Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/395

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terest in any other part of the paper, and has no more claim to any space in the editorial columns, than any other one of the public. To give him such space would be unbusinesslike, and the extension of a preference which would be unjust to the rest of the public. Nothing more quickly destroys the character of a journal, begets distrust of it, and so reduces its value, than the well-founded suspicion that its edi- torial columns are the property of advertisers. Even a religious journal will, after a while, be injured by this.

To be just to Mr. Warner, and to inform the reader that in this "commercialization of the press" the second claim of Manton Marble, of The New York World, was not completely overlooked, a comment from "The American Newspaper" should be given in this connection:

It is scarcely necessary to say, except to prevent a possible misap- prehension, that the editor who has no high ideals, no intention of bene- fiting his fellow-men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously as a means of money-making only, sinks to the level of the physician and the lawyer who have no higher conception of their callings than that they offer opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity, and by assisting in evasions of the law.

Before taking up the changes and historical developments of the period, it should be said that The Hartford Courant practiced what Mr. Warner preached in "The American Newspaper " at Saratoga Springs in September, 1881.

INCREASE OF ADVERTISING

The Period of Financial Readjustment was marked by a tremendous increase in the amount of advertising printed in the newspapers. During this period came the development of the ! great department stores in the large cities. Their increase in size '. may be traced almost invariably by the increase in the amount \ of space they used to advertise their wares in the newspapers. Stores which inserted advertisements of a half a column at beginning of the period were using a full page at the close of the century, when individual stores were paying as high as fifty thousand dollars a year to one newspaper in order to market their merchandise to readers. Railroads, instead of inserting a time-table occupying two squares of the old blanket sheet, be- came heavy purchasers of space to advertise the scenic beauty