed “ freedom of the press ”
in the constitutions of their newborn states, press
freedom had a definite meaning. It meant prima-
rily freedom from the restraints to which the press
had been subjected under British rule. The Fed-
eral Constitution, it will be remembered, contained
no reference to freedom of the press until the
first amendment provided that Congress should
pass no law abridging it. This, by the way, did
not prevent the passage of the Sedition Act, and
has not prevented in more recent times the pas-
sage of other laws (comparatively unimportant
in themselves) affecting the press although, in the
opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court, not “ abridg-
ing its freedom.”

By their constitutions our forefathers said in
effect: “ Let Congress pass no laws abridging the
freedom of the press. We will leave the regula-
tion of the press to the state governments. Let
anyone own a printing press. We don’t want any
laws limiting or prohibiting the use of the printing
press. We don’t want any press censors going
around printing offices to say in advance what
86 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

shall or shall not be printed. Let anybody and
everybody have the opportunity to publish what
they please. We have drafted laws to protect
the citizens against the abuse of this privilege and
if these laws are violated the offender may be
punished. In the long run we believe the com-
munity as a whole will be benefited by this ar-
rangement.”

On this same general principle every citizen was
free to use firearms, being held responsible for any
abuse of the privilege. If the citizen employed his
weapon in hunting or in practicing marksmanship
there would be no abuse of the privilege. If he
shot and killed another in self-defense that would
be justifiable homicide. If by a careless use of
the weapon he accidentally killed another he
would be guilty of some degree of manslaughter,
and if he purposely shot another without legal
justification or excuse he would be guilty of some
degree of assault or murder.

The laws of all of our states in this same manner
afford protection against attacks upon reputa-
tion. Freedom of the press is freedom to do what
the law permits.

The four words, “ Accuracy and Fair Play,”
sum up the law of Journalism, just as the Golden
Rule embodies the Ten Commandments.

The American press as a body today faces the
same condition that our New York police force
THE CLUBBER IN JOURNALISM 87

did a few years ago when the city government
threatened to take away their night sticks. A very
large percentage of the policemen were intelligent
and law-abiding. They knew that their duty was
to protect the lives and property of the citizens
and they were ready in the performance of that
duty to face hardship, danger, and even death.
We had been very proud of our police force.

But there had gradually grown up in the Police
Department an abuse of the night stick. The
night stick is a fine thing in dealing with criminals
and toughs and disorderly persons, but some
otherwise excellent policemen had become careless
in its use and formed a habit of occasionally
prodding reputable citizens. Honest men were
sometimes mistaken for crooks. Persons arrested
for trifling offenses complained of the night stick
and some of them were brought into court with
eyes blackened or heads bandaged. The men,
however, who were in the main responsible for the
disrepute into which the police had fallen, were a
few out-and-out, confirmed clubbers—ugly, heart-
less, cowardly bullies whose reckless disregard for
the citizens’ rights increased with the number of
their victims.

The American press is out of tune with Public
Opinion because of too much freedom with the
night stick. I know that a large majority of
American journalists are patriotic, public-spirited
88 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

citizens who take a pride in their profession
and seek to promote the public weal. But some of
the best men among us will probably admit that
they have not always shown a proper regard for
the reputations and the feelings of those who
figured in the news. Often mistakes and injury
to reputation or feelings result from haste to get
the news into print or carelessness in publishing
reports without proper verification.

We have not always resisted temptation to
publish truths that hurt innocent persons without
accomplishing any justifiable end.

We have not always been fair in our criticisms
or taken pains to restore injured reputations by
admitting our errors and correcting them.

It is regrettable, but it is the truth, that we
have in our profession a limited number of con-
firmed “clubbers,” as brutal and conscienceless
as any bullying policeman who ever broke heads
with his night stick. As in the case of the police
clubbers, their reckless disregard for the rights of
others seems to grow upon them. It is these
“clubbers ” who are in the main responsible for
the many recent attempts by Congress and our
state legislatures to regulate newspapers. The
American press as a whole is suffering in its repu-
tation because of them.

Public Opinion says journalistic clubbing has
got to be stopped. If we ourselves do not devise
THE CLUBBER IN JOURNALISM 89

some means under existing laws Public Opinion
will change the laws, and in the present state of
Public Opinion we might expect something drastic.

What can we do to save the situation?

I believe that all of us who want to be accurate
and fair should take some means of letting our
readers know of it. Invite them to point out
errors and unfairness with the assurance that they
will be corrected, and be prepared to “make
good ” in a real spirit of fair play.

Notify all our news sources to make a special
effort in the direction of accuracy and fair play.

Hit the “clubber ” with the editorial hammer
whenever you catch him in the act. Expose his
unfairness and his fakes in your news columns.
Do everything you can by word, deed or pen to
encourage and enforce his prosecution and con-
viction for libel in the criminal courts. Talk with
your judges and your district attorneys.

Remember that, while the truth is a complete
defense in a civil action for libel, it is a crime to
publish anything defamatory even though it be
true, unless the publication is made with good
motives and for justifiable ends.

Remember that under the law, comment upon
the conduct of public officials and of candidates
for public office and others who participate in
public affairs is only “ privileged ” when fair and
when the publication is honestly made in the belief
90 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of its truth and upon reasonable grounds for such
belief; that the privilege does not permit the im-
putation, falsely, of crimes or allegations affect-
ing character falsely. The “clubber ” who goes
beyond this is guilty of a crime.

Remember that a report of any judicial, legis-
lative, or other public and official proceeding in
order to be privileged, must be a true report and
a fair report. Many criminal libels are published
under this cover.

I have for a considerable time entertained the
belief that our press laws were admirably adapted
to maintaining the freedom of the press and to
protecting the citizen against any abuse of that
freedom. The remedy for present conditions, as I
see it, is for each of us, individually, to fix plainly
‘in his own mind the limitations of the law which
Public Opinion has placed on the statute books, to
keep well within the line ourselves and to turn our
batteries on all who remain outside the line.
UNTO WHOMSOEVER MUCH IS
GIVEN

BY MELVILLE E. STONE

“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be
much required; and to whom men have committed much,
of him they will ask the more.”—St. Luke xii: 48.

Tuts is my text and by your leave I propose
to preach a little sermon on what our friend
Colonel Roosevelt has aptly called the “old
moralities.” Your distinguished Mr. Charles M.
Sheldon has given some justification for me. I
could only wish that I might acquit myself as
well in his profession as he did in ours, but this
obviously may not be.

We newspaper men are clearly of those to
whom much has been given, to whom men have
committed much. It is our truthful boast that
we belong to a privileged class. It was not al-
ways so. A struggle of two centuries was neces-
sary to achieve the liberty of the press. Under
the old theory of government, when the view was
that the citizens were created for the government
and not the government for the citizens, obviously
there could be no free speech and no free press.

91
92 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

But back in Holland another view originated,
that not only did governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed, but that
indeed the true principle went beyond that, and
that governments could only rightfully exist as
the agents through which the individual citizen
should be guaranteed and protected in the largest
liberty of action consistent with his relation to
his fellowmen. Government then became but a
social contract. A necessary corollary of this
freedom of the citizen and of this theory of gov-
ernment by and for the people, was a free press.
It was old John Milton, who after visiting Hol-
land and catching the spirit of that country,
wrote his wonderful plea for unlicensed printing
and set in motion the struggle which lasted for two
centuries and culminated on our own soil in the
First Amendment to the Federal Constitution,
providing that there should never be anything
done to abridge the freedom of speech or the free-
dom of the press. Twice the State Constitution
framed in Massachusetts was offered to the peo-
ple and rejected because it contained no provision
guaranteeing a free press. The fathers thus saw
very early how essential the freedom of the press
was, and while we fully concur in that view, I
think we must all admit that it is not an unmixed
good. <A distinguished French commentator, De
Tocqueville, who wrote one of the best critiques
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 93

upon American democracy, speaking of the press,
said that it “constitutes a singular power so
strangely composed of good and evil that liberty
could not live without it and public order could
hardly be maintained against it.” Even today
there be those who think the balance of evil lies
against a free press. And do not imagine, please,
that nothing can be said on that side of the ques-
tion. Let me present to you the view of a very
distinguished European statesman, recently de-
ceased.

Pobyedonostseff, the eminent Russian reaction-
ary, said:

Any vagabond babbler or unacknowledged genius,
any enterprising tradesman, with his own money, or
with the money of others, may found a newspaper,
even a great newspaper. He may attract a host of
writers and feuilletonists, ready to deliver Judgment
on any subject at a moment’s notice; he may hire
illiterate reporters to keep him supplied with rumors
and scandals. His staff is then complete. From that
day he sits in judgment on all the world, on ministers
and administrators, on literature and art, on finance
and industry. It is true that the new journal be-
comes a power only when it is sold on the market—
that is, when it circulates among the public. For
this talent is needed, and the matter published must
be attractive and congenial for the readers. Here,
we might think, was some guarantee of the moral
value of the undertaking—men of talent will not
serve a feeble or contemptible editor or publisher; the
94 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

public will not support a newspaper which is not a
faithful echo of public opinion.

This guarantee is fictitious. Experience proves
that money will attract talent under any conditions,
and that talent is ready to write as its paymaster
requires. Experience proves that the most con-
temptible persons—retired money-lenders, Jewish fac-
tors, news-venders, and bankrupt gamblers—may
found newspapers, secure the services of talented
writers and place their editions on the market as or-
gans of public opinion. The healthy taste of the
public is not to be relied upon. The great mass of
readers, idlers for the most part, is ruled less by a
few healthy instincts than by a base and despicable
hankering for idle amusement, and the support of
the people may be secured by any editor who provides
for the satisfaction of these hankerings, for the love
of scandal, and for intellectual pruriency of the basest
kind. Of this we meet with evidence daily; even in
our capital no search is necessary to find it; it is
enough to note the supply and demand of the news-
venders’ shops and at the railway stations.

Such a paper may flourish, attain consideration
as an organ of public opinion, and be immensely re-
munerative to its owners, while no paper conducted
upon firm moral principles or founded to meet the
healthier instincts of the people could compete with
it for a moment.

Finally he delivers this last blow at what he
considers the irresponsibility of the journalist:

For the journalist, with a power comprehending
all things, requires no sanction. He derives his
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN’ 95

authority from no election, he receives support from
no one. His newspaper becomes an authority in the
State, and for this authority no indorsement is re-
quired. The man in the street may establish such
an organ and exercise the concomitant with an ir-
responsibility enjoyed by no other power in the
world. That this is in no way exaggeration there are
innumerable proofs. How often have superficial and
unscrupulous journalists paved the way for revolu-
tion, fomented irritation into enmity, and brought
about desolating wars? For conduct such as this a
monarch would lose his throne, a minister would be
disgraced, impeached, and punished; but the jour-
nalist stands dry above the waters he has disturbed,
from the ruin he has caused he rises triumphant and
briskly continues his destructive work.

Its defenders assure us that the Press itself
heals the wounds it has inflicted; but any thinking
mind can see that these are mere idle words. The
attacks of the Press on individuals may cause irrepa-
rable injury. Retraction and explanations can in
no way give them full satisfaction. Not half of those
who read the denunciatory article will read the
apology or the explanation, and in the minds of the
mass of frivolous readers, insulting or calumnious
suggestions leave behind an ineffaceable stain. Crim-
inal prosecution for defamation is but the feeblest
defense, and civil action seldom succeeds in exposing
the offender, while it subjects the offended to fresh
attack. The journalist, moreover, has a thousand
means of wounding and terrifying individuals without
furnishing them with sufficient grounds for legal
prosecution.
96 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

But it is not necessary for you to go so far
afield to find much criticism of our free press.
In an article in the April issue of the Atlantic
Monthly Mr. Hobhouse, a well-known English
writer, speaks of some of the prime evils of Amer-
ica and says that one of them is that the press
is engaged in misleading the electorate. I listened
with great interest a few weeks ago to a speech
by an eminent United States Senator, who is also
a candidate for the Republican nomination for
the Presidency, in which he inveighed at length
against the American newspaper as being con-
trolled by improper influences. In a very illumi-
nating volume which has just issued from the
press under the title of “The New Democracy,”
a brilliant writer devotes a chapter to the news-
paper, and his criticism is a very sharp one. He
alleges that there are a large number of news-
papers controlled by corrupt interests; another
large number are in the hands of their advertisers,
and in general he supports the view suggested by
Mr. Hobhouse that we do mislead the electorate.

Now, all this is very serious. These charges
are not to be dismissed without consideration.
We are bound by every obligation of propriety
to enter upon an examination to determine
whether we are meeting our obligations. ‘“ Unto
whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much
required.” Broadly, I do not believe that the
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 9%

claim of Senator La Follette or that of Mr. Weyl,
author of “The New Democracy,” can be sus-
tained. I suppose there is no one in this country
who has such opportunity for information re-
specting the ownership of the daily press as I
have. I should say that the number of newspapers
directly owned by what are known as “ the inter-
ests” is very small. Repeated efforts have been
made by men of great wealth and having large in-
terests to buy and conduct newspapers for the
purpose of affecting public opinion. But in al-
most every instance, these efforts have failed; and
for reasons which I hope I may be able to make
plain to you.

Mr. Jay Gould once owned a daily newspaper
in New York, and after a short and inglorious
career with it, was glad to sell for a greatly re-
duced price. Something like thirty years ago
Mr. Cyrus Field bought an evening paper to pro-
tect his railway interests, and made an attempt to
run it. It was the New York Mail and Express.
Of course, it was not long before he discovered
that he could not make the thing work. He then
offered to sell me a half-interest with the under-
standing that I should pay for it out of the
paper’s earnings. I asked who would be asso-
ciated with me, and he replied that he would keep
the other half himself. I was forced to say that
without any desire to be offensive I could not buy
98 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

into the paper at all if he were to remain in it,
even with a minority. A newspaper cannot suc-
ceed if it is to be made the means toward an
ulterior end.

I know a limited number of newspapers in this
country which are today owned by large interests ;
but, as I have said, the number is very small and
the papers are entirely inconsequential and prac-
tically powerless to accomplish anything of evil
for their proprietors. Nine-tenths of the Amer-
ican newspapers are conducted for the purpose of
making money for their proprietors by legitimate
means—through subscriptions and advertising.
While the last thing in the world which I propose
to do is to claim perfection for the American
newspaper, yet I do not think that the charge
that as a body the newspaper editors in this coun-
try are trying to mislead the electorate, or that
they are engaged in any sinister design, is true.
With rare exceptions they are honest and con-
scientious, and whatever failings they have, I be-
lieve, lean to virtue’s side. A writer attempting
to prove that they are improperly influenced, sets
up the claim that they are under the control of
large advertisers. This certainly cannot mean
that what are known as “the interests” are in-
fluencing them, because notoriously “the inter-
ests”? do not advertise in the daily newspapers.
The writer, then, is forced to say that editors
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN’ 99

are suppressing suicides and scandals at the re-
quest of the proprietors of department stores,
and, finally, he thinks that this suppression, al-
though done at the request of an advertiser, is
in the interest of good morals, for the scandals
themselves should not be printed. Then, if this
criticism were true, it means little because the
department stores as a class throughout the coun-
try have no community of interest with what are
known as “the interests.’ They constitute no
political factor and the views of the proprietors
upon public questions are probably as divergent
as those of any other class of people in the
country.

The next charge is that the American news-
paper has become commercialized because the
control has gone from the editorial chair to the
counting room. I think there is some ground for
this statement, although the criticism is far less
important than it seems to those who make it. It
has always been the rule that newspapers have
been controlled from their counting rooms and
that the editorial force has been made up of hired
men. I say this has been the rule. There have
been exceptions and very notable ones. Such ex-
ceptions were the cases of the elder James Gor-
don Bennett, Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana,
Joseph Medill, Murat Halstead, Richard Smith,
and Joseph McCullagh. Yet, after all, in two
100 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

cases alone among those I have cited, did the
editor, while dominating the paper, own an actual
control of its stock. ‘There is something about
the business which makes it practically impossible
for one man to combine the qualities of editor and
business manager. In a certain sense success in
the editorial department disqualifies a man for
success in the counting room. Now and then in
the theatrical profession you will find a man who
seems to have a versatility which enables him to
be a successful actor-manager, but even there the
cases are rare. Even Henry Irving died a bank-
rupt because of his lack of business efficiency.
And so editor-publishers have never been numer-
ous. The London Times, while owned for a cen-
tury and a quarter by the Walters family, was
edited by employees. Today the London Times
is largely owned by men who do no writing and,
indeed, who have no practical knowledge of jour-
nalism. The London Daily News is owned by
the Cadburys, the cocoa men. Neither the Lon-
don Chronicle, nor the London Standard, nor any
other London daily, so far as I am advised, is
edited by its owner. In this country, also, even
of the list of great editors of whom I have
spoken only one or two died leaving any personal
fortune. This, I think, is to be said to their
credit. I think it might be desirable that the edi-
torial department of the American newspaper
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 101

outweigh the counting room in importance in the
newspaper office. I believe if it did, and the in-
fluence were intelligently exercised, it would bring
better results from a purely business point of
view.

And this brings me to the thing I desire most
to speak of. Addressing, as I am, men of my own
craft, men engaged in a business to which I have
devoted my life, perhaps you will indulge me
while I make some practical suggestions respect-
ing what I feel to be the ideal newspaper, and re-
specting some of the things which I feel we, as
newspaper men, should do to meet our obliga-
tions to the public. Perhaps I can do no better
than to tell you something of my own expe-
rience.

In 1875, with practically no money, I founded
the Chicago Daily News. I laid down a course of
conduct which it seemed to me must bring success,
and I am glad to say that it did. And yet the
rules adopted at that time were in force in very
few newspaper offices in the country, and unhap-
pily I think they are not all in force today in
many newspaper offices. The first was that the
newspaper should be run distinctly in the interest
of the public and that the subscriber should have
chief consideration. It was recognized that a
newspaper has in its editorial department three
offices to perform: First, to print the news; sec-
102 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ond, to strive to guide public opinion in a proper
direction, and, third, to furnish entertainment. I
use this order because I believe it to be the cor-
rect one. I believe it to be a business mistake to
invert this order and to make the entertainment
of the reader of supreme importance. I think the
business of guiding public opinion, while it in-
volves a large responsibility, is, after all, sec-
ondary. Following this order the proper presen-
tation of news was the first thing of consequence.
The news was put upon the first page of the paper,
the most conspicuous place, and an effort made
to present a true perspective of the world’s real
developing history. There was an unbreakable
rule that nothing should appear in the columns of
the paper which a young woman could not read
aloud in the presence of a mixed company. My
belief was and is that this was a proper rule on
purely business grounds. We had a paper in
Chicago printing scandals, and while it achieved
a very considerable circulation, it was not ad-
mitted to homes and therefore its value as an
advertising sheet was of little consequence. An-
other rule was that the paper should make every
effort to see that its news was truthful and im-
partial, and if at any time we were led into a
misstatement, nothing gave me greater pleasure
than to make a fair, frank, and open acknowl-
edgment and apology. I know that in many news-
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 103

paper offices there is an attempt to convince the
public of the editor’s infallibility. I think this is
a mistake. A reputation for integrity can be
achieved and has enormous value. A reputation
for infallibility is hardly possible. The editor
cannot deceive his readers or the public. The
newspaper makes a reputation precisely as the
citizen does. If your fellow-citizen makes a mis-
statement about you and promptly, frankly, and
fully retracts and apologizes, he grows in your
esteem. If, on the other hand, with knowledge
that he has made a misstatement, he refuses to
apologize and retract, he grows in your con-
tempt. And this is equally true of the news-
paper.

These were two rules. First, that the news should
have first place, and, second, that it should be
truthful news, or if not truthful, there should be
perfect readiness to retract and correct so far
as possible. The effect of the printed word is
very great and any conscientious editor must.
recognize that, do what he will, he can never make
full atonement for a misstatement affecting the
character of any man.

The third rule divorced the business and edi-
torial departments absolutely. No line of paid
reading matter ever appeared in the columns of
the paper. This was adhered to religiously.
Everything in the form of advertising was printed
104 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

as advertising, so that the reader could instantly
detect it. Such were the rules respecting the news
service.

Turning to the business department, the rules
were equally stringent. It was recognized that
advertising was a legitimate business. Our theory
was that every one was free to advertise or not,
precisely as he was free to buy groceries at a
grocery store or dry goods at a dry goods store.
The claim sometimes set up by newspaper propri-
etors that the advertiser is under some sort of
an obligation to advertise smacks of blackmail.
In the early days of the paper it was by no
means an uncommon thing for the business de-
partment to tell a man frankly that he had better
not advertise in the Daily News. For instance,
if a man called at the office with an advertisement
to sell a stationary engine, he would be told that
while we were in the business of advertising and
would be glad to have his advertisement, if he
inserted it in the Daily News he would have to
pay for a circulation of nine, ten, fifteen, or
twenty thousand, whatever the circulation was,
and that of the readers of the Daily News, it was
not likely that a dozen would be in want of a sta-
tionary engine. He was therefore advised to take
his advertisement to a paper like the American
Machinist, where he would find a large proportion
of the readers possible purchasers. He was told
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 105

that if at any time he had something to advertise
which the Daily News could properly and profit-
ably serve, he was invited to return. You may be
sure he returned.

With the earliest issue, the actual paid circula-
tion day by day was printed at the head of the
editorial column and sworn to. This was a very
uncommon thing in that day. Indeed, I do not
know of any other paper in the United States
that did it. My belief was that the advertiser
should be perfectly free to advertise or not to
advertise, and that if he did want to advertise he
had the same right to know the extent and the
character of the circulation of the paper that you
would have if you entered a dry goods store to buy
prints and demanded to know whether they were
fast colors, and yard wide, or not.

You had no right to expect him to buy a pig
in a bag. Our aim was therefore to give the
fullest possible information and to invite the ad-
vertiser to verify our statements by any method
that might suggest itself. Inasmuch as we re-
garded the reader as of more value than the ad-
vertiser, and inasmuch as our first duty, as we
conceived it, was to the reader, while aiming to
deal fairly with the advertiser at all times, we
insisted that he should take second place. We
therefore made it an inflexible rule that all loca-
tions of advertising must be at publisher’s option,
106 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and we made no contracts whatever for “top of
the column next to reading matter.” In the
make-up of the paper the news matter was always
considered paramount and the advertising rele-
gated to a less important place.

The rule was also absolute that there should
be no cutting of rates under any circumstances.
I had an amusing experience in connection with
this matter. After Mr. Victor Lawson joined me
as a partner, he took charge of the business end
of the concern, while I conducted the editorial end.
Mr. Lawson’s views and mine were in thorough
accord. The paper was young and struggling.
One day the junior partner in a leading house in
Chicago called and said that he would make a long-
time contract for advertising if we would cut our
lowest rate ten per cent. I replied:

* Cutting rates is a thing we have never done
in the history of the paper and have said we
would never do; that is, we would never discrimi-
nate between advertisers. But I recognize the
importance of your house and am willing to con-
tract with you on one condition. As a matter of
fact we have but one rate, so that there is no
lowest rate. Our rates are printed and are uni-
form. Yet I will make you a ten per cent reduc-
tion on these rates upon this one condition: that
you make part of the contract that my wife may
buy dry goods at your store ten per cent cheaper
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 107

than any other woman in Chicago and allow me
to print that fact.”

“Good heavens!” he replied, “that would
ruin us. We run a one-price store.”

He left in dudgeon, but within a week made a
contract upon the established rates.

Another rule of the office forbade any effort
to exploit the growth of the paper; either the
fact that it had beaten some other paper on news
or that its circulation had shown a phenomenal
growth, or that it had printed more advertising
this year than last. The only reference we ever
made to circulation in our editorial columns was
when the circulation fell off and not when it in-
creased. We left the readers and the public to
judge for themselves whether as a newspaper, or
as an advertising medium, the Daily News was
valuable. I believe, and have always believed, that
the constant shouting in a newspaper “ See how
we are growing” or “See how our advertising
increases,” is no more intelligent, nor more effec-
tive, than it would be for an individual to be
forever parading on the street and in the company
of his friends his own views of his own importance.

As to the editorial department proper, that in
which we attempted to influence public opinion,
we made it a rule at the outset that neither Mr.
Lawson nor myself should buy or own stock in
any public utilities corporation affecting Chicago,
108 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and we made earnest effort to convince the people
that we were honest. We found that the easiest
way to do this was to be honest. We had no axes
to grind, no friends to reward, and no enemies to
punish. Out of that policy, and it was a policy
which contemplated building a paper not for
today nor for tomorrow, but for the long future,
came a steady development and growth, until I
think admittedly the earnings of the paper today
exceed those of any other in the United States.
Now passing from that experience to the Asso-
ciated. Press, in which I think you are all interested.
In 1893, without any solicitation or even thought
on my part of such a thing, the Western Asso-
ciated Press met in Chicago and appointed a
committee to ask me to take the general manager-
ship. An issue had been joined upon what I con-
ceived to be a great principle. The leading news-
gathering organization at the time was the United
Press, a proprietary institution controlled by
three men, Mr. William M. Laffan, Mr. John R.
Walsh, and Mr. Walter P. Phillips. Without any
reflection whatever on the fitness of these three
men, I felt that such a condition was a menace
in this country, and we at once reorganized the
Western Associated Press, made it a national or-
ganization, and set out to establish a co-operative
news-gathering association which should be owned,
controlled, and censored by the newspapers them-
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 109

selves. It should be an association of the papers,
for the papers, and by the papers.

I should be very glad if the Associated Press,
its purposes and its practices, were better under-
stood. I mean better understood by both reader
and editor. The institution bears a very impor-
tant relation to American life, and is, I am sure,
well worth your study. Its telegrams are printed
primarily in over eight hundred daily newspapers,
and are copied or rewritten in unnumbered thou-
sands of other daily, weekly, or monthly publica-
tions. It is doubtless safe to say they are read
by over three-fourths of the people of the land,
and that from the intelligence they convey, prac-
tically everyone gathers his information respect-
ing current events.

I am sure you will all agree that it is important,
to use no stronger word, that your market reports,
for example, be trustworthy. Well, what assur-
ance have you, not only that the reports of the
Associated Press are honest, but that out of the
necessities of the case, they must be more certain
of accuracy than any other market reports?

One good reason grows out of the magnitude
of the association’s work. I know there are per-
sons who think it would be better to have a half
dozen small agencies acting in sharp competition,
but I venture to suggest that this is a mistake.
Such rivalry would doubtless tend to the greatest
110 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

celerity in gathering the news. But such rivalry
would not, from any point of view, tend to greater
accuracy. And it is far less important that you
get prompt news than that you get true news.
However desirable it may be to be first in the field
in the presentation of news, and I do not under-
value this feature of our work, still I regard its
reputation for truthfulness and strict impartial-
ity as the best asset of the Associated Press.

And I insist that no smaller agency can possibly
give as great a guarantee for accuracy or im-
partiality. First, there are the traditions of half
a century which must be lived up to. This spirit,
which animates everyone in the service, is a good
deal, but naturally it is not all. More important
is the fact that every telegram of the Associated
Press is subjected to such a degree of censorship
as to make untruthful or biased reports practi-
cally impossible.

Everyone familiar with our work knows that
it is utterly impossible for any one in the service,
from the general manager to the least important
agent at the most remote point, to send out an
untruthful dispatch and escape detection. You
may write a biased or inaccurate statement for a
newspaper and “ get away with it,” but you can-
not do it with the argus-eyed millions who read
the dispatches of the Associated Press. Obvi-
ously then, the very magnitude of the Associated
UNTO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN 111

Press work tends to make truthfulness and im-
partiality in the service imperative. It cannot
be used for private aims, to serve any special in-
terest, or to help any political party or faction
or propaganda. I am not laying claim to any
great virtue. I am saying that, under its system
of operation and in view of the millions of critics
passing upon its work, the Associated Press is
automatically truthful and fair. If you hear a
man whining that the Associated Press is run
in the interest of this party or that you may put
it down that what he wants is not fair play, but
a leaning his way.

As one evidence of the truthfulness of our re-
ports, I direct your attention to the fact that
during the life of the present organization we
have never paid a dollar of damages in an action
for libel, nor have we compromised any case.

Thus do we aim to keep in mind our obligation,
“Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be
much required.”
A MODERN TYPE OF COUNTRY
JOURNALISM

BY RALPH TENNAL

Recently I read a statement of a country edi-
tor in which he said that a good business head is
about all there is to publishing a successful news-
paper. Many editors believe in hammering hard
on circulation; others make the work of securing
advertising the chief effort. In several offices I
know mechanical excellence is the particular vir-
tue. By all these methods good results appar-
ently can be secured.

But I believe in another way. I am convinced
that a distinctive type of rural journalism should
be developed. This type would include not alone
the handling of a great deal of local news, but
would carry with it the interesting or bright
things done or said by the people, from the babies
to the old folks. It would mean little stories about
things in the community, animate and inanimate.
There is an endless field for this stuff of human
appeal—matter that strictly is not news but
which is of greater value than news itself in coun-
try newspaper building. A number of Kansas

112
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 113

editors are working along this line, and are find-
ing that the pulling power of the matter beats
piano contests and all the collecting agencies. It
makes the paper a better advertising medium to
say nothing of increasing circulation.

Two papers—one a daily in a town of 15,000,
the other a weekly in a town of 2,000—developed
this rural journalism to an intensive degree. The
daily paid more than $20,000 a year without a
job office.

The daily * achieved its results without a circu-
lation manager; without an advertising manager ;
without a city editor. It did not have anything
but reporters. The editor himself was simply a
reporter. With an unfailing handling of the local
field the daily needed no shrewd business manage-
ment of any kind. The business just naturally
walked into the office because there was no other
place for it to go. Circulation and advertising
came with the big handling of the news.

The system really is not a system at all. It is
just a matter of a bunch of reporters getting
right on the streets and getting all the news and
town talk. The same reporters while on their
rounds picked up the day’s advertising and took
it to the office. The royal road to efficiency on
this newspaper lay in each reporter doubling up.
While he was on the street getting news he was

1The Atchison Globe.
114 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

absorbing ideas for editorials, and was taking ad-
vertising also. But first and foremost of all he
was a reporter. Little attention was paid to cir-
culation. It took care of itself. These reporters
on the daily included the editor and the society
reporter. In addition to the five reporters the
only business office employees were a collector and
a bookkeeper. The collector and bookkeeper
both watched for news, but the collector was
pretty busy taking money into the office and the
bookkeeper had quite a job keeping track of it.

The editor, the society reporter, and two men
reporters kept continually on the streets, but the
fifth reporter, a woman, sat in the office and read
all the copy that came in. Also she read the
proofs, nobody holding copy on her. She knew
when the stuff was right. She also read the ex-
changes and from them gleaned matter of local
interest. If she found an item that could be
played up she turned it over to a reporter who
wrote it to fit the community interest.

There were no assignments. The town terri-
tory was divided among the four reporters who
worked on the streets. I want to impress on your
mind that the owner of the paper? was one of the
four newsgathers and continued so for thirty
years.

Approximately six trips about town were made

27K. W. Howe.
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 115

by each of these four writers during the day. So
well was the territory organized that someone
representing the paper met every train, visited
all the stores and offices and customary places of
gathering news, every day. There was no out-of-
the-way corner of the town nor little modest shop
that was neglected.

Remarkable sources of news and ideas were de-
veloped. A blacksmith who thought as he
pounded his anvil nearly always was good for an
editorial suggestion. A horse doctor in a re-
mote part of the town frequently had a slant on
affairs that was worth repeating. A dry goods
clerk at the notion counter knew more news and
said more funny things than the smartest society
woman on the town site. A real estate agent
thought of so many good things that he was
quoted all over the United States. Numerous
town characters were developed by the news-
gatherers.

It was a theory that the duller the day, the
better must be the paper. So these town charac-
ters, taught to furnish matter by the workers on
the paper, were drawn upon to enliven the sheet
on the dullest day. And it became an actual fact
that on dull days when not a real item was stirring
the paper attracted more attention than at any
other time.

It might be imagined that more than one re-
116 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

porter would hand in the same item, but this did
not prove to be true in practice. If a reporter
got a story and was in doubt as to whether it
had been handed in, he asked the woman who
handled the stuff on one of his trips to the office
or he telephoned. In this way duplications were
avoided.

Each reporter wrote for all departments of the
paper. He was expected to hand in not only news
and town talk but editorial ideas of all kinds, to
say nothing of paid locals which he was supposed
to write as interestingly as his legitimate news.
And here is something that does not seem to
have occurred to the average country reporter:
. the ideas of real value you get by talking to peo-
ple. The ideas secured by reading exchanges are
second-hand ones. ‘The real burning ones come
from contact with your fellowmen. The “ Spark-
lers” as the reporters termed the paper’s funny
paragraphs, were nothing on earth except ideas
picked up by reporters on the streets. Every re-
porter was expected to write some of them every
day.

Before Walt Mason became famous as a poet
and earned five or six hundred dollars a month he
was a newspaper reporter and worked on the
streets in the manner described. He told in verse
the wonders of Smith’s bread, Jones’ spareribs
and sausage, or somebody’s hair bleach or
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 117

bananas. His poetry of the present day is writ-
ten in the same prose form that he used on this
paper for paid locals.

The paper covered all the news, but did not
stop there. Fifteen columns would probably in-
clude the amount of local stuff written daily by
the four reporters and the woman in the office.
The matter was kept very short, the daily output
of items usually amounting to about two hundred.
It was the talky, gossipy way that made the paper
necessary to the subscribers. I do not know
whether I can convey an idea of this gossipy part
of the newspaper. Somehow it always reminded
me of a family sitting around the table discuss-
ing affairs. The town and county was just one
big family, and the paper discussed the community
as such.

For the highest type of country town reporter
I would refer you to E. W. Howe. In my opinion
he is the greatest rural reporter that ever wrote
in a notebook. For thirty years he wrote matter
that was quoted all over the United States. His
daily output was about forty items. The matter
was picked up on the streets in talks with people.
It was meant for local news or local entertain-
ment, yet it was so replete with general interest
that it had an audience that was nation-wide.

Mr. Howe always kept a notebook on his per-
son. He did not wait for someone to tell him
118 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

something before writing in it. The best things
that Mr. Howe wrote were suggested rather than
told to him. The suggestions came, not only from
conversations, but originated frequently from
objects he saw.

For example he attended the theater. This
went into his notebook:

The most natural man in a play is the villain.

His mind running along the same line of
thought, this was jotted down:

What a villain a man is willing to become in making
“a good trade”!

While Mr. Howe was reading an advertisement
in the composing room by way of closing the
forms, the ad suggested a paragraph as follows:

Occasionally we see an article advertised as self-
cleaning. Nothing is self-cleaning. Dirt is the
enemy of the human race, and constant scouring, and
rubbing, and cleaning by hand, is necessary.

A bore came into the office to take up the edi-
tor’s time. The editor cashed in on the annoy-
ance in this way:

The most worthless man I ever knew is in town,
and I believe he has the best collection of letters of
recommendation I ever saw. I would be willing to
give him a letter of recommendation myself, in order
to be rid of him,
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 119

Mr. Howe cultivated certain men who sug-
gested stuff for the paper. This will show how
completely he used them:

We know a certain man who is bright, and we hang
around him a good deal because of the original things
he says. But we have noticed lately that he is begin-
ning to repeat his sayings.

One of Mr. Howe’s methods was to run matter
that would arouse discussion. This can be done
in endless ways. An example is herewith quoted
merely to show one of the ways:

How early do mothers begin spanking their chil-
dren? So far as we have been able to learn, by in-
quiring among mothers, it is necessary to begin
spanking girl babies when about a year old, and boy
babies when about sixteen months old.

A useful trick of the business was in taking
the people into the paper’s confidence. Mr. Howe
did not hesitate to talk about himself and his
paper. This will show one way in which he did
it: :

If to-morrow is a dull day, it will be the seventh in
succession, and we will be compelled to print more

stories of what Joe Schott saw when he was in Europe
last summer.

One of the strong points in Mr. Howe’s methods
lay in talking somewhat mysteriously and in mak-
120 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ing the people guess. Sometimes the paragraphs

referred to a real situation. At other times an

idea was hung onto a purely imaginative case.
This one is imaginative:

We are much interested in the case of an old gen-
tleman who is ill. Once or twice a week he comes
downtown, and, on being asked how he is, replies:
“T am very well, thank you; but my wife is poorly.
I am compelled to spend a great deal of time with
her.” As a matter of'fact, his wife is well. The old
gentleman is passing through the Dark Woods, and
he whistles to keep up his courage.

The following had fact as a basis:

An heiress is about to visit Atchison. The young
men should remember that what the town needs now
worse than anything else is outside capital.

Mr. Howe knew people so well that he was able
to write about them with intimate familiarity.
The three paragraphs which I present illustrate
what is meant:

They say there is nothing new under the sun. How
is this? Mose Morris went into a grocery store today,
and bought a sack of apples, and the grocer helped
him to eat them. Not only that: the grocer invited
everyone who came in to have an apple out of Mr.
Morris’s sack. The grocer has been the victim of
“tasters” for years, and was getting even. We con-
tend that there are new things happening every day.
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 121

Another one:

Atchison hasn’t a real thoroughbred at this time,
but it has a citizen who used to be one. When Fred
Giddings lived in London, as a young man, he never
went to bed until 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning.

Still another one:

Every time we see big, fat George Hargrave, we
can’t help laughing over the fact that when he isn’t
feeling very well, his wife makes him take Jayne’s
Vermifuge, a worm medicine for children.

These people are all well-known citizens of the
town.

Everything was grist to Mr. Howe’s mill, as
the following will show:

When a farmer comes into possession of a traction
engine, he delights to fire it up, and go snorting
through the town where he lives.

Even night sounds went into the hopper:

A big North Atchison dog preached all last night,
taking burglars for his text.

While Mr. Howe was audacious he learned to
amuse without annoying. This will give an idea
of his work along this line:

Long before George King married Christine Don-
ald, we knew what was in the air: The Donald dog
followed George everywhere.
122 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

Mr. Howe’s paper gossiped with equal abandon
about the most prominent residents of the town
and the humblest. The first two items given below
refer to the élite:

Mrs. Will Beckman, wife of the district judge, is
doing her own work while her servant girl is taking
her vacation abroad. The servant girl attended the
Passion Play, and greatly enjoyed it.

The man referred to in the following item is a
brother of the Reverend Christian Reisner of New
York, one of the most noted divines in the
country:

We desire to be as agreeable as possible, but Harry
Reisner’s summer hat is about the toughest-looking
lid we have ever seen. And we’re quite a traveler;
we've been to Omaha three times, and once to St.
Louis.

Just a town colored laborer received this men-
tion:

Some widowers may be giddy, but not all of them.
Joe Evans has been a widower three years, and is not
taking notice any more now than he did the third
month after the funeral. “I am not saying anything
against anybody,” he said today, “ but I am satisfied
as I am.”

Of course you will have to know your man be-
fore you can go this far.
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 123

The following refers to a character mentioned
previously as always being good for dull day
stuff :

Doe Robinson, the horse doctor, puts up as big a
line of talk as the other doctors.

The thing I want to call your attention to is
the equally effective use to which every class of
citizen may be put. It must be understood that
this gossipy local stuff is utilized in addition to
the vigorous handling of the straight news. Never
should a full handling of the news be neglected.

These paragraphs are given in an effort to pre-
sent the kind of rural journalism I have in mind.
It is all good local stuff and made Mr. Howe’s
paper indispensable in more than 6,000 homes in
both city and country. On dull days the paper was
full of this type of matter. Every reporter
on the paper wrote it. Short paragraphs have
been quoted in order not to take up time in the
reading. While the matter was written for the
entertainment of the local readers of the paper
‘only, you will find by studying the paragraphs
quoted that nearly every one of them has an ap-
peal that is universal. So Mr. Howe’s fame as a
paragrapher is founded solely upon his work as
a country newspaper reporter. He is distin-
guished as a novelist and editorial writer, but I am
discussing him as a paragrapher.
124 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

This style of journalism can be utilized on the
country weekly with even greater effect than on
the daily. It was inaugurated in a country
town of 2,000. The result of its application
almost doubled the profits of the paper. As in
the daily all the news was written in the office.
The editor and a girl reporter did this work. The
free copies to ministers for contributing obitu-
aries and church notices were discontinued be-
cause this matter was handled by the employees of
the office. The ministers then paid for their
papers as did other subscribers. No item was
permitted to go into the paper that was not care-
fully edited.

The usual long dull stuff sent in by this or that
contributor was either left out entirely or was
rewritten. The resolution of condolence contrib-
uted by lodges was cut out. By replacing this
donated matter with personally gathered and
edited local news and gossip, it was possible to
collect subscriptions when they fell due. The
subscribers had to have the paper. When the
news columns livened up all the members of the
family read the paper.

The paper immediately became a real hot wire
for advertisers. It did not take the merchants
long to learn that. The playing up of social
events stimulated the sale of dry goods for party
dresses and of groceries for refreshments. The
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 125

experiences of farmers in which they told of bet-
ter farming methods created a demand for farm
machinery. The merchants wanted this increased
business all along the line. So the dry goods
merchants, grocers, and implement dealers adver-
tised to get the business. The paper helped the
town folks to have a good time socially; it helped
the farmers to better farming methods; it helped
the business men to increase their trade, and it
helped itself to get more advertising. The benefit
was entirely mutual.

This is the advertising game as practiced by the
biggest publications in the country and it can
be worked by the country papers. There is no
reason why the country editor should not get into
the game scientifically.

The country paper is, or should be, a part
of the existence of the people who subscribe for
it. Covering the field is not quite all the battle.
The weekly should go to press on time as rigidly
as the daily. Thus it will have its unfailing part
in the habits of the readers. This will illustrate
the point:

A man named Jim Beach once lived in the
town of Webster. He had gone to St. Louis,
where he arrived at success in course of time. Jim
had an eight-day clock which he wound once a
week. The old home paper came to him so
regularly once a week that he got to winding the
126 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

clock by the Webster Times. When he arrived
home Thursday afternoon and saw the Times
on the mantel he first wound his eight-day clock,
then he sat down and read the home news. The
paper never missed reaching him on Thursday
and his eight-day clock never ran down. Nor did
his interest in his home paper run down. The
paper had its regular place in the existence of a
busy city man. Incidentally this clock story made
a good local item. The item renewed Jim in the
friendship of hundreds of people back home.
They followed it up with some good stories about
Jim in the community. It was all good local
stuff. This will give an idea of the kind of mat-
ter that can be played up in every country
weekly, however small the field.

A live local weekly never contains an item say-
ing that Frank Smith walked in on the editor and
renewed his subscription to “the best paper on
earth.” When Frank does call the editor shakes
his hand, and while taking his money some kind
of story is extracted from him. It may be a
paragraph about the crops, it may tell the birth-
day of his father, a pioneer citizen of the neigh-
borhood, it may be a bright saying of one of his
children, or perhaps only an amusing antic of
some farm animal. But Frank is mentioned in
connection with something of real interest, in-
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 127

stead of being coupled with a remark about pay-
ing a just debt.

Now for the manner in which the matter on
the weekly paper may be handled. The editor
and a girl act as reporters. The editor arranges
all business so that it will give him as much time
as possible on the street mingling with the peo-
ple. The girl reporter keeps the books, handles
the money, and collects the bills. She may even
pay the bills and write the checks that the editor
may have more time for news-gathering. The edi-
tor goes after the straight news, and picks up
gossipy stuff from the merchants, women, farmers,
clerks—everybody. At the same time he is right
on the spot to get advertising and jobwork.
Soliciting news makes the best excuse in the world
for introducing the subject of advertising and
jobwork. The girl reporter makes the trains,
hunts up the parties, gathers the news stuff in the
stores, goes to the schools and secures the fem-
inine talk the editor misses. These two workers
in the front office should keep the force in the
back of the shop busy. Just as soon as one week’s
paper is out the work of getting the next issue
ready is begun. There is no waiting until Monday
or Tuesday to write the week’s news. The stuff
is prepared from hour to hour, beginning the
morning after the paper is printed. This is one
big secret of going to press on time.
128 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

Country correspondence is the backbone of
many country papers. While it should be an im-
portant feature it should not be the predominat-
ing one. It pays to keep in close touch with the
country correspondents. They may be taught
to write for the paper according to the paper’s
style. If the country correspondence is watched,
often there will be found the tip for one or more
good local stories. Perhaps a three-line para-
graph will contain a hint for half a column. The
editor knows news value. The country corre-
spondent does not. A matter to be guarded
against in this line is the quarreling of various
country correspondents among themselves. In
many newspapers correspondents are allowed to
run riot. Often they cause the editor a lot of
trouble. Sometimes a country correspondent be-
cause of some ill-advised paragraph will precipi-
tate a row, even a tragedy. Biting bits of sar-
casm as the following mean nothing and harm the
paper and the correspondent: ‘‘ Greeting to the
Yumptown correspondent,” writes a crossroads
reporter, “we do not deal in slurs.” Or this:
“TI am sorry the Yoohoo correspondent has a
soft skin and that it is easily scorched,” etc., etc.
This makes bitter feeling between two depart-
ments in the paper, which eventually extends to
the communities they represent, all of which works
to the general detriment of a newspaper. And
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 129

above all it is not news nor even gossip, mere
clawing and scratching.

One of the best columns seen in a country paper
in a long time was discovered recently in the cen-
tra] part of the State. It is headed “In Rural
Society.” In this column are given the parties
and entertainments in the surrounding country.
It is a good stunt.

This column entitled “ What They Say” in a
Kansas weekly newspaper printed in a small town,
is one of the best features in the paper. It con-
sists of remarks made by people in the town to
the editor. The editor himself is wise enough to
keep the remarks brief. There is not a real news
item in all the stuff, and yet every line is good for
the local paper. I'll give a few examples:

Baldwin Smith: There is one objection I have to
Bro. Thomas as a preacher. He makes me think
about half the time that I haven’t got any Christianity.

Mrs. Hugh Harrison: I’d rather go bareheaded
than pick out a new hat.

S. Coffman: I won’t pay town tax and state tax
too on a dog. I'll kill him first.

Mrs. L. S. Grimm: I never wanted to be born in
Nebraska, but we had to go there to get rid of the
Indians.

Dr. O. W. Hughes: I have seen lots of babies, but
Dr. Vallette’s little boy was the prettiest, brightest
baby I ever saw. Its death will be a great sorrow to
them.
130 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

This last four line item beats a column of
obituary beginning “‘ So-and-so was born in 1909,
etc., etc.”

Many newspapers print half a column or so of
matter giving the news as printed in the local
paper forty years ago. This is good stuff. It
is an easy and legitimate way of making neigh-
borhood talk. A better way still would be to get
hold of some old-timer and get him to talk in
terms of today about the old days. Give the old
stories an up-to-date application of some kind.
All this takes work, but it is worth the effort. It
will pay in dollars and cents.

A weekly has to be handled differently in cer-
tain ways from that which obtains on the daily.
A strong country daily can “name names” and
nothing happens. But in the smaller town many
unseemly occurrences have to be ignored. The re-
lationships in the smaller town are so intimate
that it is better to forget some of the news.
Everybody knows it anyway and there is a world
of stuff that does not leave a sting. Remember
by gossipy stuff I mean town talk, not scandal.

A method of handling complaints against citi-
zens and institutions was inaugurated by a Kan-
sas editor. For instance: The Woman’s Civic
club made complaint against a certain butcher.
The women said his meat market was not clean.
The editor was asked to reprimand the butcher in
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 131

the paper. Instead of doing so the editor went
personally to the butcher and told him of the
complaint. The butcher thanked the editor and
cleaned his shop. Also the butcher discovered
that he was in need of letterheads and statements.
Many a town row has started from a smaller
cause than that. As a general rule roasting some-
body for the public good in the country weekly
does not work out.

Conquer the temptation to take a shot at some-
one for personal reasons. The advantage is ob-
viously unfair. The editor has a big audience,
the individual none. If the editor has a grievance
he should take it up privately as any other busi-
ness man might.

Hold your columns true to legitimate news, to
interesting and good-natured talk about your
people. Appreciate and repeat the good things
they say. Do not forget there may be a live
paragraph in the most commonplace thing. The
better rural journalism should seek to interest all
the members of the family. It should cultivate
every citizen from the humblest to the town
banker. This is the distinctive type of rural
journalism which I believe can be developed
in any community, large or small. And it will
pay.

If all country editors knew how well it pays to
entertain their readers, there would be wholesale
132 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

eliminations of voluntary contributions from their
columns. A good many of us have a plan of
work which burns up our time taking in subscrip-
tions, getting jobwork and advertising, working
in the back shop or attending to matters which
could be as well looked after by one whose time
is less valuable. The editorial or news end can
always be neglected, so we permit our paper to
be written by every Tom, Dick, or Harry who
cares to take his pen in hand. The secretary of
this meeting or that meeting writes a long story
about a very dull affair. The local clubs load
down the editor with dry papers. The politicians
contribute letters which clutter up the paper with
rot. And so it goes. Frequently and oft lodges
or G. A. R.s have resolutions of condolence with
which to “ favor ” the editor. High school jokes,
free notices about this or that, free readers for
advertisers and an endless lot of other truck con-
tributed and not handled by the editor is all so
much junk—costly junk too.

It all works to the detriment of the paper and
is the chief cause of delinquent subscriptions.
Lord knows we as editors bore our readers enough
with our own opinions, let alone turning loose on
the innocent subscribers the work of amateurs.
Some of the contributed matter is dull but well-
intentioned, but too much of it is meant to work
the editor for advertising directly or indirectly.
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 133

The chief occupation of an editor should be to
live up to his title and edit his paper.

One of the bad habits of country newspaper
editors is finding fault with subscribers because
they do not send in the news. It is the editor’s
business to get out and hustle the news. It is
the editor’s fault if he does not find out that Mrs.
Jim Jones is entertaining a friend from Kansas
City, and Mrs. Jones has a right to be sore if he
does not mention it.

Another regrettable habit is that of abusing
subscribers because they do not pay their sub-
scriptions. With a good desirable paper sub-
scribers will pay without being bullyragged.
The other kind is too expensive to have on the
list.

Leaving out the news “ until next week” is a
bad newspaper habit. The paper should handle
the news when it is news, not when it is fifteen
days old. While the cylinder press is grinding off
the last forms, a supplement can be printed on the
jobber and slipped into the folded papers with
little if any loss of time. I know because I have
done it under pretty nearly every conceivable
situation in the back office.

The country reporter on the weekly, who is
usually the editor, should give the office scissors
very little exercise. It is so easy when the coun-
try editor-reporter is busy with advertising or

ee
134 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

jobwork to grab an exchange in one hand and a
pair of scissors in the other and snip out a few
columns, regardless of whether his constituency is
interested in it or not. By this I do not mean
that one should not quote from another source
an idea or item. But the wholesale filling of
columns with another fellow’s efforts is not re-
porting. As a matter of fact there is only one
right way. That way is to write your own local
copy. It can be done, even in the smallest offices.

Among the overworked words in the country
office are the two “ we understand.” ‘ We under-
stand Miss Hanna Spengs, formerly of this place,
was married to Mr. Hank Henry in Iowa, March
11.” This is not much of an item. Surely the
two young people have friends enough in their
former home to make the story authoritative.

I note in one paper a three-column reprint from
the Breeder’s Gazette. While this is good stuff in
the farm paper, it is unsuited to a country paper
whose readers want local stuff. It costs money to
set it and it costs subscribers to print it. Quote
from any good farm paper, but limit your quota-
tions to three sticks at the most.

A W.C.T.U. column is commonly run in
many country newspapers. There is not a line
of local value in it as a rule.

I note a column story about George Washing-
ton run preceding his birthday. It was printed
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 135

on the first page of a country paper. It is set
in solid eight-point. Probably no one read the
story in the first place, and few could have read
it in the second place. It is simply a lot of dry
history.

In a Kansas paper recently was a letter of ex-
planation more than a column long. No man
should be permitted to use up a column of space
to explain anything. This should have been re-
written and put in a couple of sticks at the very
most,

Country newspaper reporting properly done re-
quires a higher grade of workmanship than city
reporting. The rural reporter isn’t a better
workman than a city reporter, but he should be.
The opportunities of the country reporter are
wider and bigger than those of the metropolitan
reporter. The reporter on a city daily does his
work by assignment. He merely carries out or-
ders, often writing but one section of a story.
Somebody else usually finds the news. Others
determine its importance. The city reporter is a
handler of facts. The editorial writers say what
these facts mean. It is the ambition of nearly all
city reporters to own country papers, because
they know the larger personal opportunities are
in the small paper.

The metropolitan paper is metropolitan be-
cause it cannot be provincial. The newspaper
136 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

published in a city can hope only to hit the high
places. The familiar touches in the news columns
which make the old home paper indispensable are
impossible in a city of say fifty thousand people.
The family relationship in the community is lost.
The people begin to live in duplex houses and
furnished flats and in restricted additions which
separate the man of means from the poor man
who works with his hands. The family in one
half of a duplex house may live just above his
neighbor and listen to his telephone conversa-
tions, yet may never become acquainted with him.
This lack of general acquaintance destroys the
kind of community interest found in the smaller
towns. The metropolitan paper does the best it
can with these handicaps, and it does mighty well
too. With stories of what it calls human interest
it tries to occupy the place in the family filled by
the country paper. It is the most difficult task
the managing editor has before him. He is al-
ways trying to get stories of human interest and
prizes them above all others.

Now, I am not going to advise any country
editor to abandon metropolitan methods of news-
paper reporting. I am only suggesting this, that
he is neglecting his biggest opportunity when he
fails to play up the small talk in the country
town. No editor of a country daily or weekly is
too good to write news and pick up town talk.
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 187

It is the sinews of the paper, and the structure is
likely to grow weak as this part of newspaper
making in the rural field is neglected.

All the metropolitan features included in the
make-up of a country daily or weekly should be
secondary to the main show, which is the local side
of the paper. No metropolitan features of any
kind can stand up against a good local service.

This brings us to the question of what kind of
reporting is necessary to make a good local paper.
Really no local paper is ever good enough. The
country reporter at his best is a reporter of ideas
as well as news. He exercises all the initiative in
finding and handling the stuff. The editorial part
of the paper is not, or should not, be closed to
him. If he has inspiration or can generate it, there
is a world of material for him to work on all the
time. Instead of one department of the paper
being given to him, all branches should be an
open door for his efforts. Every ounce of clever-
ness in his make-up is brought into action. His
evolution cannot be otherwise than rapid if he
tries along the right line.

In order to make this meaning clear let us
study country reporting in detail. A good many
country newspaper men seem to have the idea that
when they give their subscribers the arrivals and
departures, and have run the routine matter
from the court house, the city council, and similar
138 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

things, they have done all the work necessary.
That is just the skeleton of the service. The real
stuff is the community talk, the unofficial stories
of the girls in the shops, the old-timers, the
farmers met on the streets—local stuff that will
amuse, instruct, and interest the readers.

Let us start out with a country reporter and
see how he works. Incidentally I will say that the
items the reporter got on this particular day and
which I am going to quote were taken from a
newspaper and represent work actually done.

The country reporter started out shortly after
seven o’clock in the morning. The moment he left
the house his eyes began to wander about for an
item. He looked at the dogs and cats, telephone
poles—objects animate and inanimate, for some-
thing to write about. A minister had just moved
into a house the reporter was passing. His ar-
rival previously had been told, but the rural news-
gatherer was not through. Back of the house lay
a pile of boxes and crates. This went into the
notebook :

When a preacher moves into a new town he does
not burn the boxes and crates in which his household
goods are packed, for he knows he will need them
again.

The reporter proceeded to the union depot,
where he caught the night employees going off
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 139

duty.. They yielded the news of the night. This
was jotted down in the notebook. It was just
straight reporting, nothing worth repeating now.

The reporter met various persons whose con-
versations started out to be casual. But the re-
porter did not permit any casual conversation.
Always he kept the talk along some line that
would yield news or an idea. His time was
precious.

Permit me to digress long enough to emphasize
this point in country reporting: a newsgatherer
can spend a whole day and get nothing if he lets
the other fellow manage the conversation. The
science of country reporting is to dig into every
man, woman, or child in any one of a thousand
different ways for stuff. Some persons are in-
sufferably dull and never develop a suggestion.
Keep away from them. You soon learn them.
On the other hand, there are people who always
have an item or an idea or suggest something.
Cultivate them.

But everlastingly keep it in your mind that you
are searching for news and ideas. Perhaps if a
person you are talking with does not produce
something worth while, his personal appearance
or manner may suggest a paragraph. It does not
have to be personal.

The reporter we are accompanying got this
from saying good morning to a neighbor who was
140 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

carrying a pail of milk across the yard: “ Mrs.
C. E. Allen’s cow is mowing Mrs. C. C. Craig’s
lawn.”

Then this went into the notebook:

Startling item: The First Methodist church yard
is covered with bridge whist score cards.

Instead of saying the night before had been in-
sufferably hot, the reporter thought of this way
of breaking the news:

A burglar crept into a Webster home last night,
but was so shocked at what he saw that he slipped
out without taking anything.

The reporter went into the newspaper office,
wrote his copy, probably a column, and was out on
the street again. In addition to the regular police
station news which he secured next, this item was
picked up:

It is claimed that a Main street clerk is so polite

that he says “ Pardon me,” when he knocks down at
the cash drawer.

The paragraph did not refer to anyone par-
ticularly. It was simply suggested by something
that had been said at the police court.

A quick trip back to the office with perhaps an-
other half column of legitimate news. The re-
porter was called to the telephone. This is the
item he secured:
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 141

It pays to advertise. Mrs. James Shoup says for
goodness sake to take out her ad “ cow for sale.” The
cow is sold and people keep coming and coming and
coming and she will never get her peaches put up.

There was a column of suggestion in a few
lines. What is more to the point, it shows that
advertisements for the paper can be made inter-
esting.

This was whispered to the reporter on the
street or in some store:

Did you ever hear of this Webster tragedy: A
Webster widow spent a long four hard years trying
to support her three children. Finally she met a
man who appreciated her value. He wrote her a
letter proposing marriage. She answered accepting
him and sent the letter to the post office by one of
her children. The child lost the letter and the mis-
take was not discovered until after the man had mar-
ried another woman.

There is a plot for a story as good as De Mau-
passant’s “The Diamond Necklace,’ and yet it
was just one of perhaps half a dozen items taken in
on that trip. It was picked up because the re-
porter was all the time digging for stuff. But it
is from just such matter as this that many writers
get ideas for stories. Many great authors
have admitted securing plots from newspaper
clippings; notably Charles Reade and Victor
Hugo.
142 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

A town laborer was pleased to tell this story
about himself to the country reporter. The news-
gatherer made effective use of editorial comment
in connection with the item, which follows:

Cy Bush, of Webster, has been “ baching ”’ twenty
years, and says he has never quite recovered from
being lonesome. He owns a lot and small house in
the north part of town where he does his own house-
keeping and his own cooking. He has cut out most
of the traditions which women maintain. He refuses
to set down Monday as his wash day. He washes
when necessary, but refuses to be a slave to Monday.
Nor does he clean house twice a year. When house-
cleaning time comes around he never even gets a
touch of the fever. He says he can cook nearly any-
thing, and can turn out a mess of oysters as good
as the next one. He used to bake butter-milk bis-
cuits, but when fashion got up in the pictures and
began to dictate the making of biscuits with baking
powder he cut biscuits dead and hasn’t made ’em
since. Cy doesn’t buy much ready cooked food at
the stores. He buys baker’s bread, but cooks his
own meats, potatoes, vegetables, etc. He sweeps and
dusts and washes his dishes and does all his own
housework outside of working hours. But it is ap-
parent from his talk that when his household duties
are finished, he does not stay around the house much,
but goes “up town.” After twenty years, he has
never quite recovered from a sense of loneliness
around the house; that is apparent. There is a
blessedness of having a woman around the house
which robs it of a certain indefinable desolation. The
woman around the house fills a place in a man’s life
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 143

which nothing else can supply, and this does not mean
the things she does for him. The woman around the
house gives the place a touch of something which
makes us revere it as home. It would be little more
than house and furniture without her. Blessed is the
woman around the house.

Instead of just a paragraph announcing that
a citizen had returned home from a visit “ back
east,” the reporter took two little incidents of the
visit and made the item one of direct human ap-
peal. Here is the way the item appeared:

C. M. Geiger and wife, who live near town, recently
returned from a visit to Mr. Geiger’s old home near
Canton, Ohio. It has been 38 years since Mr. Geiger
had visited the old homestead. Childhood impres-
sions have a strange way of clinging to people. The
carpenter bumblebee bored holes on the under side
of certain boards in the hog house when Mr. Geiger
was a boy. These holes were no doubt among Mr.
Geiger’s first impressions in his wondering and guess-
ing at the mystery of everything around him. The
first thing he wanted to see when he arrived at the
old home place were those bumblebee holes. He
found them exactly as he remembered them. He also
found the homestead and most of the other buildings
exactly as they were when he was a boy, and for
several generations before, for that matter. He was
curious about another thing. When he was a boy a
spring near the house poured out a stream of water
the size of a lead pencil. He looked for the spring
and found it after 38 years still pouring out its little
stream of water.
144 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

This will give a hint of the methods employed
in a day’s work. The reporter probably made
six trips to the streets. The regular news of the
day such as police court stuff, personals, and other
items of straight reporting were handled. At the
sqme time the reporter was getting advertisements
and even taking subscriptions. When he was in
a store for news and ideas it took little time to ask
for an advertisement, and if one was to be had, to
carry it to the office. With the big local paper,
getting advertisements was largely a matter of
copy chasing. If the merchant wanted an ad-
vertisement written for him the reporter did it as
quickly as he wrote a news paragraph.

The samples given do not represent the full
range of work of a rural reporter, of course.
They show only the methods employed.

The local stories of human appeal are the best
of all.

Last summer I was in California. I called at
the home of a woman who previously had lived in
Kansas. Something in the conversation of the
old home town back in Kansas caused her to get
out her scrapbook. I looked it over. The scrap-
book was half filled with the talky, gossipy stuff
about the home folks back in Kansas, taken from
the country paper. There was little current news
in the scrapbook, but it was filled with smart things
said by the town children, recollections of old-
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 145

timers, amusing incidents at the town social and
other events, and, in a general way, matter that
could not be called strictly news, although there
was some legitimate news in the book. It was not
literature. It was just short stories dashed off
on the typewriter, but it contained the spirit of
the community, not the bare skeleton of the
town’s events.

And the stuff in the scrapbook had a place of
honor with the greatest poems and greatest lit-
erature the world has produced. In the mind of
the owner of the scrapbook, unconsciously per-
haps, the little, old country paper stuff sized up
shoulder to shoulder with the achievements of
Browning, Shakespeare, Kipling, Robert Louis
Stevenson—in fact the big writers of the world.
It was the work of a little old country newspaper
reporter who was not especially clever, but who
just worked along the right lines.

I would rather have three lines about the bright
saying of some child than a column on the doings
of the Commercial Club. Proceedings of nearly
every kind are more or less tiresome. They
should be kept short and should be written by a
trained reporter, not by the secretary of the
meeting.

The country reporter should always be careful
to get both sides of a story. Of course there is
the set rule of reporting, such as being fair to
146 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

all and so forth. The bigger work lies in the art
of presenting ideas. This is the stuff that will
make a country paper supreme in its field.

All matter that goes into a country paper
should be vigorously and intelligently handled.
No opportunity to play up a piece of news should
be overlooked. When I was running a small coun-
try paper I had a lot of time copy written ahead.
I used it in emergencies. I know what it is to start
out in the morning expecting to write a lot of copy
and then have the office full of advertising and
jobwork patrons all day. Ill say this: men who
brought me business nearly always yielded more
or less news. But in a certain drawer I always
had a bunch of emergency matter. I never per-
mitted myself to see the bottom of that drawer.
It consisted of reminiscences of old-timers, little
journeys to homes and farms, talks about dogs,
cats, and birds, flowers, gardens, and improve-
ments in neighborhoods, town boosts. In fact
it was this emergency stuff that did much to make
the paper interesting.

In the reporting game in which the writer
handles town talk and gossip, care must be exer-
cised not to get the writer and paper into trouble.
It is possible to avoid the shoals, though it takes
experience to learn the trick. The reporter should
be careful to leave no sting when he scintillates.
No one should dive headlong into this gossipy side
MODERN COUNTRY JOURNALISM 147

of reporting. If you have any doubts err on the
side of safety.

It is just this gossipy, picked-up-by-the-way-
side sort of stuff that makes a country newspaper
eagerly awaited by its subscribers. There are
many papers in Kansas which have become noted
through this method of news-gathering. All of
them are making their owners rich as well as fa-
mous. It must be confessed, however, that people
sometimes have to be educated into this kind of
rural journalism. When once they get it, they
cry for it and will have no other.
A STATE LICENSE FOR NEWS-
PAPER MEN

BY BARRATT O’HARA

I was born with the love of printer’s ink. At
nine I immodestly boasted of being the world’s
youngest editor. I might just as well have com-
pleted my claim to juvenile distinction by adding
the title of world’s youngest publisher, composi-
tor, make-up, pressman, and circulator, as well
as editor, since the functions of all these useful
and necessary functionaries I diligently essayed.

It was not until the spring of my graduation
from high school that I became a real journalist.
I was eighteen. I possessed a nose, somewhat
pronounced in proportions, but keenly responsive
to the scent of news. I had enthusiasm; and I
believed in myself—a faith in which our home
town editor shared to the extent of four dollars
a week,

There were three of us: the editor, who was also
the publisher; the city editor, who was also the
advertising manager ; and myself, assuming the
réle of cub and star reporter. Either because I
showed promise or the advertising outgrew its

148
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 149

bounds, the city editor soon was confining his ac-
tivities almost exclusively to the business depart-
ment while his former editorial duties descended
upon my shoulders.

I do not believe a better newspaper man ever
lived, or a finer gentleman ever gave first direc-
tion to a boy’s eager ambition, than that editor
and publisher. But he was a very busy man.
He schemed, he planned, he directed everything.
He was a newspaper genius. For a few weeks he
read my copy carefully, minutely, himself scrib-
bling the heads on the upper margins of the first
pages. Then he taught me to write my own
heads. My copy went direct to the compositors,
and he, when he was not occupied fixing a press
that wouldn’t work, or setting an advertisement
rushed in at the eleventh hour by the town’s star
merchant, contented himself with reading and re-
vising, if necessary, in proof.

I look back now, and shudder. Here was a city
of six thousand persons, a reading community of
fifty thousand men and women, whose happiness
and peace of mind, whose reputation and honor
literally rested in the palm of my hand. Under
age and unlicensed, I could not have practiced
law, I could not have served as doctor, surgeon, or
dentist, I could not even have been a nurse or a
barber; but I could serve the community as re-
porter and editor. In my hands, boyish and in-
150 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

experienced, without a single legal safeguard,
was placed the dynamite of publicity, a weapon
powerful enough, if improperly and unwisely used,
to destroy the happiness of hundreds of people.

How long must we wander intellectually before
we come to the full realization that publicity, as
we have it today in a land of many magazines and
countless newspapers, is a force of potential de-
structiveness far exceeding that of dynamite?
How long before we realize that a paragraph,
insignificant in itself and uninteresting to most
readers, needlessly inserted in an obscure section
of a newspaper, may work havoc in destroying the
happiness of some home?

These reflections on the danger of the inexperi-
enced handling of the dynamite of publicity come
to me now and give me a deeper and truer under-
standing of our constitutional theory of the free-
dom of the press. At eighteen, I believed in the
freedom of the press as a Christian believes in the
Golden Rule. I believe that I would have sacri-
ficed my life in defense of that principle; and yet,
as I view it today, I had not the slightest con-
ception of the real meaning of the term. To me,
then, freedom of the press guaranteed me im-
munity—more than that, it placed implied obliga-
tion upon me, to ferret out, to write, and to print
all news without question as to ethics, the propri-
ety or even the necessity of printing that which
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 151

may have been for the public good or may not
have been. I wonder if this is not the viewpoint
of many reporters and many editors today. I
wonder if behind their natural and very proper
zeal for an unhampered freedom of press, they are
not unconsciously overlooking the right of the
individual for protection against unnecessary
publicity !

Two incidents which were the events of my
career as a budding reporter and editor, will illus-
trate this point. I progressed fairly well that
summer. I worked hard. I dug for news, and
when I found it, I printed it ruthlessly. I knew
no law other than that the public must be served
with the news; and on my definition of news, I
placed the broadest construction.

There was a long battle in our city council over
the letting of a paving contract, and some ugly
rumors were afloat. The aldermen went into
secret sessions, foolishly I think, because this se-
crecy only added to the suspicion of the com-
munity. I contrived, with the help of a friendly
fireman with a ladder, to secrete myself in the
garret over the council chamber. Here I re-
mained for two days, gazing through the open
trapdoor, an unseen and interested spectator. At
the end of that time, I slipped, making a noise that
attracted the attention of the somewhat nervous
city fathers; an investigation was made; a lad-
152 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

der procured; and I was unceremoniously pulled
from my hiding place. Dusty and hungry,
humiliated but still militant, I fled from my cap-
tors, reached my office, and wrote the full story
of the secret meeting of our distinguished city
council. In this exploit, I believe that I was thor-
oughly justified, because the news I sought was of
a public nature and necessary to the cause of good
government.

But contrast this, please, with my next exploit.
There had been an illness, somewhat of a myste-
rious nature, in one of our best families. By dint
of much digging, I learned that birth had been
given to a very unusual monstrosity, with fea-
tures of a nature commanding the horrified inter-
est of the members of the medical profession. The
child had died, and the details of the unfortunate
affair properly were sought to be forgotten. To
me, this was news and belonged to the public. I
wrote the story in all of its ghastly detail. The
editor failed to catch it in proof, and the story,
under flaring headlines, was consumed by the read-
ing public of our community at the supper table
that evening. The next day the president of our
local medical society, a splendid gentleman of the
old school of courteous manners and generous
heartiness, called to remonstrate with my editor.
I was called into a conference. The courtly old
physician maintained that the story should not
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 153

have been printed, as it could only bring unhappi-
ness to the family, in which there were sons and
daughters under age, and that it could do the
public no possible service. I turned on the doc-
tor, asking him:

“You don’t deny the truth of the story? ”

“No; the story as printed is exactly true.”

“Then, sir, you have no just complaint,” I
declared, indignantly dismissing the matter.
“What is true must be printed, and if you object
to a newspaper printing the truth, you are a
pretty poor sort of American citizen.”

When the good doctor started to remonstrate,
I turned my back and angrily left the conference.
A year later, when experience had broadened my
journalistic vision, I would have given much to
have wiped this scoop from my record. Many
times since have I thought, with burning cheeks, of
the impression my uncharitable overzealousness
must have made with the courteous old physician.

Since that summer I have held many responsible
positions with large metropolitan newspapers. I
have seen many cubs break in who afterwards
became journalistic stars of the first magnitude.
And in every case, or practically every case, I
have seen the cub resourceful, overzealous, and
absolutely heartless in his quest for news. I have
seen the same cub, as he increased in experience,
also increase in understanding and in charity. I
154 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

have seen him, as he approached the portals of
newspaper pre-eminence, drawing finer and finer
distinctions between necessary publicity and un-
necessary publicity, courageously seeking and
writing all necessary news no matter whom or how
it might hurt, and as courageously and courte-
ously refraining from printing unnecessary news
that might cause the shedding of unnecessary tears.

It must be borne in mind that it is not neces-
sarily malice, nor even ignorance, that is respon-
sible for the misuse of publicity. In most cases,
it is inexperience and overzealousness and a per-
verted conception of the doctrine of a free press.
Until this inexperience has been wiped away with
time’s kerchief, would it not be the part of wisdom
for the state to prescribe certain safeguards for
the protection of the general public against the
careless handling of potential dynamite by prom-
ising but green amateurs?

Last winter, after consulting with a large num-
ber of newspaper men, I drafted a bill to license
newspaper men as members of the profession of
journalism in much the same manner as lawyers
and doctors are licensed in all enlightened com-
monwealths today.

This bill provided for the creation of a State
Board of Journalism, which should both issue and
revoke licenses to practice the profession of jour-
nalism. A license should issue:
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 155

1. When the applicant had reached legal age;

2. Completed the equivalent of a high school
education ;

3. Studied two years in a recognized college of
journalism, or passed the same period of time in
a newspaper office as an apprentice reporter;

4, Furnished the Board with positive proof of
good moral character; and

5. Successfully passed an examination, in writ-
ing, conducted by the State Board at regular in-
tervals.

Adequate provision was made for the beginner,
who might receive, on application to the Board
and proof of good moral character and an educa-
tion equivalent to that of the ordinary high
school, a certificate as an Apprentice Reporter.
As such he might perform the usual work of a
cub reporter, but would be disqualified from pass-
ing fina] judgment on his own and other persons’
“copy.” That is, he might write the items, but
the same would be read and possibly revised by a
licensed journalist before reaching the printer.
Two years of such training and restriction, with
the natural looking forward to the examinations
ahead and the constant preparing for them, could
scarcely fail to bring out the very best newspaper
qualities in the young aspirant. Or the same
period might be spent with equal profit in an
approved and practicable school of journalism.
156 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

A license, on the other hand, should be revoked:

1. Automatically, on the practitioner’s convic-
tion of a felony; or

2. After due filing of charges and trial by a
jury of his fellow practitioners, for willful mis-
representation, malicious writing of scandal, ac-
ceptance of money or other prize tendered as
bribe for the deliberate and unjustified coloring
of news items, or other conduct unprofessional,
reprehensible, and dishonest.

The intent in imposing the penalty of revoca-
tion was to lift the responsibility of willful mis-
representation, malicious scandal, and the other
diseases of colored and impure news from the im-
personal publishing corporation and place it per-
sonally with the reporting and editing parties.
Under the present system, the reporter and his
immediate editorial superiors are helpless. They
act under orders, which are determined by any-
thing from the leading stockholder’s political or
racial prejudices to the side of the bed he drops
from the morning. To this condition there un-
doubtedly are many exceptions, but the rule in
general is so true that I have never known an ex-
perienced reporter or copy-reader to join the
staff of a metropolitan paper on which I was em-
ployed that he did not spend the first week anx-
iously inquiring from among his fellows and pains-
takingly committing to memory the foibles, the
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 157

follies, the hobbies, the affiliations, business and
otherwise, the favorite sport, actresses, and states-
men of the new publisher. And I doubt if a vet-
eran newspaper man can be found who cannot
recall at least several instances where hapless re-
porters and copy-editors have been unceremoni-
ously discharged for failure to pay proper respect
and homage to the office’s “ sacred cows.”

Of course, the “ sacred cows” will continue to
, exist for a long time, but their number may be
reduced and their social menace almost entirely
destroyed when the working newspaper men are
vested with full personal responsibility. When
the reporter can say to the city editor, and the
city editor can say to the managing editor, and
the managing editor can say to the publishers:
“TI cannot manufacture colored and impure news
for your columns without losing my license, and
when I lose my license I cannot work for you
longer,” the reporter and editor will have finally
escaped the overhanging peril of offended “ sacred
cows ” and the consuming public the peril of a
poisoned product.

In this advocacy, I plead the reporter’s no less
than the public’s interest. The reporter performs
work demanding a higher exercise of skill, in-
genuity, resourcefulness, prompt thinking, and
quickwittedness than the work of lawyer, doctor,
or statesman. I have no hesitancy, either, in as-
158 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

serting that his professional ethics and his per-
sonal honesty are of highest order. But for all
this, he is a cog in a machine. He labors anony-
mously; and for the quantity and the quality of
his output he is miserably underpaid. Giving the
maximum among professional toilers, he receives
the minimum in reward.

Until the editorial worker has received recogni-
tion as an individual, the American newspaper
cannot hope completely to harmonize with the
American spirit and satisfactorily to embrace an
ever broadening opportunity for service.

Will not our newspaper men themselves realize
that the first steps in this direction must neces-
sarily be to vest full personal responsibility for
what they write and edit and print in the men who
actually do the writing and the editing?

The bill that I proposed for the creation of a
State Board of Journalism was not introduced at
the last session of our legislature because of the
clogged condition of our calendar. But news of
its nature and scope reached the press; and, to
my surprise, I confess, provoked a storm of bitter
editorial opposition, reaching from coast to coast.
As the bill had been informally discussed and
roughly sketched in co-operation with such pre-
eminent and practical newspaper workers as
Dwight L. Loughborough, of the Associated
Press, who drew the first draft of the bill; Charles
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 159

L. Wheeler, of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and then
president of the Chicago Press Club; Ted Phillips,
of the Chicago Tribune; John Lawson, Chicago’s
star reporter who lately came to an untimely end;
Leigh Call, of the Springfield State Journal; and
perhaps twenty others actually in the newspaper
harness, I could only account for this unexpected
newspaper opposition on the excuse that the plan
and intent of the proposed law had been inade-
quately and imperfectly presented in the neces-
sarily brief newspaper reports.

I presume editors have less respect for politi-
cians than any other class. The very moment
they read that some little obscure lieutenant-gov-
ernor off in Illinois was tinkering with their busi-
ness and talking about reforming the press, and
other tommyrot, negotiations were off in a jiffy,
with no time even for mediation. If they had only
known that the little lieutenant-governor wasn’t
a politician at all, but a very hard-working news-
paper fellow, who wanted to improve the lot of his
own professional associates and incidentally his
own lot, I imagine they would have taken the sug-
gestion of a State Board of Journalism as not at
least an alien assault upon the fortress of news-
paperdom.

The bill, it is scarcely necessary to remark, will
be presented at the next session of our legislature,
and will probably pass.
160 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

The principal criticism of the measure was that
it conflicted with the constitutional guarantee of
a free press. It did nothing of the sort, although
I can readily grasp how it might have borne that
appearance to one who esteemed a free press as
something separate and distinct from an honest
press.

I believe, with all the faith that there is in me, in
the policy of freedom of speech and freedom of
press. But I do make a distinction between free-
dom and license. Freedom to express our views
of men and of measures, and to print all news that
is possibly of legitimate public interest, is not
license to violate the sacredness of the home, drag-
ging forth the afflicted child, the daughter enter-
ing the realm of romance or the erring and re-
pentant wife to a cruel, a pitiless, and a wholly un-
necessary publicity. Domestic tragedies, those
problems in the relationship of persons consti-
tuting one family and which do not affect society
as a whole, are best settled within the four walls
of the home, and no stretching of the doctrine of
the freedom of the press can legitimately make of
them news-stories to be fed to the morbid, the
curious, and the scandal-loving.

Especially would I apply this rule in domestic
tragedies seeking their solution in the divorce
courts. How often the mere filing of a bill or
cross-bill, containing charges of gross misconduct
A STATE LICENSE PLAN 161

that may or may not have been true, has resulted
in wide and sensational publicity that, in the final
analysis, exacted its severest toll from innocent and
unhappy children! Cruel publicity,if necessary for
public weal; inexcusably brutal publicity, because
unnecessary and even harmful to public morals.

What is needed? Laws to specify what shall
or shall not be printed? Laws to define with legal
definiteness where freedom of the press begins and
where it lets off? No, not this. Not laws that in
practice might infringe upon legitimate freedom
of press, when there is the vastly saner, more cer-
tain, and more constructive course in the pro-
gramme I have briefly endeavored to present in
this paper.

Restore the personal element to eour news-
papers; place the personal responsibility with the
men who actually do the work; dignify the pro-
fession of journalism; accord it ethics as a pro-
fession harmonious with the present individual
ideals of its workers; and publicly acclaim it,
through state recognition, on an exact equality
with the profession of law and the profession of
medicine. The rest I sincerely believe can be safely
left to the working newspaper men, who are
temperamentally sentimentalists, temperamentally
idealists, and who love justice and abhor inhuman-
ity, merely because they know no other way to
love and no other excuse for abhorring.
THE ENGLISH SUBSTITUTE FOR
THE LICENSE PLAN

BY PERCY S. BULLEN

Tue Institute of Journalists of Great Britain
is organized on the same basis and principle as
our Jaw societies and our medical councils. It
aims to accomplish for our profession what the
American bar societies have accomplished for
lawyers and the medical councils for doctors. No
better basis has ever been found for serving the
present interests and needs of the members who
are building up better and safer future conditions
of working life.

It began as the National Association of Jour-
nalists among the young journalists of Lancashire
and the North and Midlands of England, and has
embodied all the best ideas and the most definite
practical purposes that are held by the young
journalists of today.

The objects and purposes for which the Insti-
tute of Journalists was constituted are described
in the Royal Charter granted by Queen Victoria
over twenty-five years ago.

(a) Devising measures for testing the qualifica-

162
ENGLISH SUBSTITUTE FOR LICENSE 163

tions of candidates for admission to professional
membership of the Institute by examination in
theory and in practice or by any other actual and
practical tests.

(b) The promotion of whatever may tend to
the elevation of the status and the improvement
of the qualifications of all members of the jour-
nalistic profession.

(c) The ascertainment of the law and practice
relating to all things connected with the journal-
istic profession and the exercise of supervision
over its members when engaged in professional
duties.

(d) The collection, collation, and publication
of information of service or interest to members
of the journalistic profession.

(e) Watching any legislation affecting the dis-
charge by journalists of their professional duties
and endeavoring to obtain amendments of the law
affecting journalists, their duties, or interests.

(f) Acting as a means of communication be-
tween members, or others, seeking professional en-
gagements and employers desirous of employing
them.

(g) Promoting personal and friendly inter-
course between members of the Institute; holding
conferences and meetings for the discussion of
professional affairs, interests, and duties; the
compilation, constant revision, and publication of
164 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

lists and registers of journalists and of records
of events and proceedings of interest to jour-
nalists.

(h) The formation of a library or libraries
for the use of members of the Institute.

(i) The encouragement, establishment, or de-
velopment of a professional journal for jour-
nalists.

(j) The promotion, encouragement, or assist-
ance of means for providing against the exigencies
of age, sickness, death, and misfortune.

(k) The acquisition by the Institute of a hall
or other permanent place of meeting and of other
places of meeting.

(1) Securing the advancement of journalism in
all its branches and obtaining for journalists, as
such, formal and definite professional standing.

(m) The promotion by all reasonable means of
the interests of journalists and journalism.

In reviewing the objects for which the Insti-
tute was founded and its actual achievements, one
may say indeed that if the Institute has not ful-
filled all the hopes of its founders it has a long
record of beneficial service which we look upon
with pride and satisfaction. Its activities were
never more fruitful than they are today. As a
body united by common aims, we have been able
to accomplish much which would have been impos-
sible by merely individual effort.
ENGLISH SUBSTITUTE FOR LICENSE 165

The younger or older journalist who enters the
Institute now enters not only into his share of the
better professional prospects and opportunities
towards which it has constantly been working, but
also to a full and equal share with present mem-
bers of what it has secured and of the financial and
other resources which it has accumulated. In the
same way that the medical and legal professions
have found it advisable to test the qualifications of
candidates for admission to professional member-
ship by examination so also does the Institute con-
template examinations in the theory and prac-
tice of journalism, but action in this respect will
be gradual. The Council of the Institute has not
sought to debar from membership journalists who
were unable to produce university or college de-
grees. It is desired, however, in course of time,
that all aspirants to membership should pass such
tests of qualification as may be considered fit and
proper as proving their eligibility.

One subscription of $6 a year covers all the
benefits, exceptionally important and comprehen-
sive, conferred by its various funds, including the
Unemployment Fund, the Defense Fund, and the
Orphan Fund, and secures valuable concessions
in the matter of legal and professional advice,
life assurance, and house purchase. Facilities for
filling journalistic appointments are also provided.

The Unemployment Fund assures to members
166 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

sufficient support to keep the wolf from the door
for thirteen weeks.

The Defense Fund protects and vindicates the
rights of members by legal proceedings, arbitra-
tion, and otherwise; and by maintaining profes-
sional practice in such matters as copyright, no-
tices, and agreement, generally, helps towards the
establishment of customs beneficial to the whole of
the newspaper world. Hundreds of cases are suc-
cessfully dealt with every year without recourse
to litigation and the percentage of failures to se-
cure the satisfaction of members is practically
negligible. Members are afforded legal advice
wherever this can be of service and are able to
avail themselves of official records and experience
of the utmost value.

The Orphan Fund assists the orphans of jour-
nalists by means of grants for each child. More
than one hundred children have been so aided
until in a position to earn their own living since
the establishment of this fund. The management
of the fund is wholly gratuitous. Every penny
subscribed goes to the children.

The Provident Fund guarantees assurance
under three heads: Life, Disablement, and Age.
The sum assured is payable with bonuses reaching
in many cases fifty per cent on maturity at the
ages of 55, 60, or 65, as arranged; or on inability
to earn a livelihood by journalism or at death,
ENGLISH SUBSTITUTE FOR LICENSE 167

should either occur before the age chosen. Spe-
cial facilities are also afforded for house purchase.
By the gratuitous service of members administer-
ing the fund, the management expenses are kept
down to about two per cent of the premium in-
come.

The Employment Registers. An important
branch of the work of the Institute is the keeping
of registers of “ Appointments Open” and “ Ap-
pointments Wanted.” With the co-operation of
members all over the empire, immediate notifica-
tion is made of requirements in both directions;
and special means are taken for making these
known to all concerned with the utmost prompti-
tude. By means of these registers the Institute
has been instrumental in filling many hundreds
of appointments—free of charge.

All over the United Kingdom and all over the
British Empire subsidiary associations of mem-
bers are formed and forming. All of these are
kept in constant communication with both the
Council and the Districts (or Overseas Division)
of the Institute. These committees further in-
crease the services of the Institute to its mem-
bers.

In the London District, the Circle of Scientific,
Technical, and Commercial Journalists, recently
formed as an Auxiliary Committee of the Insti-
tute, has already become a large and influential
168 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

branch, rendering special services to its members
and valuable support to the general work of its
district and of the Institute. An Auxiliary Com-
mittee for Women Journalists also has been
formed in London, and other such committees and
circles are being established within the District.
Outside London similar work is being done by
local Committees; and all these Committees and
Circles are united in the mutual service of mem-
bers at home and overseas through the Districts
and Council of the Institute.

This brief review would not be complete without
reference to the Annual Conference of the Insti-
tute, which attracts, not only members from all
parts of the United Kingdom, but in recent years,
from distant outposts of the Empire. The work
of the Institute is reviewed at the Conference and
topics of interest to the profession are discussed.
The Conference lasts about one week at some con-
genial resort and the programme of business is
agreeably blended with sight-seeing and social
recreation. ‘The Conference has met in some of
the leading cities of the United Kingdom and at
all times the members have been welcome and ap-
preciated guests. In times gone by, a brief para-
graph in the daily newspapers reported the an-
nual conference, but now with greatly increased
membership, the record of much useful work, and
growing prestige, the Conference is reported
ENGLISH SUBSTITUTE FOR LICENSE 169

at considerable length in the leading London
dailies.

To the honor of this Institute be it said that
it has for the last quarter of a century been
making for unity and organization, not only by
laying down sound doctrine but by creating op-
portunities for interchange and intercourse, for
meeting correspondents, for good will and soli-
darity in press matters throughout the Empire.
The professional spirit of journalism in England
has largely sprung from the Institute and grown
with it, and from that spirit has gradually pro-
ceeded the manifold development of corporate
energy in various forms.

The question has been asked, “Can the news-
paper man under present conditions hope to at-
tain professional standing?’ My answer, based.
upon the practical living experience of the great
Institute, of which I am the unworthy, but earn-
est, representative today, is that in England the
newspaper man’s hope is ATTAINED ALREADY!
His professional standing is secure and becomes
more secure every day. The thought with which
I conclude these desultory remarks, is that what
England has accomplished for her newspaper men
so also can the United States. I venture the pre-
diction that within a very few years the Institute
of Journalists of the United States, once properly
launched, would be working just as efficiently as
170 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the Institute of Journalists of Great Britain, with
a membership just as large and earnest, a home
field considerably more extensive, and with funds
proportionate to the resources of a young, rich,
and progressive nation.
A CODE OF ETHICS FOR NEWS-
PAPER MEN

BY JAMES MELVIN LEE

Publick Occurences, the precursor of the news-
paper in this country, was undertaken by Benja-
min Harris in 1690, “to cure or to charm the
spirit of lying ” so prevalent in the New England
colonies. At least such was the assertion made
in the first and only issue of that sheet. By the
time the new Republic had its second President,
Jefferson is said to have remarked that he never
believed anything he read in the newspaper except
the advertisements. In the days of the founder
of Democracy newspapers were, with apologies to
Benjamin Franklin, universal instructors in all
the arts and sciences. ‘The advertisements were
so few in number and so small in size that they
afforded no permanent hiding place for “ the
spirit of lying.” When, however, the paper be-
gan to give more in detail, not only the gossip
of the homes but also that of the stores, Beelze-
bub and all the members of his family moved to the
more commodious quarters in the advertising sec-
tion, When commercialism crept into journalism

171
172 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

in the struggle for big circulation, the family of
evil spirits had another addition in the circulation
manager. While figures are said not to lie, un-
fortunately for the times, circulation men could
figure. If you have doubts on this subject, read
that interesting pamphlet “Circulation Liars,”
written by James Keeley, formerly with the Chi-
cago Tribune, but now of the Chicago Herald.
Does journalism need a code of ethics? There
can be but one answer.

American journalism has come, by a slow and
painful experience, to learn the truth of the asser-
tion that honesty is the best policy, because it has
tried both. Indeed, it is seeing that for business
reasons, if for no other, honesty is the only policy.

y-The demand for a code of ethics has come from
unexpected quarters. In the past every news-
paper has been a law unto itself: its code of ethics,
like its style book, has been individualistic in
character. Today there is a growing demand on
the part of the people that even the press shall be
put in a moral test tube and judged by the reac-
tions it gives. The thoughtful editor realizes this
fact, as is shown by the following quotation from
a recent editorial: “The daily newspaper, we \ >
think, is to be brought to the same test as other
agencies of community education and is to be
looked upon more as such an agent rather than
as the organ of a person or the commercial prop-
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 173

erty of an investor.” The questions discussed at
the National Journalism Conference at the Univer-
sity of Kansas last spring may be offered as Exhib-
its A, B, etc., of the growing demand for a more
responsible form of journalism. The legislators at
Washington have been tinkering away on an eth-
ical code for newspapers. Already the govern-
ment is insisting upon “ full weight ” circulation
figures, just as it is insisting on “full weight”
packages. Smile if you will, but in the legislation
already passed may be heard the rumble of the
approaching storm and it may be well to get out
from under before the lightning strikes.

I realize perfectly that, so far as the American
newspaper is concerned, we cannot have a definite
code for everything. Ethics is something more
than a matter of rule of thumb. Each succeed-
ing generation raises the standard a little higher.
Yet in all the changing aspects, there appears a
certain basic principle which may be seen even by
him who runs. The Wall Street Journal—strange
it should come from such a source—describes this
principle in speaking of business ethics: “ Plain,
old-fashioned, unselfish honesty is all there is to
it.’ Even if the honesty be selfish, it does not
affect the need for a code of ethics for the field
in which all of us labor.

Magazine articles on “The Yellow Press,”
“The Corrupt Press,” etc., have been so frequent
174 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

in their publication that I am afraid that the
American reading public has been blinded to the
tremendous advance that has been made in news-
paper ethics during the last few years. Hence, I
should like to outline somewhat in detail the de-
velopment in the departments of advertising, cir-
culation, and editorial. These three—but the
greatest advance has been in advertising. Let us
consider that first.
J. St. Loe Strachey, editor of the London
Spectator, in a recent address on “The Ethics of
7 Journalism,” said: “ Facts may in a sense be given
correctly and yet so presented as in effect to be
little better than figments. A half truth, as all the |
world knows, is the worst form of a lie.” By
way of illustration of such forms of deceptive ad-
vertising in the American field I may point to
the ad, accepted by most papers of the day, in
which it was asserted that for ten cents a steel
engraving of George Washington would be sent.
Those who answered the advertisement received a
two-cent postage stamp. I hope none of you sent
twenty-five cents in order to learn how to double
your money and then received the information to
convert it into bills and fold the roll over once.
Such forms of deceptive advertising, yet giving
certain facts in a way correctly, were common
enough a few years back. Their disappearance is
due, I am sorry to say, more to the vigilance of
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 175

postal authorities than to the honesty of news-
paper publishers. But the advance has been made.

Yet here, I may remark in passing, the Scrip-
tural injunction of judging by the fruit might
have been followed. I recall one concern which,
for the small sum of a dime, would send any young
girl a recipe for whitening her hands. The thou-
sands who replied received a printed slip which
read: “Soak your hands in dishwater for fifteen
minutes after each meal while your mother rests.”
But even this method is no longer advertised in
the press.

A tremendous advance was made when the im-
moral personal ad was thrown into the hell-box.
Often such advertisements formed a directory of
the houses of ill-fame to be found in the red-
lighted streets of the city tenderloin. I regret
that one or two papers of importance still insult
their readers by printing these personal ads, but
it is understood that their practice will soon be,
if it has not already been, discontinued. The
style book of the Chicago Daily News contains a
paragraph or two about classified ads which under
no condition may be accepted for publication and
about others which must be rejected unless O.K.’d
by a-responsible member of the advertising staff.
Newspaper men know the misleading ads of the
character, so cunningly designed that only eternal
vigilance keeps them out of the paper. Were I
176 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

drawing up a code of ethics, I think I should bor-
row the declaration made by the News. Yet so
many papers have equally stringent regulations
on the matter that possibly credit should be given
not to any individual paper but simply to ex-
change.

(Another step forward was taken when influen-
tial papers began to exclude from their columns
what the Minneapolis Journal calls “ the filthy,
dangerous, fraudulent medical, and near-medical
advertising.” The advance made in this direction
may be observed by anyone who turns the files
of American newspapers. On the other hand, I
do not agree with those who think that all medic-
inal advertising should be excluded. Most of us
will fail to see on what ethical grounds a paper
will refuse to publish the advertisement of a liver
pill that is cathartic in action and will accept with
alacrity that of a face cream which clogs the pores
of the skin. As was pointed out in an address to
the Advertising Men’s League of New York by
its President, Mr. Moses, “‘ Patent medicines are
all right when they are all right, and all wrong
when they are all wrong. Do not judge Peter by
something John did. I believe it is just as honor-
able to sell a man a box of Ripan’s Tabules to
relieve his stomach of an ache as it is honorable
to sell him mince meat that puts the ache in his
stomach.” Or again, to quote the same speaker,
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 177

“Tf it is permissible for a manufacturer to sell
shoes that make corns, is it not also permissible
for Bauer and Black to make corn plasters to take
the corns away? ” .

The subject of patent medicine advertising is
one about which there will always be conflicting
opinions. Personally, I am inclined to commend
the action taken by the Philadelphia North Amer-
ican. Its practice might be set up in italics for
the code and kept standing until something better
is found. As I understand the custom of this
paper, it accepts no medical advertising that
would tend to promote a drug-forming habit nor
does it print the advertisement of a preparation
that guarantees to cure an incurable disease. In
the latter case, it sets up an even higher ethical
standard than that found in the medical profes-
sion.

The American newspaper has been a long time
learning that Gresham’s law applies to advertising
in general and to financial advertising in particu-
lar. The bad advertisement always drives out the
good. But the handwriting on the wall of the
counting room is being read: the ad of the financial
swindle has been weighed in the balance and found
wanting. Here, again, there will always be a
difference about where to draw the line. There
will always be readers willing to take the long
chance on investments. But the American press
178 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ought not to be a partner in the swindle of selling
readers a hole in the ground for a mine or a
swamp-lake for real estate. It is not only good
ethics but also good business to refuse your col-
umns to the seller of worthless securities, for in
no other way can you successfully solicit the busi-
ness of the dealer in gilt-edged municipal bonds.
It is a matter for congratulation that the more
conscientious newspapers are declining all financial
advertising that promises an unusually high rate
of interest. Some such declaration might well be-
incorporated in the code.

I have not the time to speak at length of the
fake sales. Fire and bankruptcy in the copy
should start the advertising staff hustling after
facts just as quickly as these words do the repor-
torial. The debt a newspaper owes legitimate
and regular advertisers is not discharged by
simply printing their announcements. A _ nice
question of ethics is involved in such transactions,
but in the new dispensation of modern journalism
may be found the answer.

Within the halls of the Kansas University, so I
am told, there originated the movement of ‘ Swat
the Fly!” With due apologies to advertising
clubs which have changed the slogan to meet the
needs of immediate destruction of real “ type-
lice”? I would urge that the code of ethics for
newspaper men include the revised version, “ Swat
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 179

the Jie!” whether it be in local or in national
advertising.

Locking up the advertising forms, I may say!
that an all-sufficient reason for the necessity of a

ican people were robbed last year, according to,
the estimate of government authorities, of more!
than $100,000,000 through fraudulent adver-'
tising.

In the opening paragraph of “Circulation
Liars,” to which I have already referred, may be
found the following criticism: “It is a strange
commentary—yes, an astonishing commentary—
on the ethics of one of the greatest industries in
the world that its business integrity is at so low
an ebb that newspapers before they can market
their merchandise, have to submit to the third
degree to have established which, if any of them,
are telling the truth about what they have to sell:
What would your tailor say if, when you pur-
chased a suit of clothes, you should insist on sub-
mitting to chemical analysis the cloth of which
the suit is to be constructed? What would a
jeweler think, a reputable jeweler, if a customer
insisted on testing with acid and file the article
that he was buying? What would any reputable
merchant say if his goods were analyzed, tested,
and otherwise inspected before they were pur-
chased? And yet this is the situation in the pub-

i“

code may be found in the assertion that the Amer-. ~
180 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

lication field today, and this situation, humiliating
as it is to the honest publisher, and distressing
and troublesome to the advertiser, is due largely,
yes wholly, to the newspapers themselves. The
circulation liar is not quite so old as Gutenberg’s
types, but he is not much younger.”

Mr. Keeley is glad to say, and I am equally
glad to repeat that the circulation liar is not so
numerous as he was years ago. Here again the
newspaper is learning that honesty is the best
policy, having tried both.

This illustration is typical. A publisher with
twenty-five thousand circulation claimed one hun-
dred thousand. An advertiser took large space on
the circulation claimed. As his advertising did
not pay, it was discontinued. Later the circula-
tion actually reached one hundred thousand. A
new advertising solicitor finally got the advertiser
to try a one-inch ad. It paid big. The solicitor
suggested increased space. ‘ Not on your life,”
was the quick reply. “ Big space doesn’t pay. I
tried it once. That was enough. Me for the one-
inch.” Not even the best solicitor on the staff
could get the small ad increased. It remained,
year in and year out, just the same fourteen agate
lines.

Newspapers are asking certain gentlemen,
“How did you get it?” On the same ethical
grounds, I believe that the advertiser is justified
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 181

in making a similar request of a newspaper. I am
willing to repent for the harm done if I am
wrong, but I have a strong conviction that a pre-
mium is often simply a bribe. There are too many
cases where papers have remained unopened be-
cause the subscription was given to get this or
that what-not. But let us grant, for the sake of
argument, that all the circulation schemes you use
are perfectly fair. Has not the advertiser from
every ethical point of view a right to know “ the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ”
about circulation?

Personally I do not believe that newspapers lie
so very much today about the quantity of their
circulation. The government circulation register
has made some of the worst of them mechanically
honest in this respect. But I do believe that a
higher standard of ethics is demanded in many an
assertion made about the quality.

Incidentally, in passing to the editorial phase
of the question, why are not the Washington
authorities proceeding against those newspapers
which do not print the circulation statements re-
quired by statute? I should like to see newspapers
take some definite stand and urge Washington to
bring legal action against papers who defy the
law. Here, at least, we want no Delay-Linger-
and-Wait policy.

The harm done by the untruthful advertisement
182 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

that sells real estate by the gallon may roughly
be estimated by finding the number of readers
who answer with their remittances. The news-
paper that short-weights circulation wrongs a
relatively small number limited to its advertisers.
On the other hand, every paper that prints a false-
hood for the truth sells goods under false pre-
tenses to every subscriber. Nor is it sufficient in
this case simply to multiply the unit of damage
to the character of a man or to the reputation of
a business house by the total circulation. How
many exchanges will copy the item? No one can
say. Dr. Washington Gladden has told us how
he suffered from the wide circulation of an un-
truth about his ministry." Is not his case suffi-
cient to show the need of such a code as is here
proposed? Mr. Villard of the New York Evening
Post told me some time ago that it was the prac-
tice of his paper to submit an item affecting a
man’s character to the man himself in order that
any false statement might be corrected before, and
not after, publication. The code should certainly
favor this custom. Such a rule is needed, not for
the deliberate falsehood—for that is getting to be
rare in American journalism—but for the half-
truth usually found in the unjust implication and
the inaccurate quotation.

Ed Howe, of the Atchison Globe, suggests:
Cf. “Tainted Journalism.”
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 183

“The wages of sin are publicity.” Delane, re-
garded by some as the greatest editor the Lon-
don Times ever had, is reported to have said when
criticised for the publication of a certain item in
his paper, “ You forget, sir, that my business is
publicity.” If academic and pedantic critics
would remember this fact, it would help the read-
ing public to judge more accurately the acts of
editors and publishers. The newspaper—to quote
the words used by H. A. O’Donnell, of the Philadel-
phia Press, in addressing the National Catholic
Educational Association—“ publishes the motion
pictures of life’s yesterday and today and por-
trays the drama of which all others are but copies,
art but imitation, religion the warning, society
and politics the plot—earnest, intense, acting—
with human success the object and obituaries the
end.” It seems to me that the ethical problem
concerns itself not so much with the subject-mat-
ter of the motion picture or drama as with the
mode of treatment. Dana of the Sun once said,
“What the good Lord lets happen I am not
ashamed to print in my paper.” The pivotal
point of the whole matter, however, is the selec-
tion of the happenings and the amount of space
devoted to each.

The home newspaper is the only one that needs
to be considered here. All others will be a law
unto themselves. The late Mayor Gaynor, of New
184 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

York, once told some Gotham newspaper men, “ A
paper going into the home is worth a hundred lit-
tering the streets or clogging the sewers of the
city.” If you say this assertion is only the
opinion of a layman, let me call in E. L. Clifford,

of the Minneapolis Journal: “ The newspaper of
tomorrow is going to be a home newspaper. It
is going to be a newspaper that the whole family
can read without being shocked, nauseated, scared
to death, or flimflammed. The newspaper of to-
morrow is going to be a real light that will point
the way to greater progress and greater happi-
ness. It is going to have no desire to be a
party to the crimes that are being committed
in a hundred different ways by acting as go-
between.”

What then, it may be asked, should be the ethics
of such a paper? In a way, we may regard it as
a visitor knocking at the door of the home to make

_@ morning or an evening call. Its ethics, there-
fore, must be those of a gentleman. To be a wel-
come guest, it must tell the gossip the host wants
to hear. It must talk, not down to, but straight
out to the members of the family. Of necessity
it must. always remember that if it does not please,

‘it will not be asked to call again. It must give
the readers what they want, so long as that desire
be within reason. In the days of the Boston News
Letter, four pirates were hanged in the outskirts
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 185

of the city. The paper gave only four or five lines
to the hanging, but reported practically in full the
long prayer of the attending clergyman. In spite
of your smiles this was good journalism, because
it gave the people what they wanted.

The other day I asked one of the leading pub-
lishers of school text-books whether he gave
teachers what they wanted or what they ought to
have. ‘His reply was illuminating because it shed
some light upon our problem. “ First of all,” he
said, “we give them what they want, for other-
wise we should be overloaded with shelf-worn
books. But in addition, we try to give, by way of
good measure, some of the things we think they
ought to have.” Might not the home newspaper
follow the same example? Somehow it never occurs
to the pessimistic critics of the American press
that possibly, in addition to giving its readers
what they want, it may be adding other items
which they need. Even the home newspaper might
tell its upper West side readers something about
the vice and corruption on the lower East side:
they might not want these facts, but it is barely
possible they ought to have the information. As
Mr. Strachey says in his “ Ethics of Journalism ”’:
“It is good to know, within reasonable limits, the
evil that is being done in order that we may lay
our plans and bring up our forces to check that
evil.” Lest his words be too freely interpreted,
186 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

he commends the motto of the New York Times,
* All the news that’s fit to print.”

It hardly seems necessary that one should go
into detail about the individual acts of a paper.
A code that took up every case that-might arise
would need to be a daily paper of itself. It might
be well to remark in passing, that the newspaper
of tomorrow, being a guest in the home, is going
to distinguish between publicity and privacy. Be-
cause many papers fail to make any distinction,
the American press is being rather severely criti-
cised, not only at home but also abroad.

I have said that the ethics of the newspaper
should be those of a gentleman. Now a gentleman
is not a person who can commit no wrong, but one
who, when he has done so, is willing not only to
make suitable apology in words, but also to do
everything in his power to right the wrong. Yet
in the past the newspaper has been most grudging
even in apology. Just why such a condition should
obtain, I have never been able to figure out, for
the newspaper that makes corrections is the only
one you can trust. The worst fake of which I
know is that of the infallibility of the press.

But conditions are improving. A number of
papers have started the practice of publishing
corrections on the editorial page. A still better
plan is the establishment, after the manner of the
New York World, of a Bureau of Accuracy and
ETHICS FOR NEWSPAPER MEN 187%

Fair Play. The code ought to favor the starting
of such departments by the large daily papers.
I mention the larger papers specifically because
on the country weekly or on the small city daily,
it is always possible to get an audience with the
editor and to lay before him in person any griev-
ance, real or imaginary. In such cases, a bureau
is unnecessary.

If some of you think that our code of ethics is
too high in its standards, I would point to the fact
that our practices in everything fall far below our
ideals. But should we, for this reason, throw our
ideals into the scrap basket? Are not our laws
better than we can enforce? Are not our religious
beliefs better in theory than in practice? Are we
not better because of the higher rather than the
lower standards? When practices square with our
ideals, it will be time to get out the final Last
Edition and to listen for the toot of Gabriel’s
horn.
GOVERNMENT REGULATION
FOR PRESS ASSOCIATIONS

BY ROY W. HOWARD

WE are hearing nowadays suggestions as to the
advisability of government regulation of the press.
At the mere mention of such a possibility, the
press immediately shows marked signs of a rush of
objections to the head. And this is not altogether
strange. When you stop to think how readily
we newspaper men plead guilty to having a sur-
feit of ideas on how every other business should
be run, including the government’s business, it is
possibly not to be wondered at that we should be
a bit sensitive about a suggestion that our own
methods in our own business might be improved
on—even by the government. ,

But, seriously, I think that the most plausible
explanation of the aversion to this suggestion may
lie in the fact that upon first thought govern-
ment regulation carries too much of the sugges-
tion of government censorship. It goes without
saying that all newspaper men, regardless of other
differences, are agreed that nothing could be so
certainly fatal to the best interests of journalism

188
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 189

and the public alike, as government censorship.
But does this admission warrant the belief that
every form of government regulation would be
equally objectionable? I think not.

American journalism is today on trial. News-
paperdom as a whole has been indicted by a jury
of subscribers. It is a blanket indictment that
has been returned. There will be some injustices ;
there will be some convictions; there will be many
more acquittals, and probably there will be quite a
little bail-jumping. This meeting * and others like
it the country over; recently proposed legislative
measures; current magazine articles and many
other significant omens prove that we have been
haled into the court.

But there is in the situation no justification for
lamentation by the honest publisher. No news-
paper man awake to existing conditions will deny
that with the wonderful advancement of jour-
nalism during the past years, there have grown
up many abuses. Some of these abuses are trivial ;
others are insidious practices threatening not only
the liberties and privileges, but the very life of
the profession.

But the clean, public-spirited publisher who has
not mistaken liberty for license, is not worried
at the prospect of a trial in public. On the con-
trary, he welcomes such a proceeding. He knows

1 National Newspaper Conference, University of Kansas.
190 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

that the time has passed when he can longer afford
to ignore the insinuations, the innuendoes, and the
suspicions. The editor who is sensible of his obli-
gations and his duty to the public knows that with
the present state of general misinformation, there
is little differentiation. He knows, that however
much above suspicion he may be, the public is given
to generalization. He recognizes that there must
be a clarification of the atmosphere. He realizes
that there can be no hiding behind ethics—the
sort of ethics which in the medical and the legal
profession have too frequently come to mean
standing together, whether right or wrong—but
especially if wrong. He recognizes the good and
the honorable in journalism—and there is plenty
of both left—cannot stoop to the level of the rela-
tively small per cent which is not good and is not
honorable but which is, nevertheless, responsible for
the placing on trial of the entire Fourth Estate.
In this situation confronting us—this situation
in which we find ourselves plastered on a piece of
glass and shoved under a microscope in the labora-
tory of a college of journalism—it is very natural
and very right, and very proper, that early at-
tention should be directed to the press associa-
tions. We, in the United Press, recognize this,
and far from being appalled at it, we rejoice at
the turn of events. We are not fearful of what the
public may know or may find out about our organi-
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 191

zation and our methods. Our only concern has
been on the score of what the publisher and the
public have not known about our institution. We
have not been surprised at the turn of events—
a turn which promises to result in the possession
of greater knowledge and a greater understanding
by the public of the nature and scope of our work
and our responsibility.

We welcome the turn of events which, even
though it promises to throw a little more white
light on our shortcomings, will at least serve to
shatter the cunningly-created and absurdly decep-
tive belief—in the spread of which we have had
no part—that a press association, any press asso-
ciation, can be so perfectly adjusted and so won-
derfully managed as to be proof against error,
inaccuracy, or the plain shortcomings of ordinary,
everyday newspaper men.

We have foreseen the situation which is devel-
oping, and without laying claim to any greater
virtue than the virtue of good business judgment,
have sought to keep our house in order.

So far as the United Press is concerned, I can
promise that we will not flee in terror from any
sane, carefully considered government regulation,
but we will cheerfully step out to meet it halfway.
As yet, the general public has only sensed in the
most vague and intangible way the importance of
a press association as a factor in the everyday life
192 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of the everyday citizen. If it be true that what
we know makes us what we are, the burden of re-
sponsibility upon a press association is no trivial
one. Think of the millions of citizens whose only
opinions of the national and world events affecting
their daily life are the opinions formed from read-
ing the daily press association reports. Every
feature of every event of interest to every indi-
vidual, developing during a single day, cannot be
carried by any or all press association reports
for that day. Something must be selected, many
times as much rejected, and in that selection or
rejection will be revealed the real character of any
press association.

And who. is going to be the judge of that selec-
tion or rejection? Who is going to decide whether
an item was suppressed or merely discarded?

There are some men in this conference who be-
lieve they know news values, who believe they are
able to recognize an item. Yet who among you
would volunteer for the task of branding any man
as honest or crooked on the basis of so uncertain
a thing as news judgment? Collect on a single
day “all the news that’s fit to print,” considering
and catering to the desires of all people, and you
could not pack the typewritten product into a box-
car, let alone onto a single telegraph wire. More
must be discarded than can be used. To some in-
dividual or some class of individuals every item
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 193

discarded is of greater importance than any other
item used. To each particular individual or class,
the association which discards that item in which
he or his class is interested, is careless, is stupid,
or is crooked, according to the degree of his feel-
ing in the matter. But to 999 out of a thousand
the discarding of the item in question is unnoticed,
or if noticed is given no thought. Dead men tell no
tales and killed items are generally equally reticent.

A news situation presents ten news facts of
nearly equal interest. Seven facts are innocuous;
three are objectionable to the parties to the story.
Space limitations prevent the use of more than five.
Some press association editor must select the five.
What determines the selection? The editor’s hon-
esty? Not at all! The question of honesty may
not be involved. The editor makes his selection on
the basis of the point of view from which he looks
at the story. He rejects on the same basis. You
may disagree with his judgment, but can you prove
yours is any better? You have been told for years
that it is impossible for a press association that is
a mutual concern to suppress news. I ask you
editors, looking at the thing coldly and dispas-
sionately, if you believe there is any mutuality
among five or six hundred editors in the selection
of a news item? I ask you, is not the whole idea
so absurd and ridiculous as to constitute an insult
to your intelligence?
194 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

I tell you, gentlemen, the poison in a press asso-
tion report, when there is poison in it, does not
lie in what the correspondent sends in—it lies in
what the management sends out—or cuts out.

There is no term in newspaper parlance so gen-
erally misunderstood as the term “ colored news.”
In the average mind, the term has come to be
synonymous with “tainted news.” This is both
unfortunate and misleading and we must see to
it that the misunderstanding is corrected. A news
situation of sufficient interest to command press
association attention, must necessarily be charac-
terized by color and atmosphere. A news story
that correctly reports that situation, must in-
evitably reflect and reproduce that color and
atmosphere natural to the situation.

The insidious story and the dangerous story is
not the one breathing the atmosphere, voicing the
spirit, and reflecting the color and tone of a news
situation; it is the spineless, colorless, spiritless
narrative, recounting in a few rigidly-censored
statements a few carefully selected facts guaran-
teed to carry no suggestion of the real soul or the
real action of the story. There never was a color-
less news situation; there never was a colorless
news story that was an honest story or an accurate
story. It is time to drop the cant and the hy-
pocrisy and the deception.

It is time to block the efforts that have for years
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 195

been successfully diverting general suspicion off
onto cold trails. It is time for the public to in-
vestigate where results are to be had. It is time
to abandon those quarters into which investiga-
tions have for so long been skillfully misdirected.
It is time for the hunters to select the hunting
ground, instead of chasing over fields suggested by
the quarry. It is time to recognize that the hulla-
baloo raised about colored news is dust thrown
in the eyes of the public to prevent investigation
of the real menace—the suppression of news. It
is time to fight, not for less color in the news, but
for all the natural color that belongs in the news.

It is time to recognize that the real danger is
not in honestly-colored news, but in dishonestly-
bleached news.

Another carefully-fostered, hand-raised mis-
conception is the idea that it is by a free use of
adjectives and adverbs, and by deliberate misstate-
ments of facts, that news reports are discolored
and the public deceived. This idea is a red herring
dragged across the trail. The grave danger does
not lie in misstatements of fact. If it ever did lie
there, the day for any such crude work is past.
Exaggerations can be checked up. Statements of
fact can be verified; but there is no rule or scale
of measurement known to man that can locate the
exact line that divides that which is news from that
which is not; that determines what is interesting
196 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and what is uninteresting; that distinguishes the
vital from the trivial. Each item and each situa-
tion calls for a separate decision. It is right here
that the mere test of honesty falls down; it is
right here that the really vital factor asserts it-
self. It is right here that we come face-to-face
with that most important consideration of all—
the point of view.

Compared with the importance of the point of
‘view of a press association, its honesty is a mat-
ter of secondary importance. Honesty and dis-
honesty are known quantities. We know how to
ascertain them, to measure them, and to reward
them. You can put a man in jail for his dis-
honesty. You cannot put him there for possess-
ing a point of view.

In consequence, we are brought face-to-face
with this proposition: the time to correct abuses
in the product of a news agency is before the news
is written. Whatever abuses exist must be cor-
rected, not in the news reports of press associa-
tions but in the press associations themselves. It
is this fact that brings us to the consideration of
government regulation.

Neither government officials, government regu-
lation, nor any other government action will ever
legislate virtue into a press association. No at-
tempt at control of the news reports will accom-
plish an improvement that will not be more than
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 197

offset by newly created evils. We have plenty of
evidence abroad of the effect of government med-
dling in news writing and news handling. Alongside
the evils attending such meddling, the faults in our
own system and methods are insignificant. But in
Europe, the government control is of the actual
news product, and I do not understand that in
the propositions advanced for government action
in this country anything more is contemplated
than regulation of news association organizations.

If it is desirable that press association news
reports should be run with an absolutely free hand
—and I believe it is desirable—there is the more
reason why government regulation of the press
telegraph organizations will eventually be recog-
nized as desirable. I repeat that the public has
as yet only faintly sensed the power in the hands
of the press associations. There has as yet been
no general appreciation of the carrying force of
an item that claims attention and is given a place
on a press association wire. The possibilities of
being able to talk day after day to an audience.
of from twenty million to thirty million people has
not been fully appreciated by any considerable
number of people. But the power is there.

But a very few years ago, the rumor went the
rounds of Park Row that a leading Wall Street
house was anxious to secure an interest in, or con-
trol of a press association. If the rumor was
198 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

founded on fact, nothing apparently came of the
desire; but there are younger men in the banking
house today, men who appreciate more than was
appreciated a few years ago the value of pub-
licity. There are men in Wall Street today who
might be glad to finance a press association right
now for the mere privilege of having a hand in
shaping the association’s point of view in cases
affecting financial interests.

And right here it might be well to note the ex-
tent to which the press of Europe has suffered
from the virtually open alliance between the big
subsidized agencies and the big banking and finan-
cial interests on the other side. To date, no con-
nection has ever been shown between any financial
interest and any American press association, but
the sinister possibilities of such a connection, open
or secret, must not be ignored or overlooked, and
not only the present established agencies, but any
new ones which may be launched, should be com-
pelled to divulge any and all connection between
their organization, their officers, directors, and
stockholders, and any Wall Street interest or in-
terests. This may be made possible only through
government regulation.

But how is this government regulation to be ap-
plied? I would not presume to say. The impor-
tant thing today is not to furnish the answer to
the problem, but to start work on the solution;
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 199

the important thing is to have active newspaper
men, who are competent to solve the practical side
of the problem, seek a way out, rather than await
a public demand which might result in legislation
meeting the public desire, but giving little consid-
eration to the practical problems confronting the
press.

It is not to be supposed that so great a force,
having gone unharnessed from its first inception,
will be fitted into a yoke of regulation without some
chafing. It is to be supposed that the same types
of minds will be found among newspaper interests
as were found among railroad men a few years
ago, when the Interstate Commerce Commission
was first proposed, and as were found among ex-
press company stockholders more recently when
the parcels post was inaugurated. But objections
must be met and overcome. The chief thing is to
start thinking.

By way of a start, we may I think assume that
if there is any justification for printing the names
of officers, directors, stock- and bond-holders of
newspapers, there is as much, or more, reason for
requiring the publication of similar information
by press associations.

If there is any method within reason—even at
the expense of a very considerable bit of kicking
and squealing on the part of the principals—by
which officers, directors, stock- and bond-holders of
200 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

a press association (either a mutual organization
or a profit-making corporation) can be compelled
to divulge their other financial holdings, I can see
no other reason why this should not be done. I
believe that the power vested in a press association
to create or kill public sentiment would amply jus-
tify such a step—especially with the present inter-
est in the subject of interlocking directorates. Cer-
tainly, if the general manager or a heavy stock- or
bond-holder of a press association were interested
in coal mines, the fact would be worth considering
in handling the report of that agency on the
Colorado strike situation. Certainly, if the prin-
cipal owner, several directors, or a majority of the
executive committee of a press association were
heavily interested in Mexican lands or Mexican
railways, the fact might be of interest in consid-
ering the news reports of that agency on the Mex-
ican situation.

That the public may know the scope of a news
agency and that members or clients may know
its real strength, it may prove advisable to require
publication at stated intervals of the complete list
of members, clients or subscribers, together with
the class of service each receives.

It may very soon be found advisable to abolish
all exclusive franchises in press associations, and
thereby insure genuine competition on a plain basis
of efficiency and value of service. It is hard to
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 201

figure where, or how, the public would suffer by
such a step.

Considering their public service nature, it is
possible that with sufficiently heavy penalties and
with sufficiently rigid examination to insure
against falsification, press associations may very
properly be required to make public annually or
semi-annually their balance sheets and tariff lists
containing sufficient data to show whether the or-
ganizations are self-sustaining, and if not, from
what source their support is derived.

As a guarantee against the very serious problem
of weak papers being tempted to accept reports
from subsidized agencies willing to supply their
service at less than cost, it might be found desir-
able to make it illegal for any agency to furnish
its news service to any paper at a figure less than
cost. Consideration may be given to the possible
desirability of requiring all press associations to
file a list of the foreign newspapers or news
agencies with which they maintain alliances; copies
of the contracts with such allies, together with
statements of the form of organization of such
foreign connections, and whether subsidized or
controlled by foreign governments or financial in-
terests.

There is much to be said in favor of personal
journalism. It might be found desirable to have
every lead story, every staff correspondent story, |
202 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

every situation story, and every item of impor-
tance or consequence signed by its author, and
there can be little argument but that it would be
a step in the right direction if every paper were
required to credit every telegraph item to the
agency furnishing it—the use of the reporter’s or
correspondent’s name to be optional with the
paper.

A greater sense of responsibility might be cre-
ated by requiring every news agency to file with
the government—subject to public inspection—
copies of every line of matter handled over each
leased wire or circuit.

But these are mere suggestions. Some of them
would doubtless prove utterly impractical; others
might prove merely burdensome without accom-
plishing any good. But the principal thing is to
make the start. And by this time I presume you
are asking yourself why this from us? Why
should we, in the United Press, deliberately seek
that which, by all the orthodox rules of the game,
we should must hope to avoid?

There are a number of possibilities. We may
have a sense of appreciation of the public service
nature of our work; we may have a peculiar sense
of patriotism, or we may even have some of the im-
practical impetuosity of youth. But disregard all
of those possibilities which tax your generosity.
Take the meanest incentive imaginable. Say that
PRESS ASSOCIATIONS 2038

our attitude springs from pure selfishness, from
the possibilities of commercial advantage to our
own organization. Does even such a possibility
detract from the desirability of such a plan? The
question for you to answer is “ Would such a plan
be a step in the direction of settling the problems
confronting the newspaper fraternity?”

I assure you that from the standpoint of the
United Press we are well content with things as
they are. Starting with about three hundred
afternoon papers less than seven years ago, we
have now a clientéle of more than 550 papers and
are hot after an increase of one hundred per cent
in eight years. But that growth has been due to
no individual genius. Most of the men now in
charge of the United Press were in high school or
college long after the men in charge of our opposi-
tion had become big figures in American journal-
ism. If there have been any factors figuring in our
growth to a greater extent than the mere propo-
sition of hard work and lots of it, those factors
have been a determination to keep abreast of, or
even a step ahead of the ever-changing news needs
and demands, and a constant effort to keep in
attunement with popular thought and popular
progress.

We have been branded as wild radicals by
conservatives, and as hopeless conservatives by the
radicals. We could not spare either condemna-
204 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

tion. We hope each is equally right and equally
wrong. But it requires neither radicalism nor
conservatism to catch the present drift of affairs.
The fact that this conference is looking for poison
in press reports is significant. The fact that you
have aimed your first inquiry at the innocent cor-
respondent only indicates to us that as yet popu-
lar suspicion is misdirected. That it exists at all
is what concerns us. Government regulation has
been suggested as a possible method of correcting
existing evils and removing ground for suspicion
of press associations in general. Until someone
suggests a better method, we in the United Press
are frankly in favor of government regulation.
But the one idea that I would like to bring home
hardest, is that it is not the correspondént or the
reporter of the press association at whose door
must be laid any faults of omission or commission.
Responsibility rests at the head for the sins of any
news association. Regulation or reform should
start at the head, and with the management. The
young reporter, with his ideals highly attuned, his
ideas untarnished, and his enthusiasm running
free, is the greatest force for good in journalism.
Don’t try to reform him. We want his youth, we
want his enthusiasm, and we want his point of view.
When we must start reform—and we can start al-
most any time to change—start at the head of the
institution! Go after the man highest up!
COMMUNITY SERVICE
BY FRANK LeROY BLANCHARD

Wuitetaw Retp, whose career as a diplomat at
the Court of St. James did not overshadow his
brilliant record as an editor, in speaking of the
opportunities of the journalist, once said:

To him are given the key to every study, the
entry to every family, the ear of every citizen when
at ease and in his most receptive moods—powers of
approach and of persuasion beyond those of Protes-
tant pastor or Catholic confessor. He is by no means
a prophet, but, be it reverently said, he is a voice in
the wilderness preparing the way. He is by no
means a priest, but his words carry wider and fur-
ther than the priest’s and he preaches the gospel of
humanity. He is not a king, but he nurtures and
trains the king, and the land is ruled by the public
opinion he evokes and shapes.

These are strong words, but we of the inner
circle know they are true. It is impossible to
consider adequately all the ways in which editorial
influence is exerted. The subject is too large, and
I shall confine my attention to a single topic,
“ Community Service.”

205
206 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

The most independent and, at the same time, the
most influential journalist, with whom I am ac-
quainted, is not the editor of the great metro-
politan daily, but rather the editor of the country
weekly, or small city daily. His reputation may
not extend beyond the borders of his own state and
his net income may not exceed a thousand dollars
a year, and yet, when it comes to real influence,
and real power, he leads them all. His independ-
ence is envied by many an editor who presides over
a big staff of men in the large cities.

About every so often someone, whose horizon is
not much larger than that of a five-quart tin milk
pan, arises in a press association convention and
solemnly declares that the day of the country
weekly has passed and that it is only a question
of a few years when the last of them will be obliged
to suspend publication.

As proof of this startling, although not new,
statement, he will call attention to the rapid
growth of the big city dailies, whose circulations,
he asserts, are supplanting those of the village
weekly. Their facilities for gathering the news
are so much more numerous, their choice of ma-
terial is so much more comprehensive, and they
can give so much greater value for the money,
that the country weekly has not a ghost of a show
to survive such competition.

Such talk as this is the veriest nonsense. As a
COMMUNITY SERVICE 207

matter of fact, the weekly press of America never
stood on such firm ground as it stands today and
was never so prosperous. Numerically considered,
the weeklies exceed all other publications. Ac-
cording to Ayer’s Directory, the total of all issues
in 1913 was 24,527, of which 17,323 were weeklies.
After deducting all class, technical, social, scien-
tific, literary, religious, and other papers, there
are left about ten thousand weeklies that are
printed in the small cities and towns of the
country.

The only country weeklies that are being driven
out of business are those that have been found
wanting in news value or have been so badly man-
aged that their failure was inevitable.

No big city daily, however well edited, can take
the place of the small town weekly, if its pub-
lisher knows his business. The latter has a hold
on the hearts and lives of the people that cannot
be loosened by any outside newspaper, daily or
otherwise.

The editor of a country weekly or a small daily
occupies a unique position. He is usually the
most popular man in town. More people are anx-
ious to be on a friendly footing with him than
with anyone else—not excepting the minister. He
stands closer to them because he shares their joys
and sorrows, their successes and their failures.
He records their marriages, and the births and
208 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

christenings of their children. He prints items
showing the progress made by the youngsters at
school, and writes columns of matter about their
exhibitions and parties, their entrance into busi-
ness, and their progress, at home or in distant
cities. He reports the fairs, the sociables, the
celebrations, and the church services, in which they
are interested, and, finally, it is the editor who in
fitting words records the visits of the Angel of
Death to the homes of the people. If there is a
scandal in town, he hears of it first. If a trusted
employee in the local bank goes wrong, it is he who
is asked by the anguish-stricken parents to keep
the facts out of the paper.

The editor hears all the good stories‘that are
brought to town by visitors. He is a welcome
guest at complimentary and public dinners, gets
free tickets to all the shows and picnics, knows
* everybody, and often makes less money than any
of its business men.

The country editor, if he is qualified for the
job, comes pretty near being the boss of the whole
town. He may try to dodge the responsibility ;
he may pretend that he is only the servant of the
community, but down deep in his heart he knows
that he occupies the position of the town’s leading
and most influential citizen.

Admitting this to be the fact, the editor owes
a responsibility that is almost incomprehensible
COMMUNITY SERVICE 209

to those outside the ranks of journalism. Many
newspaper publishers do not realize the influence
they exercise. It is one of the wonders of the
day and hour that newspaper men so rarely use
this power for an unworthy purpose. In the rank
and file you will find mighty few who betray their
readers or sacrifice their interests for bribes of
money or office.

The country weekly will never be displaced by
any outside publication. Outside daily news-
papers will be read more and more by the people
of country communities, and their circulations will
increase correspondingly, but the paper that will
forever retain the affection of its readers is the
country weekly with its budget of home news
about neighbors and friends whose daily lives
touch each other at so many points.

How can the country, or small city editor
render the greatest service to the community in
which he lives? I should say, in a general way,
that he can best serve the public by advocating
measures and principles that have for their pur-
pose the advancement of the town’s highest inter-
ests and the intellectual and moral development of
its inhabitants. Let us analyze the situation and
determine what may be done to bring this about.

What can an editor of a country newspaper
do to help make the town in which he is located
more, attractive, more healthful, and more pros-
210 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

perous? If he is progressive he can do a great
deal. The public looks to him, not only for news,
but for the initiative in bringing about such im-
provements as the growth of the town demands.
Lawyers, doctors, and clergymen fill their places
in the community, but they are so busy looking
after their own individual clients, patients, or
church members, that they have little time for the
consideration of public problems.

The editor, on the other hand, because of the
very nature of the business in which he is en-
gaged, must keep an eye on what is going on and
take the lead in all movements for civic better-
ment. He is expected to point out the town’s
needs and show the way to their fulfillment. An
editor is supposed to know everything, from the
best way to wean a calf to the settlement of the
most perplexing questions before the state legis-
lature, or even Congress itself. If he is not as
omniscient as he is given credit for being, he keeps
the fact to himself and puts up such a beautiful
bluff that few of the leading citizens ever discover
the real truth.

As the responsibility of the town’s progress is,
by general consent, placed on his shoulders, be-
cause he is the editor of its principal paper, it is
up to him to make good. If he has neither the
talent nor the inclination to fill the position, he
should without delay sell his paper and seek an
COMMUNITY SERVICE 211

occupation that is less exacting and more nearly
suited to his capacity. If he has the inclination
but is somewhat doubtful as to his ability to do
what is expected of him, because of his lack of
knowledge of civic affairs, let him put in his even-
ings in study, get hold of a few good books on the
subject and master their contents. Let him find
out what other towns are doing toward self-im-
provement. Let him read his exchanges carefully.
Let him get copies of the reports issued by the
more progressive towns in his own and other
states, and note how and for what they spend their
money. Of course, he should select for compari-
son villages or cities that are about the same size
as his own. If they have improvements that his
does not possess, let him ascertain the reason why.
Are their citizens more public-spirited and more
enterprising? Are they better located or do they
enjoy natural advantages that are superior to
those of the town in which he lives? If he does
not know how to analyze figures, let him secure
the co-operation of someone in town who does,
the president of the local bank, or the manager
of one of the industrial or commercial firms.
Through his aid the editor may be able to prepare
articles that will open the eyes of the tax-payers
and point out the way to better things.

Let us assume the editor is now in a position
to take up the subject of community service. He
212 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

has familiarized himself with the work that is be-
ing done in other cities and towns. He has,
through interviews and study, acquired a knowl-
edge of practical methods for protecting public
health, and of the best public school systems. He
knows all about the town’s resources and is in
touch with its leading citizens.

One of the first things is for the editor to pre-
pare a series of bright, entertaining articles,
showing what is being done in other towns to make
them more attractive. If his village or city needs
a better town hall or court house, print a picture
of one that has recently: been erected in a neigh-
boring town or even distant city. Tell how much
it costs, give the name of the architect, and em-
phasize the fact that the people are proud of it
and consider it a good investment.

Does his town need sidewalks? Get up an
article describing the different materials now em-
ployed: in building them, how much they cost per
square foot or yard, indicate their relative wearing
qualities and how much money it takes to keep
them in repair. Follow the same plan in dealing
with pavements, waterworks, and other public
utilities.

Are the streets well illuminated at night, either
by gas or electricity? If they are not, prepare
an article describing the lighting system in use
in some live town in the state. Call attention to
COMMUNITY SERVICE 213

the advantages that accompany well-lighted
streets. The citizens can go about more safely
at night and enjoy a broader and richer social
life; the activities of burglars, footpads, and hold-
up men are restrained, and people can see where
they are walking and thus avoid accident.

Does the town need a good hotel? A good hotel
is one of the best advertisements that any com-
munity can have. Traveling men will often jour-
ney fifty or one hundred miles in order to spend
the night or a Sunday in a hotel that furnishes
real, home-like comforts. In a sense, it is the cen-
ter of business life. Here public dinners are given,
and out-of-town guests are entertained.

If the town lacks up-to-date hotel accommoda-
tions, let the editor get up two or three articles on
the subject. He probably knows several places
that have attractive hostelries. Tell about them
in the paper. Stir up interest in the subject
among the merchants. Get them to tell the com- _
mercial travelers how anxious the town is to have
a hotel man who knows his business locate in the
town and erect a hostelry that will be worthy of
the community. They may know such a man and
give him the tip. The hotel need not be so large
that it will never be filled, and thus become a white
elephant on the hands of the owners. Some of the
most attractive hotels I was ever in were small
hotels located in small towns.
214 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

Now do not imagine for a moment that I am
suggesting anything that is impossible. I am not
assuming that the town has so much money on
hand that it is waiting for the editor to tell its
officials how to spend it. I have an idea that the
editor will not be able to bring about a single re-
form in the local administration or introduce a
single improvement, without patient and persistent
hard work. These things cost money, and money
is only raised by taxes or the issue of bonds.
Every time an attempt is made to put through an
ordinance regarding the expenditure of money, no
matter how necessary or desirable the object may
be, it will meet with serious opposition. Many of
the wealthy men of the town, unless they are dif-
ferent from those I have known, will object be-
cause they will have to pay more taxes. They
forget, or ignore, the fact that the more attractive
the town is made to home-seekers and business
men, the more people will want to live in it and
the more valuable will its real estate become.

Down in Columbia, S. C., there is a daily news-
paper called the State, published by A. E. Gon-
zales, which is regarded in the South as one of its
best newspapers. A few years ago there lived in
Columbia a mechanical engineer who had promoted
the establishment of cotton mills in several com-
munities. This engineer was desirous of seeing a
cotton mill erected in his home town, and under-
COMMUNITY SERVICE 215

took the task of interesting local capital in the
project. After several months of hard work he
had accomplished so little that, chagrined at his
failure, he decided to give up and move, with his
family, to a more responsive section of the coun-
try. He told the editor of the State of his deter-
mination. The latter asked him to wait thirty
days longer, and then, if the situation had not
changed, no one could blame him for going away.

The next day the State published the first of
a series of thirty editorials, one each day, for a
month, on the desirability of having a new cotton
mill established in Columbia. These called atten-
tion to the fact that enough cotton was grown in
South Carolina and neighboring states to keep the
looms of such a mill humming the year round.
Cotton goods were in demand all over the world.
Labor to operate the mills was abundant, the mar-
ket for the goods was such that it would absorb
the product of the mill as fast as it could be
manufactured. Under the circumstances the mill
could not fail to return substantial dividends to
those who invested in the enterprise.

The State’s editorials were so convincing that
before the end of the thirty days a brick manu-
facturer came forward and said he would furnish
the brick for the factory and take his pay in the
stock of the company. A lumber dealer agreed
to furnish the lumber, a manufacturer of cast iron
216 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and steel promised to supply all of those materials
that were needed, and a contractor guaranteed to
put in the foundation,—all taking their pay in
stock. Work was at once begun, and such was
the public interest developed in the project that
before the mill was completed, a second mill was
under way, and at the end of another year a third,
having the largest floor area of any cotton mill in
the world, was erected. Had it not been for the
State, there would have been no cotton mills in
. Columbia and its population and wealth would not
have increased as they have.

The State has always stood for progress in the
municipality. It fought for community govern-
ment, it advocated and promoted the paving of
the streets and sidewalks, it cleaned up the old
ward system, and worked early and late for the
best interests of the city.

Mr. Gonzales, publisher of the State, has estab-
lished a model experimental farm near Columbia
for the purpose of helping the farmers of South
Carolina to make their land more productive and
to raise better varieties of fruit and vegetables.
Here a model dairy is maintained where farmers’
wives and daughters are taught how to make good
butter, and where certified milk is furnished. This
farm does not yet pay its way, but Mr. Gonzales
expects that it will in time. Meanwhile, he is

cheerfully paying the deficit each year.
COMMUNITY SERVICE 217

What the State has done in Columbia, any edi-
tor can do in his city. It may not be cotton mills
that are wanted, but it may be that some other
industry stands knocking for admittance to his
town, requiring only a reasonable amount of finan-
cial support from its citizens to locate there. How
many desirable factories or other business en-
terprises are lost to some towns through the
indifference of their citizens! The live newspaper
editor should ever be on the lookout for such cases
and bring them to public attention. Sometimes
the advent of a single manufacturing concern in
the town means an increase of from a few hundred
to several thousand inhabitants.

Note what the addition of only five hundred
working men and women means to a town’s busi-
ness! Each workman or workwoman must have a
home for his or her family. If each family has
an average of three members, then fifteen hundred
people must be sheltered, fed, and clothed. Think
of the stimulus business of all kinds would receive!
Real estate values would be increased, churches
would be better supported, and more money would
be in circulation in all channels of trade.

I know of several towns, one of which is within
easy reach of both rail and water transportation,
that would make admirable locations for various
industries. Land is cheap and labor is plentiful,
but because the local paper is a spineless sheet
218 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and no one is public-spirited enough to take up
the matter, nothing is done, and the town is at a
standstill. It has no more stores than it had ten
years ago, and its population increases so slowly
that, to the naked eye, there are no more people
there than in the year of the St. Louis World’s
Fair!

Some editors may think that the community
service I have described will place such a burden
of work upon their shoulders that they cannot
possibly carry it. That is a mistake. The writ-
ing of one article a week, upon any one of the
subjects I have suggested, will not overtax their
strength. The gathering of the material, and
putting it into shape, ought not to consume more
than one or two evenings, at the outside.

It is not advisable to urge upon a constituency
more than one project at a time. Concentrate all
your ability and force upon this and drive it
through to a finish. You must have public senti-
ment behind you or you can never hope to accom-
plish anything. To win public favor for an im-
provement is, sometimes, a most difficult task.
There is no one way that always proves success-
ful. Sometimes you can win it by common sense
arguments; sometimes by appealing to public
pride or the community spirit ; sometimes by gentle
irony or ridicule; sometimes by almost brutal at-
tacks on the opposition.
COMMUNITY SERVICE 219

In all cities and towns there usually reside a
few public-spirited men who can look beyond their
own business interests to those of the community.
It is the business of the editor to know who these
men are, and to win their co-operation. The
editor cannot accomplish much alone. He must
have the help of strong hands and willing hearts.
He can plant the seed, but others must help him
cultivate the soil.

There are many other services besides those al-
ready enumerated, that the editor of a country
newspaper can render, if he is thoroughly alive to
his opportunities. One of these is to see that
the town is properly advertised. In the larger
cities commercial organizations and sometimes the
municipalities themselves raise large sums of
money to make known their advantages to the out-
side world. In the smaller places no such funds
are available. Therefore, methods must be em-
ployed that do not involve the expenditure of more
than nominal sums of money. At the same time,
something must be done to put the town on the
map.

One of the ways to advertise a town is to have
it advertise itself. If your village has good side-
walks, neatly kept streets, a comfortable and home-
like hotel, up-to-date stores, attractive residences,
courteous citizens, people cannot help telling
others about it. Its fame will spread to other
220 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

counties and other states, and its population and
business prosperity will show a healthy growth
from year to year.

Before leaving this part of my subject, allow
me to urge the desirability of uniting the busi-
ness men of a community in a commercial organi-
zation that will be ever alert to protect and pro-
mote its material interests. What though the
town is small, and the editor can only muster a
few merchants and professional men, even this
small number, if they will work with the right
spirit, can accomplish wonders. Such an associa-
tion can do more than any other kind of an or-
ganization to develop a town.

I will admit that there may be some difficulty in
getting men to put aside their rivalries and work
together for the upbuilding of the community.
But it can be done, and the editor of the local
paper is the man to do it. He may not be able,
himself, to swing all the business men into line,
but he ought to know someone who can help him
do it. With such a body to back him up, the
editor will find the task of inaugurating a desired
reform or improvement comparatively easy.

Thus far, I have spoken only of the services an
editor may render the community on its material
side. Important as this is, it should not be al-
lowed to overshadow the still greater service he
may give to its intellectual and moral side. The
COMMUNITY SERVICE 221

editor should often stop and ask himself the ques-
tion, “ What influence am I exerting on my read-
ers in the matters of clean living, the inculcation
of upright business methods, the cultivation of
high and noble impulses, the encouragement of
movements for the quickening of the public con-
science, the advocacy of church attendance, the
fostering of patriotism in the hearts of the chil-
dren, and the developing of a wholesome local pride
among all citizens? ”

The editor with a grouch, or a mean, revenge-
ful disposition, can do more to upset a community
than half a dozen agile-tongued gossips. Have you
ever visited a city or village where the inhabitants
seemed to spend the most of their leisure time in
saying disreputable things about their neighbors,
or in running down the town, and whose every
remark was: characterized by the tang of ill-feel-
ing? If you have, you may depend upon it that
they only reflect the views and the spirit expressed
by the editor in the columns of the local news-
paper.

I believe in the gospel of optimism. Show me
a town in which the people look on the bright side
of life, are progressive and thrifty, and I will
show you that its leading newspaper is edited by
a man who is an optimist. The newspaper editor,
even more than the clergyman in his pulpit, should
preach cheerfulness to the sorrowing, patience to
222 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the headstrong, hope to the discouraged, and the
ultimate triumph of truth and justice to those
who have been ground down by circumstances or
their own folly.

Blessed be the editor who, in the face of dis-
couragements and disappointments, can still pre-
serve a cheerful mien and write editorials that will
bring sunshine to the lives of others. How many
men and women are there in the world who have
had new courage given them by the helpful articles
they have found in the newspapers! How many
who have had kindled within them an ambition to
study and overcome obstacles in order to accom-
plish some worthy and helpful purpose?

I am sure you will pardon me if I have seemed
to preach. It is a serious subject we have been
discussing, one in which there is no place for
clownish antics or the display of a bundle of
tricks to make you laugh! If I have brought to
your attention some old ideas dressed out in new
form, or some suggestions that will assist the
editor in his work, I am glad. If I have helped
him to realize his responsibilities as an editor more
than ever before, or have pointed out a few ways
in which he may serve his fellowmen and the com-
munity in which he lives, I am satisfied.
SYMPOSIUM: GIVING THE PUB-
LIC WHAT IT WANTS

BY DR. LYMAN ABBOTT

To the question: Is the defense of the newspaper,
that it must give the public what it wants, a good
one? I answer emphatically “No!” It is no
better defense than it would be for the selling of
whiskey, cocaine, and opium, for the marketing of
stale fish and decayed vegetables, for the publish-
ing of obscene literature and obscene art, for put-
ting on the stage licentious dramas, for houses of
prostitution and gambling hells, for the manufac-
turing of dynamite bombs for anarchists. In all
these cases the seller gives to the people who buy,
what the people who buy want. The editor is, or
ought to be, a public teacher, and he ought always
to give to the public the facts of life and the truths
of life as honestly and as accurately as he can
do it with the means at his disposal.

BY NORMAN HAPGOOD

The answer to this question depends on how
we interpret the question itself. There is a public
223
224 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

which wants cocaine for a very demoralizing
stimulant. In my opinion, this does not justify
the person who supplies the drug to the cocaine
fiends. There is a demand for the meanest kind of
scandal. This does not justify its exploitation.
The demand that exists does not justify the or-
ganizers of white slave traffic or the owners or
keepers of individual houses of prostitution. The
newspaper owner or editor is justified in respond-
ing to the demand of the public in so far as that
demand does not ask him to do anything that is
against his own conscience. He cannot, however,
justify himself for doing anything that seems to
him evil, on the ground that a certain public will
pay him for it, any more than he can justify him-
self on the ground that a certain individual will
be willing to bribe him to do it.

BY HAMILTON HOLT

Of course, we must appeal to the public. A
paper cannot be published, manifestly, without
the support of the public; but the answer to this
question depends on: what is the public and what
does the public want?

Now, I claim there is not an editor in the United
States who knows either what the public is or
what it wants. If any man knew what the public
wants, he could sell that information for $100,000
SYMPOSIUM 225

a year. We fire in the dark, hoping that we shall
hit the mark, and we don’t know whether we hit
the mark or not until finally some subscriber
writes us an irate letter or stops his subscription.
The only way, I suppose, that we can tell is by
the number of subscriptions that stop at the end
of the year. If the discontinued subscriptions are
more, we are losing; if less, we are winning.

What the public is, is an equally difficult ques-
tion. The public is not, certainly, the average
man of the public, multiplied by the population.
You try to make a paper for such a man and
three-fourths of the rest of the people would not
care for it. The public is made up of many classes
and sections bounded by political and educational
lines; and they have different attitudes, so that
you must make up papers to appeal to certain
classes or to certain sections or certain thoughts
in the community.

For the purpose of answering this question, we
might divide the public into three parts: the first,
the so-called thinking classes and intellectual
classes—“ high brows,” if you will; second, the
mass of the people, “low brows” as they are
sometimes called; third, the depraved and de-
based and criminal classes.

Now, I hold that no editor has a right to make
a paper deliberately for the last class—for the
debased class; and if he tries to do so, he should
226 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

be ostracised by other editors, and, if necessary,
should be prevented by the State through legal
process. But every criminal has some good side
to his nature, and the upper classes have a yellow
streak in their nature; and I do not believe that
an editor should be allowed to appeal to that
yellow streak. Mr. Hapgood is about right when
he says that if you admit that fact, any man who
sells liquor or any man who sells dope would have
a perfect right to sell it because the public de-
mands it.

Now, it is perfectly legitimate, I think, for an
editor to deliberately attempt to appeal to the
intellectual classes or to the masses; and which is
the more important I don’t know. I suppose it
will never be decided whether Harvard or the pub-
lic schools have done the most for the State, and
whether the man who writes a scientific treatise
has done more than a man who writes a novel.
I think it is legitimate to appeal to these classes.

In all of our large cities, the population is so
great that we have the two classes, and there are
two kinds of papers that appeal to them. We
find those two kinds in almost every large city.
Of course, in the small cities, there is only room
for one or two papers and they will have to more
closely approximate the average intelligence of
the town, but they don’t have to descend to the
average intelligence because they are in the na-
SYMPOSIUM 227

ture of a monopoly, and so the editor can keep
a little above them all the time and he ought to
keep a little above them if he can.

I don’t think it really makes any difference
whether you choose to appeal to the upper or to
the lower classes, and I don’t know whether I
would rather be the editor of a paper like the
Atlantic Monthly or the New York World. Each
is doing a fine work in its way.

The real objection, I suppose, to the daily
papers is that they print sensational and vicious
material that vitiates the minds and the habits of
the people; but the masses do like sensational stuff
and I am not sure that they should not have it
to a certain extent. Beyond that, with the deep
things of life—questions of religions, of morality,
of politics—all those things on which men differ
and which they think deeply about—they can be
treated in a spectacular way so as to attract peo-
ple; and I think it is legitimate to do so, myself.
But as we progress in civilization, we have to over-
come that tendency. All modern science has done
is to make commonplace and usual things sensa-
tional; and the papers that have gone on that
basis have had great success. The Ladies’ Home
Journal, for instance, treats only conventional
subjects, but in a fresh and wholesome way.
There are men who deliberately try to single out
the humdrum things to tell about. They don’t
228 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

simply take up accidents and earthquakes and
shipwrecks and things of that kind; and they are
having a tremendous success. And the fact that
they have been so successful shows that a paper
of that kind can make a success.

It is the same way with other things than news-
papers. The things that pay the best returns are
always wholesome. Take Coney Island, in New
York, for instance—a place that appealed at one
time entirely to the vicious elements, although now
they have cleaned it up to a certain extent. That
place never paid as did Luna Park and Dream-
land. They were wholesome, healthful places where
a man could go with his family. It pays better to
stand up for the wholesome things: there are more
people interested in them than in the unwhole-
some things.

So that an editor, in making his choice, has to
make up his mind whether he wants the most
influence or the most money. He ought to be
compelled, I think, to print nothing absolutely
vicious; but beyond that he cannot be compelled
to go very much further unless except by the force
of public opinion or custom.

It seems to me there are possibly three or four
things that may tend to help along this movement.
I have spoken of the classes of journalism and of
the introduction of the papers into the schools.
The chief value of that is that it will compel us
SYMPOSIUM 229

to elevate the tone of our papers. And then, I
think we ought to have some endowed journals.
If we had several papers that could speak out as
they wanted to, we would imitate them more or less
closely. I don’t believe that the average editor
who has had all his training on the old competi-
tion basis would be a fit man to edit an endowed
journal. You would have to have a man who
has been in a university; and he could be trained
by our schools of journalism.

Last, I have always believed that there ought
to be some society of public-spirited citizens who
would get together and agree to prosecute papers
that libeled individuals. Now, a man whom a paper
libels has no redress. But if we had a public-
spirited society that would agree to take up all
these cases, that would make us ‘more careful about
how we sling mud and attack the motives of other
people.

BY OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD

The newspaper is, in many sections of the coun-
try, responsible for an increasingly low taste in
journalism. In some cities, there is nothing but
‘a choice of evil.

It is an undeniable fact, too, that the high
grade newspapers of the type of the Springfield
Republican,—which I consider our model Amer-
230 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ican morning newspaper—are finding it harder
and harder to make both ends meet and to make
that normal profit on their investment to which
they are entitled. The Republican is a broad
paper. It is almost a national newspaper in the
variety of its interest; yet it does not begin to
have the circulation which a more sensational and
cheaper newspaper has that is published across
the way.

Now, if the public wants that kind of a news-
paper and is going to want it fifteen or twenty
years from now, the public has got to support it
better than it is doing today, because the cost
of production of such a newspaper has largely
increased—probably one hundred per cent—in
the last thirty years. Our magazine friends have
injured us of the newspaper world, in a way, by
the enormous salaries they have been offering;
and altogether the pressure of increased expendi-
ture is something that has become very serious for
the three-cent newspaper.

Now, what it seems to me we might well teach
in our schools is the simple fact that there is a
referendum going on in the field of journalism
every single day. You don’t have to wait until
election day comes. Every day in the year, the
man who reads a newspaper takes part in a refer-
endum as to the kind of journalism that he wants.
He lays down his three or two cents on the stand
SYMPOSIUM 231

and he votes for that kind of journalism. If
there really is a high taste in newspapers; if, say,
those ten thousands of college graduates who are
going forth year after year from our universities
want the high grade journalism, they must support
the men who are giving it and vote for it, or there
will eventually be a lowering of the standards of
journalism in this country.

But while the responsibility for having the
right kind of newspaper is so clearly on the read-
ing public, there is also no denying that the news-
paper—certain newspapers at least—is largely
responsible for the public’s low taste. It would
be well worth while, if you are not familiar with
the journals of 1850 to 1865, to hunt up some
bound volumes of the New York Tribune and
Herald and the Springfield Republican, and other
newspapers of the time, and study them; and you
will be surprised what fine newspapers they were,
what fine standards they had, how intelligent was
the comment. Editorially, they were, of course,
superior to the bulk of the newspapers today.
They were clean; there were no large headlines.
They were as efficient as we are in the way of giv-
ing the news and giving it accurately. I don’t
think that we can plume ourselves over that gen-
eration of editors, for all our modern facilities.

Of course, we get the news more fully and
quickly; but when the European steamers did
232 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

come in, in 1850, the editors took that news and
intelligently analyzed it and set it forth succinctly
and clearly, and the historian can get a tremendous
amount of matter that is valuable from those files,
which he could not begin to get from our files
today. I found that so in writing about the early
Kansas history. I found a great many interest-
ing and heretofore unused facts in the columns of
the Tribune, coming from such men as Redpath
and others that were in Lawrence, keeping the
Tribune supplied with the development of the Free
State movement. It was done, of course, with
some exaggeration of the Free State side; but it
was a consecutive narrative—correspondence—not
merely little bits of flashy items of news, something
sensational that happened and they sent five or six
lines about it. Then, perhaps once every week or
twice a week, there would be an intelligent discus-
sion and report of what was going on in Kansas,
and I found it of surprising value in checking up
contemporary narratives. So I cannot help think-
ing that the newspapers themselves are respon-
sible in a large degree for the present low taste
of the public.

There is in the public, unfortunately, in human
nature, this yellow streak, as Mr. Holt has called
it, to which one can appeal. Dr. Abbott is
right. If we wanted to increase our circulations to
a higher increase than they have ever been raised
SYMPOSIUM 233

before, we could do it by printing obscene pictures,
disgusting caricatures of the French kind. I am
sure that we could run our circulation figures
higher than they have ever gone before; but to
do that would be to throw away the last vestige
of responsibility to the public.

But I cannot but feel, in conclusion, that it
would pay us to return to the standards of fifty
years ago in the matter of presenting our news.
I think we should combat the public low taste by
freeing ourselves from the charge of bad taste, by
presenting our news fully and accurately; and
then demand of the intelligent public that it shall
support the right kind of journalism. There
must be action between us and the public itself.
They must help us create a public opinion in favor
of good taste; and we must indicate to the public
in what way it can help us.

BY DR. CHARLES M. SHELDON

The daily paper, the magazine, and every other
periodical, have just as much of a duty to give
the people the thing they need instead of what
‘they want, as the minister has to give his people
what they need instead of what they want.

I have never believed there was any rule of
human conduct which made it any less imperative
for one man to live on the highest plane possible
234 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

than for another; and the printed page today is
under the high command of God to help regenerate
the world.

I cut out of two Sunday papers, a few weeks
ago, printed in one of our large cities, twenty-
seven column feet of what seemed to me to be in-
decent matter. In it were a good many feet of
advertisements that ought not to be read in the
home. There was not a particle of excuse for
one inch of that matter.

I do believe that the editor is responsible for
all that goes into the paper. I don’t believe the
public is to be called into question. Papers are
responsible for what they print, and I would have
as much right to go into my pulpit next Sunday
and preach to my people the things they want
in theology or moral living as editors have to
print in their papers anything below the highest
standards that govern human beings. The rules
that ought to govern a newspaper man are just
the same rules that govern a minister. There is
but one law of conduct for a man. It is the same
law for everybody. I am not compelled to be any
better man than you are simply because I am a
minister. You must be just as good a man as I
am, in your newspaper.

And as I look forward to the future, I see more
hope for the newspaper, in spite of all that is
wrong in it today. I have not receded one step
SYMPOSIUM 235

from the position I took fourteen years ago in
trying to edit a paper along those lines. I have
not changed my mind. I think a paper of that
character could be printed in this country and
would find subscribers and would be successful.

BY GEORGE FITCH

I have afflicted various newspapers for a long
time, but I have never afflicted many editors by
talking on the theory of newspaper work. And
I cannot say much today on this subject except
that it appears to me that the general excuse or
the general reason for publication, “‘ We must give
what the public wants,” is open to the same ques-
tion that has been prominent in science for so
many years: “ Which comes first, the hen or the
egg?” J believe that question has never been
satisfactorily answered. The question of which
comes first, the desire for a certain kind of news
or the news itself, is another question which has
not been answered and which is not generally
recognized by the editors who say they publish
certain kinds of news in response to the public
demand.

Editors are not clairvoyants; neither are read-
ers. I don’t believe that at any time in the past

1 Dr. Sheldon edited the Topeka Daily Capital for a week
as he thought Jesus Christ would have edited it.
236 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ten or fifteen years, a sudden demand for comic
supplements has arisen over night,—particularly
for the comic supplements printed in colors which
jar every established rule of art. I do not believe
that that demand came pouring into the news-
papers of the United States on a single day and
that the newspapers had to comply with it. It
appears to me that that demand was cultivated
as carefully as the farmer cultivates his soil;
and the seed had to be sown before the demand
arose.

And so there are two ways of answering that
question. In the first place, if you are publish-
ing what the public demands, why does it demand
it? Did you teach the public what it was? And in
the second place, does a man have to publish what
the public demands? It depends altogether on
what kind of an editor you are, just as it depends
in every line of business whether you have to give
the public what it demands.

Boys demand certain things that they cannot
have; and they grow up and demand liquor and
certain men cater to that demand and supply it,
and they open saloons and sell liquors, and those
saloons are supplying a great popular demand.
But we don’t build monuments to the saloonkeepers
when they die. Other men have to have morphine.
They have educated themselves into the belief that
they cannot live without morphine, and you can
SYMPOSIUM 237

always find in every city some druggist who sup-
plies the great popular demand for morphine; but
he has to do it on the sly, because if we catch him,
we certainly teach him that there are some popular
demands which cannot legally be supplied.

Other people seem to need a certain type of
reading—a type of reading which subverts prob-
ably all the moral instincts they have, which
vitiates their taste, which destroys what regard
they have for morality, which leaves them in a
state of hopeless misinformation on all public
affairs ; and that is a recognized demand and some
papers supply that. But if I was an editor and
supplied that demand, I would not go around
bragging about it, because I would be in the same
newspaper category as the man who supplies liquor
to the man who demands it, or the druggist who
sells morphine, or the man who supplies all the va-
rious non-necessities of human depravity.

You can run a newspaper to supply a popular
demand, and that newspaper can lie and destroy
all the news there is and give all the misinformation
that can be herded together by a large and com-
petent staff, and never supply a demand. And
one of the reasons why editors supply this de-
mand is because there is a certain type of news-
paper which recognizes that imagination is much
easier to supply than facts, or news, or scientific
information. And they mistake the great demand
238 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of the reading public for news, for interesting
editorial information, for clean and clever enter-
tainment, and so they substitute other things for
it,—and give nothing but imagination in return
for the demand for news. And they get away
with it because the public cannot see the demand;
and unfortunately we have no pure news depart-
ment in journalism as we have a pure food de-
partment. You can supply anything in journal-
ism, and if there is not any demand before it, there
will be a demand after it.

So the demand of the public seems to be no
excuse. The public, with its many millions of
readers in the English reading countries, and all
the newspaper readers of the world, among them
can demand anything; and it is simply up to the
newspaper man to sort out that demand very care-
fully and make up his mind what particular fea-
ture of the demand he is going to supply.

BY HARRY J. HASKELL

If we, on the Kansas City Star, were addressing
an audience of the people, for instance, who sub-
scribe for the New York Evening Post and the
Nation, it seems to me it would be a pretty simple
thing to know how to run a newspaper. I do not
suppose Mr. Villard finds it so, but there, at least,
you have a definite audience that you are trying
SYMPOSIUM 2389

to address. When you are trying to conduct a
newspaper and address yourself to pretty nearly
everybody in town and a pretty tolerably good-
sized town, from the washwoman up to the lawyers
and doctors and ministers, you are up against
something of a proposition; and it is that propo-
sition that we have brought home to us every day
in the year in Kansas City. The Star is
unique, I suppose, in the general character of its
circulation.

We took a census of houses in Kansas City
some time ago, and we found that we were selling
a good many more newspapers in the city than
there were houses in the town. Of course, that
was accounted for by the fact that there are a
number of apartment houses to which a number of
newspapers went; but we do have an unusual
problem in the very general character of our sub-
scriptions there in Kansas City—the papers we
deliver by carrier. We are delivering now, in
a town of probably 350,000 people—counting
Kansas City, Kansas—we are delivering over
eighty thousand papers by carrier, and we sell
something like fifteen thousand on the street. So
you see there are mighty few families in town who
don’t get the paper.

In the considerable time I have been with the
Star,—something like eighteen years—I have hap-
pened to know just one family personally that
240 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

did not take the paper, among all the circle of my
acquaintances.

That puts up a very complicated problem for
us, and I confess that the older I grow in the
business—I am getting to be quite an old settler
at it—the less I know about it and the less I know
about what the public wants. As Mr. Holt said,
I suppose that if I did know what the public
wanted I would be getting rich quick.

A year or two ago, we sent out some men to
try to make a canvass in the medium district in
the town, to find out what the public wanted—
what it was that pleased them about the paper.
They were men who were employed by the circula-
tion department. These men got into the house by
asking a question about how the delivery service
was satisfying the housekeeper. They talked
mostly to the women, because they made the
canvass during the day. The first reports we re-
ceived quite set us up—those of us who were con-
nected with the editorial side of the paper—
because they said they read the advertisements but
their husbands read the editorials; but finally we
found that by “ editorial” they meant anything
that was not advertising; and sometimes they
called it all advertising and sometimes all editorial.
So we were somewhat up in the air again on that
proposition. Then, too, we found that the reports
were not entirely to be depended upon, because
SYMPOSIUM 241

a great many people, instead of telling what they
really liked, would tell what they thought they
ought to like. If they think that they ought to
read the editorials, they will say that they read
that part; but if you cross-examine them you may
find out they don’t.

It was Mr. Nelson’s idea that perhaps Plato
and Victor Hugo, and various other eminent
gentlemen of the past, had written things that
people would still be interested in; so we have
taken particular pains on that, and we have per-
haps ten men on the staff who are devoting them-
selves to getting up such articles as well as re-
printing from other magazines and newspapers;
and we make quite a feature of it. Going home
on the street-car, I met a man who is in the employ
of the postal service in Kansas City—a very in-
telligent fellow. I spoke of the Star and I asked
him what he read in it; and he said he read the
first page, and sometimes he read something more
and sometimes he didn’t. He said his wife read
it more thoroughly than he did. I said, “Do
you ever read that special article that we print
on the editorial page?” And he said, “No, I
don’t know that I do.” I saw that he didn’t quite
get what I meant, so I named two or three to
him, and explained what the articles were, and he
said, “Yes, I should think those might be inter-
esting. I don’t believe I ever read any.”
242 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

So we have hard work all the time to know
what our audience wants. Mr. Nelson, who has
been unusually successful in finding what the audi-
ence wants, said he supposed that the one chief
difference between the successful and the unsuc-
cessful newspaper editor was that one guessed a
little less badly than the other. We don’t think
that we know, but as he said, perhaps we guess
less badly than some other men who are not as
successful in meeting the demands of their public.

I used to think that we could tell from letters
what our audience wanted, but I found that the
letters were very uncertain indications, because
apparently there is one class of letter writers of
a peculiar disposition, who ought to be, perhaps,
put in a class by themselves. But letters do
occasionally give us an insight into the fact that
we are shooting over the heads of the great ma-
jority of our readers.

We conduct an “ Answers” department, and
some of the letters that come for that column are
very illuminating. The other day, we got a letter
from a woman. She wrote a very nice letter and
said she was a busy housekeeper and had a great
deal to do, but she wanted to keep up with the
times, and would we please tell her what Congress
was? She had frequently heard it mentioned, but
she did not have a very definite idea.

You may think that represents a very extreme
SYMPOSIUM 243

case; but when the reciprocity treaty was up be-
fore Congress, we had pretty nearly the same line
of inquiries from a number of Board of Trade
men in Kansas City, with incomes of three and
four to twenty thousand dollars a year; and they
had the vaguest possible ideas as to the course of
the reciprocity negotiations and the procedure of
Congress, and whether the President might not de-
clare the reciprocity negotiations in effect with-
out consulting Congress, and so forth.

I remember several years ago that Professor
Harvey, in giving lectures on journalism in Yale,
got out what he called an ideal newspaper. He
had one long editorial, and explained that he was
going to treat this subject—whatever it was—
exceptionally, so that it would not be necessary to
refer to it again in the columns of the paper for
a long time, thus saving tiresome reiterations of
the same article. Well, I can only say that ac-
cording to our experience that would not get very
far, because any given article that is put in the
paper seems to strike at only—well, maybe five
per cent of the readers; and then when you repeat
and repeat and repeat it until you get black in
the face, you find that in the course of a few
years if you keep it up, day after day, people
will begin to understand what the subject is, when
it is mentioned.

And so these are some of the guiding principles
244 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

that we are trying to work out to give the people,
not what they want, but something a little better
than they want.

For instance, in our department of inquiry for
poems, I asked the young lady in charge, some
time ago, what was the poem most often asked
for; and she said it was “ The Face on the Bar-
Room Floor.” But we assume that when they
ask for “The Face on the Bar-Room Floor ”
what they really want is the “ Recessional” or
something of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or some-
thing of that kind; and while we occasionally
give them “The Face on the Bar-Room Floor,”
we keep hoping that they will find that what they
really want is the other thing.

BY LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT

You ask me to give my reply to the following
question: To what extent is the newspaper re-
sponsible for the public’s low taste in newspapers?

I do not believe that the public has a low
taste in newspapers. It is true that a part of
the public has, but the taste of a very large part
is excellent.

Ought we not to define accurately what is low
taste and what is good taste before we try to
answer this question categorically? The man who
tucks his napkin under his chin and eats with his
SYMPOSIUM Q45

knife in a public restaurant is guilty of a certain
kind of bad taste. His esthetic sense needs culti-
vation. But if in business his word is as good
as his bond, if in politics he scorns graft, if in his
social relations he is a good neighbor, if in his
family he is a loyal husband and a companionable
father, his tastes are much higher than the most
refined and finished clubman who indulges in gossip
and innuendo and who believes and acts on the
belief that the Ten Commandments are the product
of an iridescent dream.

If I may reframe the question slightly I can
more easily give a categorical answer.

To what extent is the newspaper proprietor and
to what extent is the public responsible for the com-
mercial success of so-called yellow journalism?

I would answer this question by saying that the
newspaper proprietor is almost wholly responsible.
Mr. Joseph Pulitzer came to New York twenty-five
years ago and showed that sensationalism in jour-
nalism can be made highly profitable. Mr. Wil-
liam Randolph Hearst followed and went Mr.
Pulitzer one better. Whereupon a host of smaller
papers in smaller cities and towns tried to do the
same thing. Generally speaking, these little imi-
tators have failed. Large circulations are some-
times synonymous with low tastes, but not always.

The Springfield (Mass.) Republican, the Kansas
246 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

City Star, the Chicago Tribune, the New York
Times, and the Baltimore Sun, to name some spe-
cific examples, demonstrate that popular, widely
read, and successful newspapers do not have to
cater to low tastes.

The newspaper problem is like the theatrical
problem in this country. Managers of low tastes
getting hold of some newspapers and some
theaters, think that the taste of the entire public
is like their own and like that part of the public
which they most intimately know. But while we
are deploring the vulgar, tawdry, and vicious
Broadway “shows,” we forget that the public
supports heartily “ Potash and Perlmutter,”
Denman Thompson in “The Old Homestead,”
James A. Herne in “Shore Acres,” and Dave
Warfield in “The Music Master” and “ The
Auctioneer,” all of which have elements of good
art as well as great popularity. My own belief
is that the average standards of the great body of
Americans, both in intelligence and in morals, are
higher than anywhere else in the world and that
the American public prefers decent newspapers
and decent plays to those that are cheap and
vulgar.

But let us be careful not to regard the term
“high brow ” as a synonym of the term “ good
taste.” A newspaper must be vital, human, and
sympathetic. It must not be afraid to talk in the
SYMPOSIUM Q47

vernacular. There are scores and hundreds of
small dailies and weeklies in this country which,
on the whole, represent and promote the best
things in the life of the region they serve. It is
the duty of the public to give the weight of its
support to those newspapers which truly repre-
sent the sound, wholesome, neighborly, helpful,
although plain and simple, life of the average
American community.
THE SECOND CANDLE OF
JOURNALISM

BY RICHARD H. WALDO

In one of his delightful stories, James Lane
Allen speaks of the men who “ in the time of need,
can grope within themselves for some second candle
and by it become illumined through and through.”

To us of the effete East, Kansas language has
about it a strong flavor of William Allen White.
He told you, in his famous editorial, “ What’s
the Matter with Kansas,” to “raise more corn
and less hell.” I am going to tell you, in the
course of describing “ What’s the Matter with
Newspapers,” to raise more Faith and less Bunk
in your advertising columns.

As a man in close touch with national journal-
ism, I hold that the great future of the publishing
business is in the development of advertising effi-
ciency. Therein lies the second candle, alike for
the publisher of the country weekly and the na-
tional magazine. “ We are of the one blood, thou
and I,” as Kipling has it, and the road to pros-
perity which we both must travel is today the
rocky one of low efficiency. It is for us to better

248
THE SECOND CANDLE 249

it as we go, that those who come after—the young
men whose feet we already hear behind us with
such mixed emotions—may travel faster and
farther than we, their forbears, ever can.

Does someone say “ Why a second candle? ”
I ask you “What of the first candle? Is there
much chance left for the old editorial supremacy,
in a day when it is the United Press that scores
the war-beats, and the Associated Press offers a
prince’s ransom to the best talent in the field?
What can one publication do in this day of syndi-
cated brains, and an every issue standard of ex-
cellence that was but a dream twenty years ago? ”
Little is left to do but fall in line, in the news
columns—and strike for the heights in every line
of advertising that we carry. There lies the
chance for individuality—there the place of rich
rewards, and it is there that the pioneers have al-
ready found their Klondikes.

An English newsboy of some thirty years ago
bought two of Chicago’s famous newspapers within
the week. You may have been surprised, but you
were not amazed, at the news. You have known
and watched James Keeley for years—you have
seen him build the Chicago Tribune into one of the
world’s greatest newspapers. But how many of
you have it clearly in mind that Service to the
Tribune’s readers is the keynote of Mr. Keeley’s
success? It is a simple fact, and we are again
250 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

reminded of Ruskin’s words “To do the best for
others is finally to do the best for ourselves.”

The story of the Tribune’s fight against false
and fraudulent advertising is a familiar one. The
clean-cut individuality developed through it is
known to be equaled only by the wonderful finan-
cial returns. The Tribune of today is a monu-
ment to a new kind of service, yet I venture to
predict that the new property which Mr. Keeley
will erect from the fragments of the two old ones
will overtop his old love because he will carry
Service further.

Within five years the Herald will have a
standard of advertising reliability that will make
it famous. Failing that, it will be an “also ran”
among Chicago dailies. James Keeley will be-
come the Horace Greeley of advertising—or of
politics.

Every editor has, to a certain extent, an equal
opportunity. In every community of the greatest
commercial nation the world has ever known there
is need of a newspaper whose advertising is abso-
lutely reliable. The public wants it, and men
grow rich giving the public what it wants.

The monotony of doubtful advertising has be-
come a wearisome custom. From it strong men
are breaking away. They feel with John Stuart
Mill that “he who does everything from custom
exercises no choice.” They know, too, that it is
THE SECOND CANDLE 251

the power of choice, steadily developed, that marks
the man who can prosper in the publishing field,
be it reporter, editor, or business manager.

It is by choice and selection that we get adver-
tisements that draw trade. Yet there are fewer
trade-drawing advertisements signed with pub-
lishers’ names than in any other field, despite the
example set by exceptional men from Robert
Bonner to Cyrus Curtis. Therefore I am going to
ask you to consider with me advertising that will
draw trade for your own advertising columns.
The volume of business in newspapers will remain
but a fraction of what it should be until you
crack the nut of adequate publicity for your-
selves.

In preparing copy, we must first decide upon
the points we wish to drive home. If we have
these clearly in our own minds, we stand a chance
of getting them into the other fellow’s. There-
fore we must “sugar off” on this newspaper
proposition and find out just what we can say—
truthfully—that will sound good to the man who
has money to spend in buying our space.

You can get your points quickly from your best
hard-shell prospect—the tight-wad whose dimes
are so hard to get that you don’t even dream of
going after his dollars. If he’ll talk—and that’s
up to you—he’ll give you material for a month’s
advertising in a morning’s interview. And at the
252 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

end of the morning—you’ll find you’ve nothing to
do but follow the example of the town fool.

A valuable horse was lost, and to the astonish-
ment of everyone the town fool earned the re-
ward. They asked him how he managed it, and
he replied, “I just thought what I’d do if I was
a horse, and I did, and he had.” That’s the way
to prepare advertising that draws trade.

If you’ll set down the items that your hard-
shell has told you would look good to him, you
will find the list surprisingly short. But it will
be shorter when you cross off the things you can’t
deliver, and so dare not talk about—if you are
either wise or honest. The lying advertisement
of a merchant is bad enough, but from a publisher
it is worse—it is foolish. You may hope to get
away with it—but it can’t be done.

These are the three chief things on which, once
convinced, any “prospect,” is 99.44 per cent
sold: (1.) That your circulation is accurately
stated; (2.) That you know what kind of people
read your paper; and (3.) That all of your read-
ers are interested in all of your advertisements
because you carry only those that are reliable, and
which render a service to the person who is influ-
enced by them. If you have those three things to
work with, you won’t need to be a genius to write
copy that will bring home the bacon. And by the
way, I think it was the Topeka State Journal
THE SECOND CANDLE 253

which suggested that there should be at least three
children in every family, so that if one becomes a
genius, the other two can support him.

Let us suppose that you can talk about all three
of the values suggested. Your circulation story
is simple, and if you are up against the unfair
competition of the circulation liar, send him this
little item from last week’s Editor and Publisher:

Friedrich Lutz, proprietor and editor of a Zurich
(Switzerland) newspaper, the Commerce and Con-
tinent Beyond the Seas, has been sentenced to a
year’s imprisonment on a charge of defrauding the
public by claiming a larger circulation in Europe
and America than he really had.

We shall have a similar case or two to report in
this country before long, if recent information is
reliable.

Good copy can be written around the kind of
people you reach. Whether they are rich or poor,
young or old, men or women, farmers or city folk
—they all spend money, and the story of how they
spend it is music to the ears of the man with goods
to sell. You can play it, with variations, on
every sort of occasion, and pretty generally you
will hear the pat-pat of hands as you do when the
band plays Dixie.

But if you want more than that—if you want
your prospects to get up on their hind legs and
254 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

sing with you, give them copy that tells how
every reader of your paper is strong for your
advertising columns—looks through them every
issue and is guided by them in spending money.
Go into details and tell how and why this is—
how there is nothing advertised that you cannot
stand behind,—nothing that you would not let
your own family buy. Try that on your piano,
and the clinking of the shekels will be melody
indeed.

Circulation makes good copy, and wealthy cir-
culation makes better, but responsive circulation
is the thing that every advertiser from Dan to
Beersheba is looking for. Can you deliver it?

If you cannot, then you will do well by yourself
—well by your family, well indeed by your readers,
if you will take thought for the morrow, when you
must deliver it. The casual belief in advertising
of the present day is not enough to support the
increased number of advertisers who seek to profit
by it, and there is a demand that grows apace for
something more. That “more” is faith in the
advertisements and it is certain as the sunrise
that increasingly publishers are going to cash in
on meeting the demand.

The very beginning of the cashing-in process
will be with your own advertisements. When you
run these, telling the men who should buy your
space, clearly and convincingly, why that space
THE SECOND CANDLE 255

is worth while, you will go much more than half
way toward making that space what it ought to
be. For very consistency’s sake you will think
twice before you run a lying advertisement once.

When you take stock, and begin to discard the
business that does not measure up to your own
standard, you may get cold feet. If so, go to it
again, and remember that the easiest way to get
good advertising is to throw out bad advertising. I
threw out $98,000 worth in one year and wrote
$210,000 new. Ever since, I’ve been looking for
more ways to throw it out, and the man who sug-
gests a new one is my friend. You’ll get it too,
if you'll try it, and the way in which unexpected
aid—unforeseen business—will come to you will
surpass your most roseate hopes—if you pro-
ceed with that wisdom which is the better part of
valor. Rome was not built in a day, but there
was a vision back of the building that we hard-
driving Northern races need in our work, and par-
ticularly so in the publishing business.

According to figures gathered during the last
few years, eighty-eight per cent of all manufac-
turers in the United States turn out goods fit to
be advertised under the highest standards. It is
a fact, however, that many of the remaining
twelve per cent are among our brightest little
spenders,—especially in the newspapers. Most of
the big city dailies have told them that their room
256 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

is preferred to their company, and not one has
ever recalled the word, yet these gentry of the
twelve per cent are as regular as the pay-roll in
thousands of smaller places. But theirs is the
advertising that draws trade for themselves alone,
and the harm they do, in shattered confidence, to
every other advertiser is coming to be clearly
understood.

The tail has wagged the dog long enough and
the great body of American manufacturers is
getting back of the clean-up policy that seeks to
make advertising pay as it really should pay. It
is pretty nearly time for every man to say whether
he is with the clean-up or against it.

Not all of the eighty-eight per cent are beyond
criticism, however. In fact, fully half of them
put out advertising that uses poetic license to a
greater or less degree. But this is a condition
which is rapidly being corrected as the superior
pulling power of truthful advertising is repeatedly
demonstrated.

The situation in the retail field is about the
same as in the wholesale. The great clothing
firm of Rogers-Peet Company, of New York, has
become one of the greatest in its line by running
copy that is like Cesar’s wife—beyond suspicion.
They can, and frequently do, sell $15,000 to
$20,000 worth of merchandise with a fifty- to
sixty-word advertisement in half a dozen news-
THE SECOND CANDLE Q57

papers. B. Altman & Co. can do as well—and there
are other names that will at once come to you. But
it is enough to ask you to picture what would hap-
pen if a publisher presented to his readers only
advertisements of this kind. Think it over—and
figure out whether you are content to have the
next generation reap such a harvest. If you want
a little of it yourself—get busy.

A famous newspaper man asked me this spring
to tell his staff of the results of a canvass I had
made about three years ago, and a recent check-up.
Perhaps you, too, can make use of the figures.

Twenty-seven states were spotted—villages,
towns, and cities up to one hundred thousand
population. The proposition carried forward
under the guise of subscription-taking, was to
find out how people stood in regard to advertise-
ments in magazines and newspapers. I got what
I was after, but my worst suspicions were con-
firmed.

Answering the question “Do you read adver-
tisements? ”’ less than one-half the people seen, men
and women living in good neighborhoods, replied
“Yes.”?> Of these barely twenty per cent were
able to remember that they had ever bought any-
thing because it was advertised. Many of the
others said, “ Of course not—we just get cheated.”
And the only high efficiency discovered in news-
paper advertising was on Department Store copy
258 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

where the truth of the statements could be per-
sonally investigated!

Let me get this to you in other words. If you
and I were running a business in which it could
be shown that out of every one hundred thousand
people visiting our store, fifty thousand went
away without looking at the goods and eighty
thousand without buying anything, how long
should we expect to continue? Don’t you think
we'd try to figure out the reasons back of such a
condition? Don’t you think we'd fire out any
merchandise that was clearly lowering the confi-
dence of our prospects in the bulk of what we
hoped to sell? There is but one answer, and you
have got to give it in journalism precisely as you
would in merchandising. The same laws prevail
in each.

That’s the way I figured it, two years ago,
when I found that about twenty per cent of my
readers was all I could deliver to my advertisers.
So I went at it to do better—not by getting more
circulation, but by building up the confidence of
the circulation we had in every advertisement car-
ried. Without going into details, I will simply
state, that with a very moderate increase of cir-
culation, this year’s gross revenue will show a
gain of over $200,000, and we are just getting
well started.

If there are ten newspaper men in the state of
THE SECOND CANDLE 259

Kansas who will follow a similar plan, they will
all get rich within five years. They will investi-
gate every advertisement offered, stand back of
every advertisement accepted, and refund the
money to any reader who isn’t pleased with a pur-
chase made from any advertiser—if the adver-
tiser does not do it first. That is what we do,
and on a $600,000 business I refunded less than
$900 last year. The public is honest—most busi-
ness men are honest—but you newspaper men have
been in your business so long that you can hardly
believe it. Take a chance—and you will have the
surprise of your lives.

Is there any newspaper man who is unfamiliar
with the competition that the local merchant has
to meet from the mail-order houses? But how
many of you know that the responsibility for the
growth of this competition is squarely up to the
newspapers? I will read you what Governor
Hodges, of Kansas, has to say on the mail-order
matter and then I will show you where your re-
sponsibility lies:

The reason that mail-order houses flourish is that
business men generally do not advertise. If every
retailer would set aside a portion of his revenue for
advertising, and advertise extensively, he could com-
pete with mail-order houses. You must patronize
your local paper. Advertise your wares; give an
honest description of the article you want to sell, get
260 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

it before the people, and give them the right price.
They say that these men who send their catalogues
out over the country have a wonderful advantage over
the one, two or three men in business, but their over-
head expenses are far greater than yours, and the
difference between the overhead expenses will enable
you to meet their prices on the same grade of goods.
Advertise well; the business comes to them through
this advertising.

That’s all very well, but the local merchant can
only advertise in your papers on a level with
fake medicines and other frauds, while the mail-
order houses can and do go into the great farm
journals with their money-back guarantees. And
because these mail-order men will beat the pub-
lisher to it every time a refund is claimed, they
are allowed to go as far as they like. No use to
say their advertisements are misleading—that is
another story. The point is that the farm papers
as a class have a degree of reader confidence to
deliver to their advertisers that is making million-
aires of mail-order: men. And until you give the
local merchant the opportunity to buy as respon-
sive circulation as Sears Roebuck can, conditions
will remain as they are today. What are you
going to do about it?

When advertising in the local papers of the
United States reaches its proper efficiency—and
it is only a question of time until it does—mail-
THE SECOND CANDLE 261

order business will find its net profits slim indeed.
More than that—the local merchant will do busi-
ness up to his full capacity, instead of the forty
to fifty per cent that is back of the present high
cost of living. When that day comes we shall
see the United States prosperous to a degree as
yet hardly dreamed. For{4n the last analysis) the
prosperity and well-being of this nation rests in
large measure upon our smaller newspapers, and
the way they measure up to their opportunities,
editorial and advertising.

It has been well said that “ Distribution is the
last great unsolved problem of Civilization.” On
this and the other side of the Canadian border
the solution seems to be in a fair way to be
reached. Many of us believe that Truth in ad-
vertising, plus public knowledge of where we men
in the publishing business stand, will give the
answer that political economists have not found.

It is truthful advertising that draws trade,—
advertising in which brevity is the soul of wit,
and in which nothing but news is presented, but
that to its full value. Of its typography I shall
say nothing, nor of its frequency or size—since
richness and quantity of clothes count for little
on an unhealthy body. But of its need for sin-
cerity I have said all, in endeavoring to show you
that the public wants it, and that it will pay.
NATIONAL ADVERTISING FOR
THE COUNTRY PRESS

BY GEORGE HOUGH PERRY

Every advertising man, every advertising
agency, and possibly all publishers of advertising,
both newspaper and magazine, will agree with me
in this: that the advertising business as a whole
is at present suffering from a pretty severe head-
ache. There are brilliant spots of exception,
there are many advertisers that are spending more
money this year than they did last year; there
are advertising publications that are printing
more advertising than they have at any time be-
fore; but they do not represent the general situa-
tion. The general situation is not as good as
it was one year, two years, five years, or ten years
ago. And the advertising business has got that
headache today for the very reason that brings
a great many headaches,—it is just recovering
from a debauch. That brings up a certain eco-
nomic condition that I think it is well worth your
time to spend a few moments considering.

The second Roosevelt administration marked
the beginning of those times which a writer in the

262
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 263

Saturday Evening Post, a few weeks ago, very well
described as “loose.” One of the things that be-
came loosest of all was advertising. An orgy
began about that time, and we are paying for it
now. ‘That was the time when the retail adver-
tiser fell from grace. That was the time when
the fraudulent advertiser in almost every line of
business came to his full and horrible fruition.
That was the time that the liar and the faker, the
get-rich-quick man, the oil scheme man, the gold
mine man, the food adulterator, the food poisoner,
—the liar and the fraud in every business,—seemed
to find the wheels greased for his progress. And
he progressed very largely by a style of adver-
tising that is only just now beginning to die out.
It paid. Fraudulent advertising may not pay
today, but it paid in those days. And in this
whirlwind of bad advertising,—loose advertising,
not altogether fraudulent, some of it was merely
careless,—the worst of that advertising paid.

It paid, not because money was easy, but be-
cause the public was easy. That was before the
public had become wise and wary. There had been
fraudulent advertisers ever since newspapers were
printed, but there never was a time that fraudu-
lent or careless advertising was so scientifically
written and so carefully prepared, and so judi-
ciously placed before the public, and the public, to
use a slang phrase, “ fell for it.” An owner of
264 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

a middle-sized retail store in Chicago built an
enormous fortune in less than five years, on this
very simple proposition: He found that people in
Chicago liked to believe that they were getting a
little bit more than they were paying for,—the
foundation of almost every fraudulent “ ad,”—
so he quietly said to his advertising man, “ Here-
after you will never print the regular price in
your advertisements. You will never say that the
price of this pair of shoes, or this suit, or this
hat, or these ties, or whatever it may be, is $6.00,
and let it go at that, but you will say ‘ $6.00—
worth $10.00’; or, you will say, ‘This $25.00
suit of clothes is reduced to $15.00.’ ” And when
the man asked him, “‘ What basis have I for those
‘ads’?” he replied, ““ Why, make figures to suit
yourself. Just mark them down.” And it was
perfectly astonishing how that man’s business
boomed from that day, for a while.

And the worst of it was that his competitors
saw how easy it was; and retail merchants in other
cities found how easy it was to say that a thing
was reduced, or to say that this hat was a $15.00
hat at $10.00; and in five years we had a flame
of advertising burning out the theories of honest
merchandising throughout the country. There
were few stores that dared to stand against that.
The first people in the country to wake up
were the women. Like everybody else at that time,
/

NATIONAL ADVERTISING 265

they took for granted the truth of what they saw
in advertisements or in the papers; but you can-
not fool a woman very long. They discovered by
and by that this $15.00 suit that had been repre-
sented to them as a $25.00 suit was not a $25.00
suit. They found it out and acted on it while a
great many of us supposedly wiser men were still
“falling ” for the oil scheme and the gold scheme;
and little by little, during the next four or five
or six years, the feminine public of the large re-
tail stores taught its merchants how to adver-
tise—not the other way around. As one woman
said, explaining it to me, “I pay no heed whatever
to a claim of value until I see it. That is only
advertising talk!” Think of the pathos of that
—“ only advertising talk!” The very kind of
talk that ought to carry conviction with it is
damned at the outset! But that is another story.

Now, little by little, those stores found that
they had made a mistake in their policy of lying
advertisements; and they began to change their
methods. Some few stores are still continuing it.
There was a bad failure in New York recently,
and it marked the downfall of, I think, the last
of the prominent American merchants who were
still following that scheme, and he failed because
he did not change in time. The few smaller stores
that are still screaming false values, that are still
with ever blacker type and more emphatic phrase-
266 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ology howling the value that does not exist, and
that has never existed,—I am sorry for them!
I am sorry for them because their death is com-
ing, and because with teeth and nails they are
trying hard to hold on to their business in the
face of a public that has found them out.

What, after all, is most important, is the atti-
tude of the public. It is the confidence of the
public, the belief of the reader in what he sees,
that really sets the value on advertising in a news-
paper. And it makes no difference whatever, so
far as the purchaser of advertising space is con-
cerned, if the paper is the most ethical in the
world, if every statement that is made editorially
in the news or in the advertising columns is abso-
lute truth, unless the readers believe it is the truth.

Let us get away from the idea that all we have
to do is to turn around now and be good. Un-
fortunately, a renaissance is not so easily worked
out. We have not only got to be good, but we
have got to pay for our badness in the past. We
have not only got to be worthy of belief, but we
must demonstrate to the public that we are worthy
of belief, before the advertising business recovers
from the debauch through which it has passed.

During those loose times which I have just
tried to outline, the national advertiser in the
magazines and in the newspapers also came to the
peak-load. There was developed at that time a
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 267

certain kind of advertising agent whose purpose
was merely to place advertising in the newspapers
and magazines for his client. And it was so easy
to do it, there were so many large accounts de-
veloped, the success of those large accounts so
encouraged large accounts, that the volume of ad-
vertising in the six years from 1904 to 1910
nearly trebled. This advertising agent was simply
a broker of space. He got his money by inducing
the advertiser to purchase large quantities of
white space. The advertising pages of the maga-
zines those days were anywhere from two to six
times what the reading pages were. Look at them
now, if you want to see a quick demonstration of
the change. :

The only thing that that kind of advertising
agent thought of was, “ How much money can I
induce my client to spend? ”—because the agent
was paid at that time, as he is, unfortunately,
today, on commissions based upon money that he
induced his client to spend. In other words, it
was like paying a salesman a percentage on his
expenses, rather than his sales. However, that is
another story. The advertising agent thought
little about the problems that engage advertising
agencies nowadays. He never cared very much
about analyzing the situation; he never figured
very much upon the distribution of the goods.
His sole thought was, “ How much money?” And
268 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

that meant, “ How many pages? If one page
didn’t do the trick last week, take two pages this
week.”

The same public that attacked and corrected
the retail policy has attacked and is correcting
national advertising; and the public is being ac-
tively backed up by the men most interested,—
the advertisers themselves. The economic or
commercial history of the last ten years is filled
with some of the saddest failures that I think the
world of commerce has ever seen.

I make a living as a consulting specialist in ad-
vertising matters and in the distribution of cost;
and as a part of that business, I have been called
a great many times in the last four or five years
to investigate and analyze certain advertising
campaigns, and to tell why they didn’t pay. A
case which I think is worth while to mention be-
cause it will serve to illustrate a point later on,
was that of a well-known electric vacuum cleaner.
The company was induced, by one of these agencies
that I have described, to put an enormous amount
of money, practically their entire free capital,
into a six months’ advertising campaign, on the
ground that that would create such a tremendous
demand for the machines, that with those orders
on hand they could go to their banks and get
more money, and so build up. The copy was
placed in what we call “small town ” publications,
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 269

and farm publications, and women’s publications
like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s
World. ‘They were fine mediums; but investiga-
tion proved that in a little less than three-fourths
of the towns in which that advertising appeared,
there was no electric current; this was an electric
vacuum cleaner. Three-fourths of all that ad-
vertising was lost, worse than lost, because the
money was spent, orders did not come in, and the
concern failed.

I mention this instance for two reasons: first,
to show that nowadays, careless, hit-or-miss, slap-
dash, get-it-out-in-big-copy style of advertising is
rapidly disappearing, and second, that nowadays
the scientific advertiser must pick his territory and
pick his mediums. It is generally stated that the
small town newspaper can never get the volume
of national advertising that it should, because it
has too strong a competitor in the monthly or
weekly magazine. I want to say, from the stand-
point of an advertising man, and I express the
views of a great many other advertisers, that the
present contest between the magazine and the
newspaper is rapidly resolving itself into a vic-
tory for the newspaper. And many others believe
that the one greatest advertising medium of the
next decade, we will say, is the small town news-
paper, daily or weekly. Not that the magazine
will pass away. It has a field which the newspaper
270 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

can never take away from it, but it is equally true
that the small town newspaper has a purpose and
a power that the magazine can never touch. And
why on earth doesn’t the small newspaper profit
from that fact? It is absolutely true, as the ad-
vertising man sees it, that in the small town news-
paper there is a potential medium that is at least
as great as, and I think greater than, any other
in the country. And the small town editor is not
using: it.

The magazines printed about $250,000,000
worth of advertising in 1913, considerably less
than they printed in 1912. I spent three or four
days trying to figure out how much of that money,
instead of going to magazines, should have gone
to the publishers of small newspapers, and I did
it by taking twenty-five of the leading magazines
and figuring out how much of the money that was
represented there would have gone into the small
town circulation had I had the handling of the
money. Now, of course, that is largely a matter
of personal equation, but according to my analysis,
there was considerably more than $75,000,000
spent in 1913, by the advertisers in magazines,
that should, by every law of economy and efficiency,
have gone to newspapers.

What are the country newspaper’s greatest
assets, from an advertising man’s standpoint?

First, and greatest, is the power that it gives
NATIONAL ADVERTISING Q71

us to separate, to concentrate, and to control ad-
vertising. It gives us the opportunity of what we
call “ spot” advertising, advertising that can be
done in certain territories. You know, nowadays,
there are very few big national propositions that
are established by one effort, as the “ Uneeda
Biscuit ” was, for example. Those days are
pretty nearly gone. The advertiser of the next
ten or twenty-five years is the small man, with a
new food or a new shoe, or hat, or brand of clothes
or coffee. He does not have money enough nor
the machinery for getting his goods on sale all over
the country at once.

I am probably talking in a very elementary
manner to many of my readers, but it may be
there are some who have not recognized this fact.
Nowadays the advertising man looks not so much
at advertising as at distribution. Advertising
men realize that an advertising problem is only a
problem of selling, and distribution comes hand in
hand with it. Advertising is merely an instrument
to the general scheme. Here is a man, we will
say, with a new coffee. There isn’t a grocer in
the United States selling it. What is he going to
do? During the debauch just passed, we have
unfortunately developed a serious factor which
interferes with national advertising today. It is
what we call the dealer’s resistance. It is the
antipathy that nine out of ten dealers have today
272 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

against starting a new brand. Druggists and
grocers have been particularly abused in the past.
There have been so many new brands of breakfast
foods and coffees, and so many new remedies have
come up, that nowadays when a salesman comes
in with something new, the dealer says, “ No, look
at what I have now on my shelves. I have fourteen
different kinds of that stuff up there gathering
dust. I don’t want any more.”

And now what does this man with the new
coffee do? He cannot sell his stuff by mail. He
cannot send out salesmen. But suppose he does,
in one way and another, get his goods into the
hands of traveling men. It is a physical impossi-
bility for him to cover the entire country, even if
every grocer that his man visited would take his
goods. Mind you, here is the vicious circle: the
grocer says, “I will put those goods on my
shelves when the public demands it; not until.”
The public, on the other hand, cannot be expected
to demand an article which is not on sale in that
vicinity. And there you are! Now, in that
vicious circle, which is the problem that confronts
every man that is going to be an advertiser in the
next ten years, the local newspaper comes in as
the probable solution. We have a tremendous
economic problem here, because nowadays the
method of putting out that coffee or any other
small article, is not to put an advertisement in a
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 273

magazine which goes all over the country; that
would be like firing a shotgun into the air in the
hope that maybe a bird flying across will be hit.

What will the advertisers do? They will use
the magazines, perhaps, for their true market
value; but the clever sales-manager now picks out
a territory,—let us say Kansas; and instead of
trying to blanket the whole United States with a
little force of salesmen, he says, “ You go into
Kansas and you tackle every grocer or every drug-
gist”—or whatever it is—in the state.” And
then he advertises,—or he would advertise except
for another reason that I am getting to—in the
local papers of Kansas. He saves in that way
nearly two-thirds of his money. Now, remember,
you have this fact before you all of the time. I
can reach more people through the small town
paper, for about one-third what it would cost to
reach them through magazines.

Let me mention one advantage of the magazines.
On both sides there is a pure mathematical quan-
tity; one million readers a day. The magazine
has this advantage over the small town paper:
that today the effect of the magazine “ ad” is far
stronger than is the effect in the country papers.
But always, from the money standpoint, the coun-
try publisher has this tremendous factor: it is
two-thirds cheaper to reach the people of Kansas
through his paper than through the magazines,
a4 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

and more than that, think of the concentration!
My goods being on sale in Kansas, I advertise in
Kansas; I am not losing a single bit of that cir-
culation. Were I advertising in the magazines,
circulating in Boston, Montreal, San Francisco,
and New Orleans, and the Islands, I am shooting
all over the United States to hit Kansas, and I
get only one forty-eighth of the value of that cir-
culation. Moreover, if I go into a magazine cam-
paign, I must stick it through; I cannot conduct a
magazine campaign for a week or two; if I am
not using the proper appeal in my advertisements
in a magazine, they are there another month. I
can change it in the newspapers tomorrow morning
by telegraph. Now those factors in favor of local
advertising, I do not believe are being used at all.
You may very properly ask me if all that I
have said is true, why don’t the small papers get
more of this national] advertising? You may very
properly ask me, “If it is a fact that these coffees
and these clothes and these shoes and these socks
that we see in the magazines all the time, can be
advertised through our papers for one-third
cheaper and something like one hundred per cent
more effectively, why aren’t the small papers get-
ting them?” Here is the answer as I see it.
The people don’t believe what they see in the
newspapers. It is a sad fact, but it is a fact.
It is due, again, as I believe, to the loss of public
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 275

confidence engendered by the orgies of the past,
that newspaper advertising does not make the im-
pression on the public mind that magazine adver-
tising does. It lacks impressiveness, partly be-
cause of its more ephemeral character, and partly
because the copy or actual typographical appear-
ance, and I might also say the literary appear-
ance, of the newspaper advertising is not any-
where near as careful as it is in the magazines.
Therefore, the magazine people, although they
admit the actual mathematical truth of what I
have said, and the advertising fact that you can
reach the people more cheaply through the news-
papers, maintain that magazine advertisement is
ten times more effective than the newspaper adver-
tising. That is the only answer they can give us.
If that argument could be destroyed, if newspaper
advertising did have the same convincing effect
that magazine advertising has, the newspapers
have their mathematical advantage yet, and will
get the national advertiser without any trouble.
The second reason why the country newspapers
are not getting national advertising is because of
the tremendous physical difficulties in reaching
them. Advertising men are human. Think, for
example, of the difficulties and the expense in
reaching these 690 newspapers in Kansas! Think
of the 690 pieces of copy; the 690 contracts; the
690 processes of negotiation on rates. Then think
276 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of the 690 plates to make and ship, as against one
plate for the magazine.

How does the advertising man look at the coun-
try publisher’s rates? I don’t care how carefully
the country publisher’s rate card has been made
up, he has taught me that the quotation made in
answer to my letters is not the final answer, but
merely the place to begin talking. I have been
mixed up in that business for about eighteen years.
I have placed hundreds and hundreds of adver-
tisements in small town papers, and I have never
yet found the price that I could not break by the
mere trouble of writing a letter. I am talking
about the small town paper, not about the large
one. Now, whose fault is that? Is it my fault
that I don’t believe the rate card? Why doesn’t
the rate card tell the truth? In the first place
most publishers do not know what they should
charge. They ask a price not properly commen-
surate with the quality and size of their circula-
tion; but the usual argument is, “ Well, a paper
about my size is getting about this price, and if
that one can get it I can get it.”

I can, today, actually buy space in more than
fifteen hundred newspapers, some of them dailies,
at a cost of about one-tenth of one cent per line
per thousand. In other words, I can put a plate-
matter advertisement into a paper of twelve hun-
dred or fifteen hundred circulation, at about the
NATIONAL ADVERTISING Qt7

same rate per thousand that I can get that ad-
vertisement in the New York American, with six
hundred thousand. That is absolutely ridiculous.
The country publisher cannot begin to print his
paper as cheaply. It is obvious he is losing money
upon it.

We have an economic condition in the country
at large which in the course of the next ten years
is going to demand more studious, more carefully
calculated advertising,—in other words, more effi-
cient advertising. The small town newspaper has
a very important standing. The day of magazine
advertising, as we have seen it in the past, is pretty
nearly over, and the newspapers are coming into
their own. I am not criticising the magazines.
Some of them are carrying more than they did
five or six years ago. They are the magazines that
two or three or five years ago adopted the ethical
lines.

Therein lies the country newspaper’s power.
Against that is the fact that people don’t believe
the newspapers; the fact that it is exceedingly
difficult for me to reach the small paper; the fact
that I don’t know its rates, and will beat them
down as far as I can, probably down to a point
where it ceases to be profitable to the publisher.
What is the answer? The nearest guess that I
can make is this: the formation of a central body,
to have two or three functions; first, to buy sup-
278 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

plies co-operatively: second, to act with me or
other advertising men and advertising agencies, so
that I can reach 690 papers without the necessity
of making 690 separate contracts. You may say
that certain corporations are giving that service
now. With no desire whatever of criticizing the
service they are rendering, which in some circum-
stances is very valuable, I say that they are not
giving me the service that I want. I want to deal
more directly with the country publisher. The
probability is that, for a long time, advertising
agencies must get the compensation and commis-
sions from the advertiser. They cannot afford
to pay a commission to a middle man. The mid-
dle man is rapidly becoming archaic anyhow. It
may be purely a state matter. It may grow to
be a national matter. But if there were any
office today, or series of offices, through which I
could reach the small papers, with four or five
letters or pieces of copy, or contracts, I know of
half a dozen national accounts they could have
today.

In the third place, that body at that central
office, should assist in the extremely important
work of making the weekly newspaper more con-
vincing. In other words, it should act as a censor
of the advertising. So far as Kansas is concerned,
the University department of journalism, upon
which you may depend, will pass on advertising.
NATIONAL ADVERTISING 279

With the biological, chemical, and engineering
laboratories available, careful tests of adulterated
goods can be made.

And that, to my mind, is the only way out. In
some such manner, not necessarily that exact
method, the paper will come back into its own, will
adopt that higher standard, and then the natural
factors in its favor will have their real unhampered
operation.
THINGS TO TELL THE
MERCHANT

BY MARCO MORROW

One of the first things is to establish thoroughly
in the minds of the merchants the proper rela-
tion that should exist between the publisher and
the commercial and mercantile interests of the
community. Once get a clear understanding,
thoroughly established, of your function in the life
of your town, and thus have a working basis for
your business relations. The newspaper is in
reality a public service institution, a public util-
ity privately operated. Its function is, first, to
serve the people of its community with all the
news that is worth while, while it is worth while;
to reflect public opinion; to guide, so far as is
possible, public sentiment into safe and sane chan-
nels, and to promote to the utmost the material
prosperity of the community and of the people
who make its existence possible. ‘Therefore, the
merchant must be made to understand that adver-
tising is a part of the paper’s public service—
that business news (and that’s what advertising
is) is of as great importance as social or political

280
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 281

news—that the publisher is derelict in his duty if
he does not give his readers and his merchants an
efficient advertising service. The community needs
the paper; the merchant must have the advertis-
ing; and the publisher must have the money. The
day is gone when the publisher dare ask for busi-
ness “ because he needs the money,” but the fact
remains that your business men—your community
—need the paper. There is a mutual dependence.
So one of the first things that the publisher of a
local newspaper must tell his merchants is the
fundamental relation between the newspaper and
its public, and by “ telling ” them, I mean showing
them, rather than standing ’em up in a row and
lecturing them.

In the second place, give them genuine service,
and solicit their business on a business-like basis.
It’s easy enough to get almost any man to admit
“the power of the press,” in the abstract. What
you want is that he recognize the power for good
of your paper. When you go to him to solicit
an ad on the ground that he is using some other
paper and he ought “to play fair,” you are in
reality asking charity: you are belittling the value
of your own paper and of all advertising, and
there is small wonder that you don’t hold the ad-
vertisers’ respect.

Make it a part of your religion to keep in mind
the relations that exist between your paper as
282 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

a public servant and the public whom you serve,
and do nothing to belittle that relation. Many
of the modern teachers of science of salesmanship
—of psychology in business—talk a great deal
about auto-suggestion; and it is a fact that many
good salesmen put themselves through a little
catechism every morning. I have known salesmen
to stop outside of a man’s door and say this to
themselves :

“Do I represent a good house? ”

oe I do.”

“Ts it to this man’s interest that he give me a
respectful hearing?”

“Tt is.”

* Am I going to be able to convince him? ”

“You bet I am.”

And you bet he is, too. And the fact that he
stops and says that over to himself two or three
times during the day does help. So I beg of you
to do nothing to belittle, in your own mind or in
the mind of your public, the service which your
paper renders.

I wrote to two or three publishers when this
subject was assigned me, and asked them to make
suggestions as to some of the things that they are
“up against.” Here is what one of them wrote me:

Of course, there are a thousand and one reasons
put forth by non-advertisers why they should not
use space.
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 283

In the first place the non-advertiser is nearly al-
ways, and naturally, a man of small caliber; it is
difficult to reason with him intelligently for even
when cornered he cannot see, or will not admit the
truth of one’s logic.

Nearly every man has a different excuse or set
of excuses, but few of them are real reasons.

One class will admit that “they ought to do a
little advertising” and then put you off by saying
the time is not ripe, or that they are expecting new
goods in, or are going to make some store changes.
When you return at the appointed time, they have
thought of something else that prevents them using
the paper “ just now.” “See me a little later,” they
say, but they can never be convinced that now is
the appointed time.

Perhaps the one greatest reason why non-adver-
tisers in our town are not regular users of space is
this: our town has been quite thoroughly, though per-
haps not altogether effectively, canvassed for news-
paper advertising. Nearly every business firm or
office of any consequence has at one time or another
used newspaper space; they have used one, two or
three ads and then stopped. Of course, no big re-
sults, perhaps no tangible returns at all, have been
realized from such haphazard attempts at publicity.
So these people are firmly convinced in their own
minds that advertising in the newspapers does not
pay. Now while it is claimed that it is better to
get a man for one time than not to get him at all,
yet perhaps if the campaign idea were insisted upon,
the final results would, on the whole, be much larger
and better.

One novel reason advanced is that competitors
284 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

exaggerate their values and minimize their prices so
outrageously that it is simply impossible to hope to
cope with them.

And this last is not such a novel or such a unique
excuse as this publisher seems to think. It is not
confined, by any means, to small town merchants.
The Associated Advertising Clubs of America are
devoting, I think, at least seventy-five per cent of
their energy in an attempt to get merchants to tell
the truth literally in their advertising. A great
deal of advertising exaggeration that merchants
and publishers and advertising men have drifted
into is not really as untruthful as it seems, if you
start to analyze it. It is no great harm for a
man with a circus—no difference if it is only a
two-wagon show—to advertise it as the “greatest
show on earth.” It is not a circus unless it is
the greatest show on earth. That is proper circus
advertising. But mercantile advertising has
drifted into that same meaningless habit.

I remember seeing an “ ad ” of a little hotel, the
other day, which said, “ Our prices are unequaled
by any hotel in New York.” I don’t know whether
he meant it to be taken that way or not, but we
use, and advertisers use, and publishers use, so
many of those phrases that are entirely meaning-
less. But aside from that, you know that there
are many reputable stores that grossly exag-
gerate, often deliberately. It is a great thing that
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 285

we are now attempting to get our advertisers and
to get ourselves to weigh a little more carefully
the exact meaning of the words we use. Of course,
there can be no excuse ethically, and no excuse from
a business point of view, for a local merchant’s
saying, “ This women’s $35.00 suit marked down
to $22.50,” if the price was not $35.00 in the
beginning. In a number of states, we are already
accomplishing something in that direction. There
have been two or three convictions in the last
two or three months in New Jersey, where they
are putting a stop to that. If we say an article
is worth a dollar, it must be worth a dollar: that
must be the current market price for it, before
you can put that into a bargain ad. Ihave a little
bit of sympathy for a man who is up against a
competitor who is constantly misrepresenting,
when he says, “I don’t want to go in and com-
pete with him and his kind of advertising.” Of
course, there is a way to capitalize this misrepre-
sentation of a competitor. An advertiser like
Marshall Field, for instance, or John Wanamaker,
—no difference how great the exaggeration is on
the opposite page, isn’t hurt. In fact, it helps to
bring the contrast out,—it is good advertising for
them. But for the average competitors in busi-
ness, where they are in very much the same class
and the one man is constantly lying and the other
is telling the truth, it takes a good while to get
286 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the public educated to that, and it does hurt a
little. This publisher says further:

Not infrequently some non-advertiser will ask the
solicitor to guarantee results, saying that if the re-
turns are as great as they are glowingly pictured, the
paper can well afford to give positive assurance that
it will “make good.”

The question of copy sometimes enters into the
discussion. The prospect cannot write his own copy
nor will he accept the copy prepared for his O. K.

Of course one is ever meeting the man who is
“strictly ethical,’ and the one who says, “ Father
didn’t advertise and no one can say that he wa’n’t
a good business man.”

One great difficulty among our business men, and
this applies to many of the big fellows as well as the
little ones, is that they consider advertising as an
expense rather than an investment, and enter it under
that head in their ledgers.

Another source of trouble is that the majority of
the men are not so big mentally but that they allow
their prejudices to influence their business judgment.
If they like a solicitor or the policy of the paper,
they give that solicitor or paper business regardless
of the returns.

Little neighborhood stores and some people in
specialty lines argue, and not without some reason,
that the territory they can hope to reach or the class
of patrons they wish to appeal to is too limited to
justify their paying the rates of a paper with a
general circulation.

Some non-advertisers point to other non-adver-
tisers who have made conspicuous successes and say,
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 287

“ Look what can be done without advertising.” Though
such instances of success are rare exceptions, there
are enough of them apparently to “ point a moral.”

Some prospects say, “If I use your paper, I will
have to use the other one too, and I can’t afford to
use both.” Good accounts that have been nicely
started are often killed for this very reason.

The matter of preferred position, without an added
charge for same, is another vexed question. The new
man who is just starting to advertise cannot see why
he should not be as well treated as an advertiser of
twenty years’ standing, and he thinks he should fare
altogether better than the Eastern “ patent medicine
faker.”

It seemed to me that this publisher has sug-
gested a good many of the objections which I
suppose we all meet. In talking to the advertiser
who does not believe in advertising or who has
‘tried ” advertising once or twice, or “tried it”
a great deal, I always use this old illustra-
tion, basing it on some of my own early expe-
riences.

An advertising agency starting a national cam-
paign will prepare carefully the copy which is to
appear in a number of papers; almost invari-
ably, if not always, in the list of papers which
it is using there will be some one paper which they
know is good, or two papers, or maybe all of them,
that will fall down completely. Now, the adver-
tiser who has put up the money for that campaign
288 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

does not say, “You have selected papers that
are no good.” Not at all. He goes to his adver-
tising agent and says, “ Your copy is wrong, your
scheme is wrong; or your plan is wrong; let’s get
at this.” And every national campaign is torn
to pieces two or three times before it finally strikes
the gait that makes it a success. It often hap-
pens in great national weeklies, for instance, that
the same copy appearing in several papers will
make good in three or four and fall down miser-
ably in the paper that may seem to be the best,
simply because that particular piece of copy did
not fit that medium. That is no criticism of the
medium.

Now, the local advertiser cannot criticise news-
paper advertising simply basing it on his own lim-
ited experiences. The local advertiser must know
that you reach people who buy what he wants to
sell. They are his natural customers, and he must
know, if he has any business sense at all, that others
are succeeding in getting dollars into their tills
through the newspapers. Therefore, it is up to
him primarily to find the way to use them; how
to extend his trade, how to take advantage of
this opportunity that you offer him. I say it is
up to him; but it is also up to you if he doesn’t
know how to do it. I like to say to him:

* You will never build a business nor make the
profits which are possible for you until you aban-
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 289

don all of those haphazard, hit-and-miss methods
of advertising and get at it in a systematic, per-
sistent, businesslike way. Make an advertising
appropriation and stick to it. Every article
which leaves your store must bring to you its
original cost plus a percentage to cover the cost
of doing business plus another legitimate profit.
Now, your cost of doing business, Mr. Merchant,
must include rent and insurance, and salesmen’s
wages, and light, heat and taxes, and interest on
investment, and advertising, and the score of in-
cidentals that enter into the conduct of a retail
shop. These charges against every sale are fixed,
are staple. You meet them without question or
quibble. If you had a bad day yesterday and
your sales fell away below the normal, you don’t
say that you'll have to cut down clerk hire and
suspend your best salesman until trade picks up;
you don’t say that you'll cut down your rent and
move for a day or two to a side street; you don’t
say that you’ll save the wear and tear on the sign
over your door and take it down for a day or
two; you don’t say that you'll save taxes and rush
up to the city officials and ask them to lay off the
firemen and policemen and shut down the water-
works and turn off the electric lights until busi-
ness picks up. Oh, no; you wouldn’t think of
that; and yet that’s exactly what you do with your
advertising !
290 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

“Your advertising, if it is advertising worthy
the name, is your best salesman, and yet you don’t
hesitate to lay it off indefinitely because business
was bad yesterday.

“Your advertising is a bigger factor in your
business than your location, and yet you'll move
it down a back street or wipe your advertising
location off the city map because you’re not feel-
ing right today.

“Your advertising is the big sign over your
door, and yet you'll take it down and store it in
the cellar; your advertising is your most profit-
able and most economical tax for insurance against
loss, and yet you'll lightly ‘save’ that ex-
pense for a few days if your dinner or business
conditions don’t exactly suit you. Now why?
Why this difference? ”

The merchant has an answer. He says, “Oh,
my dear publisher, don’t you know that I can-
not lay off my clerk without losing him; I
cannot change my location without losing it ; I can-
not suspend my insurance without losing my pro-
tection—but Advertising, that is different! Adver-
tising is a faithful dog I can kick into the street
whenever I feel like it, and he wags his tail and
comes back again when I want to wipe my feet
upon him.”

I say to him, “No! Advertising is not differ-
ent. Advertising is a great force in business and
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 291

many great and many foolish claims are made for
it, but it is not greater, not more powerful than
any other factor of your business. It can’t do the
impossible. If you expect to get any good from
it you must keep it ‘on the job’; make it work
while you sleep.”

The question of copy ought not to bother the
local merchant, although it is in the matter of
copy where he falls down nine times out of ten.
There is, of course, a great difference in the effect-
iveness of advertising copy, but if you can get the
merchant who writes his own copy to forget all
about fine writing or about being smart and
clever; if you can get him to forget the stand-by
phrases which have been used until they mean
nothing to him or to anyone else; if you can get
him to sit down and talk to the people of your
community—-to his customers—about his store,
about his stock, and about the service that he can
give them, he will be able to write a good adver-
tisement. I ask him, “Is there any reason in the
world why the Jones family or the Smith family
or the Brown family should trade with you? If
there is, tell them the reason; and tell them again
and keep on telling them. That’s advertising,
good advertismg. Have you anything in stock
that Mrs. Jones or Miss Smith or Hank Brown
would be interested in? Tell them about it, and
tell them about something else tomorrow and next
292 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

week, and keep on telling them, until they know,
beyond all doubt, that you have just about the
best stock ever brought together in your com-
munity. That’s advertising, good advertising.
And it will pay you.”

I would educate the local merchant to take ad-
vantage of every bit of national advertising that
is being done. The average local publisher and
the average local merchant are not utilizing that
advertising. I don’t think it is possible that the
country weekly or the smaller country daily is
ever going to get any large amount of the appro-
priations made for national advertising cam-
paigns. It is too expensive a proposition to do
business with the thousands and thousands of local
papers that would be necessary to cover the
country.

I am referring more especially to the smaller
town, where the local paper does not carry a great
deal of this national advertising. The local pub-
lisher ought to watch the magazines where these
national campaigns are conducted and then go to
the man who is carrying these goods in stock, show
him how much of that advertising is coming into
that community and get him to tie up his local
advertising to that. It is often possible to sell
a man space on a day when he is not coming in,
because there is a double-page ad in the Saturday
Evening Post of some article he sells, and he knows
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 293

there are so-many hundred copies of the Saturday
Evening Post coming into his town. The mer-
chants more and more are doing this, and the
manufacturer himself is more and more trying to
interest the local distributor in campaigns of that
kind in order to make his national advertising more
effective. From the local publisher’s point of
view, this might seem like aiding and abetting the
enemy—the big national publisher who is getting
the bulk of these national appropriations—but
when we take into consideration the fact that
we are never going to be able to get all of that,
it seems to me good business to cash in on such of
it as we can.

Without attempting to cover the whole subject,
I do want to say that you can be of great help
to your local merchants and to your town by
tackling the mail-order proposition in a sane,
sensible manner and not going off half-cocked and
using some of the awful rot that is put out on the
subject and which so many newspapers slip into
their columns without really giving it due con-
sideration. It is your business and you owe it to
your community to support your local merchants
and stand by them; if I were publishing a local
paper I don’t think that I would run any mail-
order advertising unless the companies sued me
and made me open my columns to them. But that
doesn’t argue that the mail-order business is not
294 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

legitimate, or that it has no standing in the com-
munity. It doesn’t mean that you can overcome
it by boycott or by standing up and damning the
mail-order house. You cannot go against an
economic principle. That is all there is to it.
The mail-order business never would have come
into existence if there had not been room for it;
and the room for it was created by inefficient busi-
ness methods in the country and in the smaller
towns. If the retailers and the publishers in the
smaller towns had been living up to their possi-
bilities and giving the merchants and the public
the service that they ought to get, the mail-order
business never would have made the growth that it
has made. Of course, it is something gigantic. I
think we probably never realized how great it was
until after one of the big Chicago houses listed its
stock and made monthly reports of its net earn-
ings, showing a gross business of nearly $100,-
000,000 a year. It is estimated now that the mail-
order business is about twelve per cent of the re-
tail business of the United States. That is some-
thing that must make everybody stop and think.
Now, there are all over the country good live
towns that the mail-order houses are not hurting
the least bit; and maybe in an adjoining town, in
the country perhaps, the merchants are being hurt
very badly. It is not a nice thing to stand up and
say to the merchants, “It is your own fault”;
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 295

but it is their own fault, very largely. The aver-
age man would rather see what he buys; would
rather trade at home; and if he is getting the serv-
ice that he ought to have and the service that
the merchant can give him and the service that you
can help him give, there is not going to be nearly
so much trouble. And I also like to tell the mer-
chant that he has a right to put into his adver-
tisement, “ Mail-Orders promptly filled.” Every
merchant in the country is trying to reach out and
get trade from a little beyond his natural com-
munity, and that is perfectly right; and it is just
as right for the big establishments in our large
cities to reach out, too, if they want to. But the
only way they ever succeed in doing it is by ad-
vertising. That is the whole secret of the mail-
order success.

The small town, as a community, is naturally
handicapped by the greater volume of free adver-
tising which the larger town naturally, inevitably,
and legitimately gets. The smaller town dealer is
handicapped by that enchantment which distance
lends to the view of the larger city—to say noth-
ing of the vigorous, persistent, and highly efficient
advertising of the city merchants. And there is
but one way to overcome that handicap. Damning
the mail-order houses won’t do it. Boycott and
blacklist won’t do it. I don’t believe you can get
a law to do it. You can do it by letting the peo-
296 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

ple of your community, your natural and legiti-
mate trade, know what you have for them, the
advantages you offer them, the service you can
give them. You can do it in only one way and
that is by systematic, persistent, sane, and judi-
cious advertising.

The phenomenal success of the mail-order house
is a good argument as to the value of advertising
to be used on the local merchant. He will come
back at you and tell you that the mail-order
houses misrepresent in their advertising: that the
prices seem to be low but they are not so low be-
cause the quality is not there. But that is not
true, or else twelve per cent of the great American
public are idiots. The mail-order houses give a
positive guarantee; and there is no question about
their making good. One of the greatest successes
I have known personally in the mail-order busi-
ness was the Kalamazoo Stove Company. It made
a rule of selling on thirty days’ trial. In five
years, from an impossible proposition, it built up
a business of a million dollars a year, selling stoves
and ranges one at a time to persons in the coun-
try. One of its early shipments went to California
on that agreement: “ Thirty days’ trial, and if
it is not satisfactory, notify us.” Of course, if
it got any complaints, its sharp, keen, brilliant
correspondent would try to find out what was the
matter and make the sale stick. Well, a woman
THINGS TO TELL THE MERCHANT 3297

in California, who had ordered a stove, notified the
company that she didn’t want it, and, although
her local dealer told her it could not be done, she
sent it back. The head of the stove company
wrote her, saying simply, “ You didn’t live up to
your contract; you didn’t try the stove. But here
is a draft for the money you paid us and for the
freight.” Before the stove reached Kalamazoo,
another letter came from the woman in which she
said, “If that is the way you feel about it, you
must be a fair sort of a man; I must have been
wrong, so I will order a larger stove; and if you
will send that to me, I will pay the freight on
both stoves.” That woman, in the next three or
four years, sold for those people more than
twenty-five stoves and ranges; and that is the only
way a mail-order business can possibly be con-
ducted.

Of course, every once in a while, the customer
will buy something not entirely up to standard,
but the same thing happens in your local stores
just as often as in the mail-order house. I am
not saying all this in defense of the mail-order
system, but merely to show you that it is straight
advertising which has built up the mail-order busi-
ness. And it seems to me that is one of the best
arguments in the world you can put up to a local
merchant.
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS
BY F. M. BALL

Tue primary object of any business venture is
to make money. Publishing a newspaper is classed
as a business by the census reports, so we may
deduce the statement that the primary object. of
publishing a newspaper is the making of money.

The first requirement of any successful business
is that it establish a sound credit foundation, and
judged by that standard the publishing business
as a whole is far from successful. The last gov-
ernment census states that the publishing and
printing industry ranks sixth in the commercial
value of its output, and places the value of its
product each year at over $737,876,000.

There are over thirty-one thousand establish-
ments employing over 388,000 wage-earners. Two
large commercial credit agencies of this country
say that this tremendous industry ranks at the
bottom of all the great industries as regards
credit. We, therefore, are confronted with the
situation that an industry upon which most other
industries depend for success, one that has more
to do with the success of all other industries than

298
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 299

any other combination of forces, is financially the
least successful of them all.

Without the great medium of publicity which
the newspapers furnish, American commercialism
would progress slowly, whereas it is rushing ahead
at express train speed, outdistancing every other
country under the sun, and setting new speed rec-
ords each year which are nothing short of mar-
velous.

As far as the publishing industry can be ana-
lyzed, it should be, as a whole, classed as a philan-
thropy instead of a business, for a philanthropy
is defined as exertion to do good to our fellow-
man because of the love we bear for him and not
for the profit to be gained. You publishers assist
other men to succeed, you supply a selling force
without which other business men would not pro-
gress, you distribute goods, knowledge, ideas, in-
formation of all kinds, and get as your reward
the reputation of being the poorest business men
in the world and having the lowest credit rating
of any large listed industries.

If there is a grain of comfort in being listed as
a philanthropist instead of a successful business
man, I shall have to subtract even that because it
is a proven fact that the papers doing the most
good to their communities are the ones which are
successful financially. Unsuccessful papers are
more of a burden to their constituents than a help,
600 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

because the papers that pay their own way are
fearless, independent, progressive, and construc-
tive, while the others are too often governed by
the dictum of some money power from whom they
have to draw their revenue. Therefore, there is
but cold comfort to offer the financially unsuc-
cessful publisher, because he is not much help to
himself or to the community at large.

There can be no effect without its cause and the
reasons for so much financial loss in the publish-
ing field are not hard to find. First and foremost,
is the fact that most publishers are unaware that
they are in the merchandising business. They get
into the field through the universal desire born into
all men, and some women, to express their ideas
and give advice to the rest of the human race,
who are not possessed of such epoch-making
opinions and theories. They become enamored of
the conspicuous position they occupy in the pub-
lic eye, and think more of what their constituents
say to them than what they pay to them.

A writer or an author is seldom a good business
man. If fewer reporters owned newspapers, there
would be more bills paid promptly. The small
publisher, however, must write, edit, compose, buy,
sell, and figure, and here, therefore, is the funda-
mental psychic condition that is difficult to co-
ordinate and harmonize.

If the literary instinct is dominant, the business
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 301

end of the paper suffers; and if the business in-
stinct is dominant, the literary quality is likely
to deteriorate. The happy medium wins, and un-
fortunately there are all too few men with the
two instincts evenly balanced. The remedy is, for
the owner, if he be a writer, to quit writing or
learn business methods. The latter recipe is more
sensible.

The next great difficulty is that a publisher sells
a more or less intangible value. A quart of beans
is a quart of beans, a steam engine is a steam
engine, a horse is a horse, and these have certain
fixed standards of exchange, but an inch of adver-
tising space is of value only in so far as it will
sell the thing advertised or create the impression
sought, and this value is difficult to weigh, meas-
ure, or determine. To print one extra paper costs
only the value of the white paper and the ink; and
since this paper, if read by the right person, may
increase the value of the advertising space, its
rea] value may be neglected and still not have the
paper wasted.

Another big difficulty is the great number of
competitors which divide the field. The market is
oversold. Few business fields are so crowded.
The forty-sixth annual census of the publications
of the United States shows that an average of
five new publications are started every working
day. The suspensions and consolidations make
302 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the net gain three a week, but this gain is in a
field already overcrowded. The reason for this
crowding is hard to locate. It results from ac-
cumulation rather than from formation.

A losing newspaper proposition is about the
hardest thing in the world to let go of. If a
merchant can’t make money, he closes out and
quits. A publisher can hardly do this because
his plant would have about the value of ordinary
junk. He therefore hangs on with the hope of
being rescued by a lucky turn or of selling out.

With the credit that newspaper supply houses
are all too willing to extend, a new paper can be
started on about the same capital for which an
old plant could be bought. In fact, the easy
credit that a new publisher may obtain in the
newspaper field is one reason for the stiff competi-
tion which exists. Politics and politicians are also
responsible for the existence of many newspaper
properties which otherwise would be driven from
the field because of their unsound business methods.

One would think that since newspapers are ab-
solute necessities socially, educationally, and com-
mercially, their ownership would be more generally
profitable, for as a rule those men who control the
necessities of life are the moneyed class.

Let us analyze a moment and try to discover
the peculiar conditions which exist and which ac-
count for so many newspaper plants being only
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 303

partially successful. First, a newspaper has only
two sources of possible profit—revenue from cir-
culation and revenue from advertising space sold.
If the sum total of these two incomes is in excess
of the total expense of the plant, the paper makes
money, and if it is less the profits sink below zero.

The income from circulation is from papers
sold singly or by the year—the income from ad-
vertising is from space inches disposed of. If a
profit is realized on the circulation, papers must
be sold for more than their combined manufactur-
ing and distribution cost, plus the cost of getting
the subscriptions on the list. If advertising is
to yield a profit, it must be sold for more than the
cost of producing the advertisement and setting
the copy.

Analyzing circulation costs, there is the first
cost of inducing the subscriber to read the paper,
second cost of paper, ink, and presswork on
papers sent out, third cost of distributing the
papers, and fourth cost of renewing the subscrip-
tions or replacing them. (Strictly speaking,
paper, ink, and presswork are not legitimate cir-
culation department items, but are entered here
to prove a point made later in the discussion. )

The selling price of any article ought to depend
on the cost of production, but what editor can tell
me upon what foundation the subscription price
to his paper is based? Why do most weekly
304 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

papers charge $1.00 a year, most daily papers
$3.00 a year by mail and $5.00 by carrier, and
most mail-order journals twenty-five cents. The
fact remains that publications have no scientific
price basis. They sell at a price fixed by cus-
tom, not by production costs. This condition
typifies the condition of most newspapers—they
don’t know their costs. Herein lies one big reason
why so many publications fail to produce a legiti-
mate profit.

Let editors ask themselves these questions:
How much does it cost you to produce a hundred
new subscriptions, or to renew a hundred old ones?
How much does it cost you to produce one eight-
page paper, exclusive of editorial expense. What
per cent of losses do you sustain each year from
failure of subscribers to pay their just bills? How
much money is due you right now on subscrip-
tions that should be paid? When did you last
take a trial balance to see whether or not your
subscription list was a losing or a winning propo-
sition? What does it cost you to print an inch
of advertising? Do you know for your individual
plant whether your subscription list is an asset or
a liability, and just how much it loses or profits
each year?

The man who does not know these things ac-
curately is not a good business man, and it is to
be feared that there are many such. Do you figure
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 305

on paying yourself a salary for your time? Do
you accurately know your overhead costs of heat,
light, power, insurance, rent, telephone, clerk-hire,
interest on investment, depreciation, bad accounts,
postage, premiums, and what relation these bear
to your total expense? Do you know whether a
solicitor ought to produce new business at forty
per cent or seventy-five per cent in your field?
Do you know what per cent renewals cost you? Do
you know how many subscribers leave your list
each year? Do you know what percentage of re-
plies your various circulation promotion and col-
lection letters bring in? In other words, do you
keep a stop watch on your business at every point?

You may say that many other lines of busi-
ness do not keep such checks and yet succeed.
That is true, but their field is not so crowded as
yours. Too often, publishers and circulation men
merely “ guess,” when they should know actual
facts. The plants that make big money do have
such checks on their cost figures. Don’t “ guess ”
that your circulation losses can be made up from
your advertising income. Have positive knowledge
on these points.

I recently remodeled a circulation system that
lost the publishers $50,000 a year, and by ac-
curate bookkeeping, a changed system, and a little
enthusiasm, wiped out the loss entirely. No busi-
ness in the world yields more readily to modern
306 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

efficiency methods than the publishing business,
and no business in the world has so little efficiency
thought given it. I can name another paper to-
day that is losing $75,000 a year, and the pub-
lisher will not even investigate to find out if that
loss can be stopped. It is true that a well run
circulation department will not show much profit,
but it should not show a loss, even when white
paper is charged to its account.

Therefore, I advise you to study your costs.
Look your circulation problems squarely in the
face and do not be afraid to find out the true rot-
tenness of it for fear some advertiser will learn the
truth about your list. Know the truth and it shall
make you free to correct the errors.

You have all heard that the way to get circula-
tion is to publish a good newspaper. Yet any
number of good newspapers have comparatively
small circulations. A poor newspaper with a good
circulation department can outdistance a good
newspaper with a poor circulation department
every time. The best way to get circulation is
to go out and fetch it in. It won’t come to you
very rapidly, for the average man does not feel
any great need of any additional reading matter.
You will have to go out and fight for it and then
fight some more to retain it.

The best kind of circulation is the kind that
comes into your office voluntarily and lays down
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 807

its money each year and begs you to please send
the paper another year. Unfortunately, there is
not enough of it to go around. Newspapers, as
a rule, are too nearly identical in news features
and service to influence a subscriber one way or
another. It is a difficult thing to prove one news-
paper better than another. The most successful
newspaper from a circulation standpoint, there-
fore, is the one which can induce the most peo-
ple to read it and pay for it. It is simply a case
of salesmanship, arid the best salesman wins.

Shall high-priced salesmen be employed? Not
if lower priced ones will get you enough business
at reasonable cost.

Shall premiums be used? Not if you can get
enough subscribers for your purpose without them
and get them at as low cost without premiums as
with them.

Shall contests be held? Not if you can main-
tain all the circulation you need without them.

Shall prices be cut? Not if you can get enough
subscribers at the full price.

Shall clubs be made with other publications?
Not if your own is strong enough to induce its
own subscriptions.

It seems to me that the trouble at that point
with the publisher is largely inactivity. It puts
me in mind of the story of Lincoln on the inac-

tivity of McClellan. McClellan didn’t do much
308 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

of anything. He played the waiting game—
watchful waiting. Lincoln wrote a letter to him
and said, “ Dear Gen. McClellan: If you do not
care to use the army during this coming week, I
would like to borrow it.’? So lots of publishers
might lend their newspaper publishing plant, if
they didn’t care to use it.

In no way vary from the ideals of a strictly
meritorious publication until you are compelled
to—then go only so far as is necessary. If you
need high-priced men to get you the needed cir-
culation, hire them; if you have need for more
circulation than you have and premiums will get
it where other things fail, use premiums; run
contests, cut prices, club—get the circulation.
Don’t hesitate—get enough subscribers so that
your circulation equals or exceeds the amount
necessary to earn a rate big enough to show a
profit on the amount of advertising you carry or
are likely to carry.

Circulation you must have—enough good cir-
culation to pay your advertisers. If you have
not got it already, go out and get it by hook or
crook. Whether or not a subscription list will
produce results for advertisers depends largely on
the methods by which the list was built. Whether
a subscription is good or bad is governed entirely
by the opinion the subscriber has of the publication
subscribed for. That opinion is governed by what
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 309

is in the paper, the methods used in getting the
subscription, and the service rendered the sub-
scriber after the subscription is taken.

If the editorial and news departments are weak,
the paper is a weak salesman for the advertiser.
If dishonest methods and misrepresentation were
used in getting the subscriber’s money, or if the
delivery service is poor, the influence of the paper
as a selling force is weakened terribly.

If you sell me a good article, for which I have
use, at a right price, my opinion of it won’t be
lessened by your offering me an inducement to
buy, in the form of a premium, a cut price or a
chance to please a pretty girl. Therefore, a
premium, a contest, or a bargain day can-
not be condemned as such. The danger lies
in the methods employed. So here again I
come back to the conclusion that if pub-
lishers are good business men they will know ac-
curately just how their particular paper will be
affected by a premium offer or a contest or a bar-
gain day. Two-thirds of the papers of standing
in the United States use premiums; over half be-
lieve in contests, and most all papers cut prices
in one way or another.

The danger in a premium campaign lies in not
figuring the cost before its inauguration, in em-
ploying crooked agents, and in giving away stuff
on which you get insufficient return in money or
310 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

influence. If proper business methods are em-
ployed, a premium induced subscription is as good
as any on the list.

The danger in a contest lies in the methods em-
ployed by the managers. A straight contest is a
good thing, providing the publisher is a good
enough business man to invest the proceeds wisely
and not spend the whole income immediately and
forget the paper and ink bills that must fall due
before the subscriptions expire.

The best way to maintain a good list of sub-
scriptions is first to get a good list which has
been built by honest methods and then keep that
list interested. A subscription list is like a new
theatrical production. It is easy enough to fill
the house the first few nights by proper adver-
tising, but if the show is not interesting the audi-
ence dwindles and the show fails. Therefore, don’t
spend your money building up a list and spoil all
your efforts by printing a poor paper.

Salesmanship and advertising can sell any
article once, but future success demands that qual-
ity bear out the statements of the salesman or the
advertising.

So I would say that it is necessary to print a
good paper if a solid circulation is to be main-
tained. A big circulation may be obtained on
any kind of a paper if enough money is spent and
enough brains used, but it cannot be maintained
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 311

at ordinary cost unless the readers find quality
within its pages. A good many papers who hold
up their hands in holy horror if a circulation
scheme or premium plan is suggested to them,
forget that their paper obtained its circulation
through just such methods, and they were wise
enough to keep it by giving the purchaser value
received in news features and service.

Nowadays, it is next to impossible to build up
a paper’s circulation in any field without resort
to premiums and schemes. Of course, these
schemes must be clean, honest, and not too costly.
When you once have obtained a sufficient list, you
should hold it by publishing a good enough paper
to make the reader want to renew.

Many a newspaper now loses money because it
has not quite enough subscribers. I refer now to
the small daily papers with circulations from four
thousand to twenty-five thousand. Broadly
speaking, no one-cent paper can make any money
worth mentioning unless it has at least five thou-
sand paying subscribers, with a net circulation
revenue of approximately $25.00 a day. This
achieved, however, the paper will make about six
per cent on invested capital and for each one
thousand subscriptions addcd, about one per cent
will be added to the profits. A paper with ten
thousand circulation ought to make ten per cent,
but after the twenty-five thousand mark is reached,
312 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

the percentage of profit per thousand decreases,
owing to the inability of the paper to pull results
in the wider territory.

The cost of printing ten thousand papers is but
little more than that of printing five thousand
papers, except for the white paper item. Pay-
rolls, overhead expense, and editorial cost will not
increase but the advertising revenue will, and the
result is very satisfactory to the book balance.
Some newspaper men have never figured this out
and let their circulation stay just below the win-
ning mark. If your paper is losing money, I ad-
vise you to investigate this ratio of circulation and
determine at what point your list will have to
stand in order to bring it up to the profitable
mark.

So again I say, if you do not have enough of
the right kind of circulation, get it. You can’t
win till you do. Don’t stop just this side of suc-
cess. Step over the line if you have to lift your-
self by your boot-straps. Don’t wait until you
are forced to write the pathetic and amusing vale-
dictory of the Missouri editor, “ With grateful
acknowledgment to my friends and benediction
upon the profession, I take my hat—the savings
of seventeen years in the newspaper field—and
retire.”

You publishers can’t get away from the fact
that you are manufacturing an article to sell and
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 313

are therefore governed by all the rules of the selling
for profit game. You must give the people of
your community what they want in the way of
reading matter, you must keep them interested,
and you must sell enough papers to keep the
manufacturing cost down and the advertising rate
up.

Use honest methods, honest schemes, honest. pre-
miums, and sell honest value; keep your editorial
department on its toes and print a better paper
than your competitor. Never be satisfied with
your results or achievements and use the keen
judgment to keep a sound circulation and a sound
business policy.

Publishers as a class do not believe in adver-
tisg. They sell it, write it, pay their bills with
it, and then disbelieve their own statements about
its selling power. A publisher will give you a
splendid talk on why you should advertise lavishly,
but he seldom spends a nickel for the purpose of
advertising his own product.

Many publishers will not print a line of their
own advertising in their own columns, much less
pay for space in other publications. I have
actually heard publishers remark that their ad-
vertising space was too valuable to use in running
house copy. Beyond a doubt, publishers are the
worst advertisers in the world. The big publishers
are waking up, and it won’t be long before others
314 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

follow. Curtis has always believed in advertising
his publications and has spent millions of dollars
in letting the public know their good points and
he has won. The New York World is a good ad-
vertiser. Hearst also has been a big advertiser as
well as a seller of space. Capper has built up a
tremendous business mainly by believing in the
‘power of advertising as applied to his own pub-
-lications.

One week, I counted up $36,000 worth of space
‘used in advertising the Curtis publications in the
columns of the Saturday Evening Post. And it
is nothing to spend two or three hundred thousand
dollars a year. Talk to any man in the magazine
game and ask him why the Curtis publications
.stand where they do stand, and they will tell you
it is because they have advertised. I was in com-
petition with the Ladies’ Home Journal circula-
tion for several years, and I found, in many in-
stances, the women would not make the statement
that the Ladies’ Home Journal was a better publi-
cation than some other magazines, but they were
attracted to it because of what was said about it
in the advertisements.

Every publisher should lay out his advertising
campaign as carefully as the Cream of Wheat
Company, the Quaker Oats Company, automobile
concerns, and so forth. He should know what
effect he wants to produce and then go after it
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 815

with scientific copy. Don’t be afraid to take your
own medicine.

How much time have you spent during the past
year in working out scientific collection letters
and improving your letters of solicitation? The
answer will determine whether your letters to
subscribers are good or bad. Ordinarily the aver-
age newspaper loses a lot of money on so-called
bad subscription accounts. The truth is that the
money is lost through carelessness and not dis-
honesty. Poor collection methods are the real
cause of the trouble. The average mail list is a
gold mine, yet the publisher who will collect his
advertising accounts up to less than one-half of
one per cent, will allow fifty per cent of his sub-
scribers to be in arrears. He will bill the list from
time to time, but he won’t follow it up properly
with the right kind of letters.

I have known of mail lists on weekly papers
where the average amount due from each sub-
scriber was in excess of fifty cents, and on a
$4.00 a year daily paper an average of over $2.00
was due from each name. This is criminal negli-
gence and it is always punished by a big money
loss and a loss in subscribers too, because readers
dislike to be allowed to run up a big bill and then
be dunned for it. The safest way is to keep the
list paid up as far as possible. A regular billing
and letter schedule should be made up and followed
316 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

religiously. The man who does not pay up when
he ought to do so must be reminded and you should
have your collector or your letter there periodi-
cally until he does pay. Talk to any man who is
a good collector—ask him what his one big secret
of collections is; and he will say, “ being there.”
Being there periodically, continually, if necessary,
but being there on the job. It is just the same
in collections on the job as by the letter.

Most men do not dodge grocery bills or rent
bills, and why should they be allowed to put the
publisher off for years? The publisher is in error
if he allows it and he also stands a big chance of
losing the subscriber. I believe that lax collection
methods lose more subscribers than the strictly
paid in advance plan. Clean up your lists and
keep them clean. Get the money coming to you
from subscribers and don’t let accounts drag. Be
a good collector as well as a good editor. If you
don’t know the theory of collections, better get
hold of someone who does and let him install a
system for you. It will pay you big dividends.

I have not dealt with individual circulation
methods because they change with every commu-
nity. Whether a certain line of procedure shall be
followed or not depends on local conditions, and
the answer will be in a thorough analysis as to
whether the plan is commercially sound. Any
publisher who is also a good sales-manager will
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS 317

answer each question for himself, and if he is not
a good sales-manager, he will not get very far
along the road of circulation success.

Pay more attention to the circulation of your
paper than you do to any other department until
you have a list big enough and good enough to
yield you a profitable advertising rate. Publish an
interesting enough paper to hold the readers you
get, and don’t let your list run down. The pub-
lisher’s job is no sinecure. No other business in
the world requires such eternal vigilance, such
keen analytical powers, such dogged tenacity, such
good judgment, and such progressive and aggres-
sive methods as the publishing business. If you
are the publisher of a successful paper, you have
reason to be mighty proud of your achievement.

The advertiser used to buy any kind of circula-
tion at any price asked. He seemed to think that
publishers were magicians whe could produce
readers where there were none, and create sales
for him by waving a magic wand. Here is an actual
situation: A daily paper in a town of one hundred
thousand. There are three daily papers with al-
most equal circulation in the town. They con-
vince the local advertiser that one paper with a
circulation of fifty thousand is the blue-stocking
paper, that the second paper, circulating about
fifty thousand, belongs to the working man en-
tirely, and the other paper circulates about fifty
318 THE COMING NEWSPAPER

thousand almost entirely among the great middle
_class. And other papers are now finding it a
pretty hard matter to get the advertiser to see
the fallacy of this. The advertiser has not been
analyzing, but he is beginning to now. The acid
test is being applied to circulation and the bogus
claims are being discounted heavily. There is no
magic in advertising and the publisher who would
build up his business must realize that. A list
that is inflated will be shown up sooner or later
and will crumble like a house of cards. An honest
list of one thousand subscribers will outpull a
padded list of three times that number. There
is enough good circulation to buy and the adver-
tiser is rapidly learning the difference between
good and bad. The honest list has nothing to
fear. The dishonest list ought to go. As long
ago as the days of Adam Smith, it was considered
poor policy to follow out the theory of “ Let the
buyer beware.”

The modern business man knows that the way
to the most lasting success is to render service,
and all our acts, deeds, and dealings must eventu-
ally be measured up against that standard. The
greatest good to ourselves lies along the same road
as the greatest good to others, and if we would
achieve the one we much seek the other. Sir
Galahad solved the problem of all our seeking and
striving, and there is no other way. The pub-
CIRCULATION PROBLEMS ‘319

lisher must render a double service, one to the
reader and one to the advertiser. If he renders
poor service to the reader, the advertiser suffers,
and thus both aims are defeated.

Systematize your business, become a convert to
the new religion of efficiency, look at your busi-
ness as critically as though it belonged to some
other man. Demand of it a fair profit, render
the public a just return for the confidence placed
in your paper, serve the interests of reader and
advertiser as faithfully as you expect your em-
ployees to serve you, render unto each its just
share of that which it pays you for, and success
will follow as the night the day.
APPENDIX

Tue Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play main-
tained by the World was established on July 1,
1913. Its objects, as stated by Ralph Pulitzer in
the order creating it, are:

To promote accuracy and fair play, to correct care-
lessness and to stamp out fakes and fakers.

In establishing the Bureau and sending official
notice of the organization to its correspondents,
inviting their co-operation, the World not only
insured better and more conscientious service in its
own columns, but it spread the gospel of accuracy
and fair play in journalism throughout the news-
paper world. Every notice sent out by the Bureau
to correspondents was prefaced by the following
declaration of policy:

The World aims to be accurate. It aims to be
fair and just to every person who reads it and to
every person whose name it prints.

Accuracy and fair play are inseparable in jour-
nalism. Inaccuracy often means injury to innocent
persons. A newspaper’s influence is measured by
the number of people who read it AND BELIEVE
IN IT.

321
322 APPENDIX

The words “accuracy and fair play” sum up the
law of libel. If what is published is true and fair
the writer need not worry about the libel law, civil
or criminal.

On the reverse side of the notice sent to corre-
spondents, in order that all might be impressed
with the very decided views on accuracy and fair-
ness entertained by Ralph Pulitzer, and by his
father before him, were printed extracts from their
public utterances on the subject.

Isaac Deforest White, head of the Legal De-
partment of the World, is the director of the
Bureau, with Richard Linthicum and James L.
Frazee as associate directors. A part of Mr, Lin-
thicum’s duty is to read the World and other
newspapers critically in order to discover contra-
dictions, errors, and unfairness. Mr. Frazee is on
duty at night and reads in proof all articles de-
signed for publication in the Morning World, with
a view to preventing inaccuracy and unfairness.

All complaints involving the question of accu-
racy or fair play received in any department of
the World are turned over to the Bureau. These
complaints include libel actions, letters from at-
torneys and others, and complaints made in person
at the World office. The Bureau makes careful
inquiry and determines whether or not these com-
plaints are well founded and, if they are, who is
responsible for the matter complained of, Having.

Bone
APPENDIX 323

determined that a complaint is well founded, the
necessary correction is prepared and turned over
for publication to the managing editor of whichever
edition of the World published the particular mat-
ter complained of. .

A card-index record is kept showing who are
responsible for inaccuracies -and unfair publica-
tions, and this record indicates who are habitually
inaccurate or unfair. Deliberate faking, which,
happily, is extremely rare, is invariably punishable
by dismissal. Carelessness or unfairness may be
punished by reprimand, suspension, or dismissal.
Chronic carelessness results in dismissal.

The total number of cases considered by the
Bureau during the first year of its existence was
432. The number of complaints involving accu-
racy or fair play which were sustained was 262,
and 164 corrections were published. There were
41 publications in the interest of fair play where
the World had not been at fault. A majority of
these publications were made at the request of per-
sons who had been accused in the courts and who
later asked that the fact be published that they
had been cleared of the charges made.
BOOKS ON JOURNALISM

THE WRITING OF NEWS
By CHARLES D. ROSS

Assistant Professor of Journalism in the University of Missouri
$1.50 net, by mail $1.62

A practical manual every man who wishes to write for the
papers should have, and that contains much of interest to the
general reader.

The author was trained on a newspaper and is now assist-
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His book is equipped with helpful exercises, shows how to
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‘The chapters include : Newspaper Copy ; The English of the
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MAKING A NEWSPAPER

By JOHN L. GIVEN
Recently with the New York ‘ Evening Sun ”

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Some seventy-five leading newspapers praise this book as
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It should be invaluable to those entering upon newspaper
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Anecdotes and actual experiences add to the interest and
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“An interesting and detailed account of newspaper organization by
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WALTER LIPPMANN’S
THE STAKES OF DIPLOMACY
By the author of “Drift and Mastery,” ete. $1.25 net.

Even a democracy is not democratic in foreign affairs.
When the emotion of patriotism and the notion of na-
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policies and the civilization of patriotism.

KATHARINE ANTHONY'S
FEMINISM IN GERMANY AND
SCANDINAVIA

By the author of “Mothers Who Must Earn.”
$1.25 net.

This is the first book to be published in this country
containing a substantial and concrete statement of what
Feminism means beyond the English Channel.

The contents includes: The Coalescence of the Euro-
pean Feminists—Schools and the Woman-—-Some Reali-
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State Maternity Insurance—Reclaiming the Illegitimate
Child in Norway—The Economic Renaissance of the
German Woman—The Valkyrie Vote—The Philosophy
of Feminism—Bibliography.

 

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THE NEGRO
By W. E. Burcuarr DuBois,
author of Souls of Black Folks,
etc. A history of the black man
in Africa, America or wherever
else his presence has been or is
important.
CO-PARTNERSHIP AND
PROFIT SHARING
By Awneurin WituraMs. _ Ex-
plains the various types of co-
pane or profit-sharing, or
oth, and gives details of the
arrangements now in force in
many of the great industries.
POLITICAL THOUGHT:
From Herbert Spencer
to the Present Day
Ee etee Barker, M.A., Ox-

ord,

UNEMPLOYMENT
By A. C. Picou, M.A., Professor
of Political Economy at Cam-
bridge. The meaning, measure-
ment, distribution, and effects of
unemployment, its relation to
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disputes, and some proposals of
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COMMON-SENSE IN LAW
By Pror. Paut VinoGRADOFF,
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Rules—Legal Rights and Duties
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ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL

ECONOMY
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THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH
By J. A. Hosson, author of
Problems of Pane’ A_ study
of the structure and working of
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PARLIAMENT. Its History,

Constitution, and
Practice
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“Can be praised without reserve.

Cloth bound, good paper, clear type, 256 pages
per volume, bibliographies, indices, also maps
Each complete

or illustrations where needed.
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eee clear."—New York

un.

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“The latest authoritative exposi-
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cisco Argonaut.

LIBERALISM
By Pror. L. T. Hosnousz, au-
thor of Democracy and Reaction.
A masterly philosophical and his-
torical review of the subject.

THE STOCK EXCHANGE
By F. W. Hirst, Editor of the
London Economist. Reveals to
the non-financial mind the facts
about investment, speculation,
and the other terms which the
title suggests.

THE EVOLUTION OF IN-

DUSTRY

By D. H. MacGrecor, Professor
of Political Economy, University
of Leeds. An outline of the re-
cent changes that have given us
the present conditions of the
working classes and the princi-
ples involved.

ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH

LAW

W. M. Getpart, Vinerian
Professor of English Law, Ox-
ford. A simple statement_of the
basic principles of the English
legal system_on which that of
the United States is based.

THE SCHOOL: An Introduc-
tion to the Study of

Education
By J. J. Finptay, Professor of
Education, Manchester. Pre-

sents the history, the psycholog-
ical basis, and the theory of the
school with a rare power of sum-
mary and suggestion.

IRISH NATIONALITY ;
By Mrs. J. R. Green. A bril-
liant account of the genius and
mission of the Irish people. “An
entrancing work, and I would
advise every one with a drop of
Trish bloat in his veins or a
vein of Irish sympathy in. his
heart to read it."—New York
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ESSAYS FOR COLLEGE MEN

Edited by Norman Foerster, of the University of
North Carolina, Freperrck A. MANCHESTER and
Kart Youne, of the University of Wisconsin.

390 pages. 12mo. $1.25.

This collection of fourteen essays is primarily intended to
be used as a text-book in “Freshman English” but will also
be useful wherever need is felt for reading of an intellectual
nature in connection with composition courses. Among the
authors represented are: President Wilson, Newman, Huxley,
Tyndall, Arnold, and William James.

G. R. Lomer, Columbia University: “It will interest you to know
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morrow,

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is good and our men are examining it with interest. I think there is
no question about its being used in some section of our Freshman
Composition.”

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it in my freshman course.”

G. M. Harper, Princeton University: “A beautiful and valuable
book, which I shall take great pleasure in recommending to students.
It was a very happy idea to collect these vitalizing essays, some of
which have had a great influence upon the thought of our time.”

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volume, and an exceedingly useful one in the material which it brings
together. In the endeavor to emphasize the higher purposes and values
‘of cultural training such collections are very useful.

C. M. Brink, Kansas State Agricultural College: ‘The editors have
made a most admirable selection. It would, indeed, be difficult to
choose, within equal space, a similar number of as valuable discussions
on the general subject. In these days of experimentation in educa-
tion and of crude and often arid guesses, it is refreshing and encourag-
ing to have these addresses, so inspiring and helpful, from such sound
thinkers and experienced educators,”

 

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