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Show jTHE RURAL I PRESS. There are some 15,500 newspapers and periodicals published in this country. The greatest proportion of them are small-town weeklies, dailies and semi-weeklies, and magazines whose principal appeal is to the rural dweller. 1 The importance, the influence, and the worth of these publ'cations can hardly be exaggerated. They are, as the San Francisco Argonaut has written, writ-ten, "the chief influence in the thoughts and habits of our rural pop-' ulation of fifty-four million." And tlie character of their comment, both in news and ed'torial departments, well repays those who peruse them. 1 As a result, the recent contest held by the magazine "Country Home" to pick the best country newspaper cor- j 1 respondent in the United States, was J of much more importance and inter-1 est than contests usually are. The winner, a woman, lives in a Missouri town which has a population of 27, and is fifteen miles from the nearest railroad. For forty-four years she has been local correspondent for a rural paper in her county. Urban editors, on reading excerpts from her correspondence, have been amazed by its quality. It does not deal with crimes and misdemeanors. Instead, it tells of the crops, of the trials, tribulations and achievements of farm people who rarely make the metropolitan headlines, but who, happily, hap-pily, are more numerous and more vital to the nation than our gangsters, gang-sters, our political and business renegades, rene-gades, and our ex-show-girl divorcees. Most interesting of all, this woman's wo-man's correspondence, fine as it is, is not greatly different from that of other rural correspondents. Winners of lesser prizes in the contest show the same qualities the same command com-mand of clear and vivid English. The country newspaper, little known as it I is to the city dweller, is one of the finest, most permanent, and most deservedly de-servedly successful influences in our American life. Last, but not least, it is the outstanding guardian of the nation in upholding our constitution and American ideals. |