OCR Text |
Show NEWSPAPER DEATH RATE In one day last week, five newspapers news-papers quit business in the United States, borne by suspension and some by consolidation. At that rate, the public will soon be clown to hard pan in the matter of newspapers The suspensions and consolidations consolida-tions are caused by the relatively high prices of producing papers that are fit to read and doing it without going "broke." The gentle reader, who has always thought that his paper was made by the trainload at some central spot and shipped out in mailsacks to suit, is beginning to understand un-derstand that the production of the readable .newspapers is a specific business, a real business, requiring time, hard work and something more substantial than hot air and sawdust. saw-dust. He is beginning to appreciate them more as they get scarcer and in the coming years he will think still more of them. He will also come mere accurately to understand that they are his friend and business ally, no matter whether he is a farmer farm-er or a railroad president. And the publisher with brains enough to hnoint a gimlet will stick to the policy poli-cy of cutting off the dead-heads and chronic delinquents. He will come to appreciate the work of his own hands a little more. The whole process, as we see it, is one of steady inevitable reduction of the newspaper business all the way from the smallest legitimate weekly to the largest metropolitan daily to the plane of dignity and profitableness profitable-ness that it should occupy. There are good men in the game who are trying to do the impossible, trying to make a newspaper go in a community commu-nity not big enough to support it or not appreciative enough to keep it decently alive. They will gradually drop out where they are and reengage re-engage in some more logical spot and start in to build a newspaper on a sounder basis. The old habit of "running a newspaper" news-paper" for the sheer delight of running run-ning it is as depleted and as thoroughly thor-oughly dicsarded as the idea of original origi-nal total depravity or, rather, we should say. it has gone to join that long-sought mate. |