Nugget and what do you find? A 12- or 16-page 6-column paper, in two sections, with the leading news of the state or county attractively displayed on the front page, with the usual run of local news, social and personal items from the county seat, publicity stuff, editorial, country correspondence, boiler plate and advertising. With this important difference, that scarcely an issue goes on the press without at least one good front-page story of prime interest to farmers, often occupying the right-hand column or under a two-column head in the center; and with the further important difference that the proportion of country correspondence, state college instructional matter, farm news and general “boosting” which agriculture needs, to the amount of town news and of canned stuff of general interest, is far and away greater than that set by the average weekly. Most of the second section is devoted to the outlying districts of the county. News from the smaller towns is given prominent display; and in addition to ample space and head-lines for the more important “stories” from the farming sections, there is a weekly department under a two-column head, “Lewis County Rural Topics,” where a “Commentator” familiar with farm life and farm problems of the county, mirrors that life with a column or more of news and comment on things of local interest, and tops it off with “agricultural-ettes,” spicy farm items from everywhere, and with the weekly “mail-o-grams” of advice from the state college.
This program has made a tremendous hit with the farmers of the county, and the amount of agricultural material the Bee-Nugget uses has been gradually increasing for some months back. An issue last September, for example, carried 110 inches of purely agricultural matter to 764 inches of all other reading matter, while one of last February carried 211 inches of agricultural matter to 432 of all other, an increase in the proportion of agricultural matter to all other matter from about one to seven to about one to two. It will be observed also that in this period the amount of reading matter decreased, and the amount of advertising correspondingly increased, about 250 inches. Both were 16-page papers, and while it is perhaps hardly fair to use the February issue for com parison, since strictly agricultural news occupied nine-tenths of its front page, yet it graphically illustrates the tendency in the Bee-Nugget office.
Mr. Ellington told me'a year or more ago that his policy was beginning to take effect on the minds of his farmer subscribers, with the result that they called it to the attention of neighbors. and subscription getting was easier; also that it was causing more and more favorable comment among the advertising business men of Chehalis, who are among the most intimate in the Northwest with their farmer patrons, being comparable to those of Eugene in this respect. This was about the time that the editor decided, because of wide endorsement of the policy, to increase still further his devotion to agricultural interests. “More and more,” he said to me then, “the metropolitan papers are encroaching on news fields in smaller communities where weekly or small daily papers are now published. Rapid transportation and other modern methods of speeding service have brought country publishers face to face with a situation which they should grasp now, and the results of which they should prepare for before it is too late. Sooner or later this rapid news service on the part of large daily papers will result in their soliciting advertisements from the small town merchants on the strength of the news service furnished in that town. But the country weekly has a field which the metropolitan paper cannot enter, and that is the field of rural development about its place of publication. The country editor can develop this and it is all his own. It gives him excellent opportunity to secure close personal acquaintance which the editor of the metro-
