- mitting fifty-year franchises. The city council of Cincinnati
then passed one fifty-year franchise, after which the legislature repealed the bill permitting fifty-year franchises for anybody else!
In an article in the "Atlantic Monthly" for March, 1910, Prof. Ross explained just how tight the hold of the advertiser upon the newspaper had then become:
Thirty years ago, advertising yielded less than half of the earnings
of the daily newspapers. Today it yields at least two-thirds. In the
larger dailies the receipts from advertisers are several times the
receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting ninety percent
of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and
sixteen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one cent,
the time comes when the advertisers support the newspaper.
And in "Pearson's," Charles Edward Russell gave the
figures for the magazines. He shows that at the prices then
prevailing (1914), a magazine publishing four hundred
thousand copies a month would support a net loss of over
sixteen hundred dollars for manufacturing costs alone, not
including the cost of illustrations, articles, salaries, rent, etc.
All this, plus any profit from the enterprise, must come from
the advertising. So largely did magazines depend upon the
advertising that some of them were practically given away in
order to get circulation. One large magazine was sold wholesale
at an average price of three cents, another magazine was
paying out a total of five dollars for every one dollar it took
in through subscriptions.
And what if the advertising did not come? Why then, of course, the magazine or newspaper went out of business. One case of this sort I happened to see from the inside, as the experience befell one of my intimate friends—Gaylord Wilshire, the first of America's heroic band of "millionaire Socialists." Wilshire came from the West with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and established a Socialist magazine in New York. He had got the figures from experts; he must have four hundred thousand circulation, and then he would be safe. So he set out to get this circulation. He had a subscription contest, with a trip around the world for a prize. He had another with a grand piano for a prize. He gave away small fortunes; also he published the truth about American public affairs, and he published the most penetrating editorial comment then to be read in America. So he got his four hundred
