same time the principal disseminator of public opinion.
Contemporaneous with the first general use of the telegraph came great editors and great newspapers. Most conspicuous of all were Horace Greeley and his New York Tribune. It was said of Greeley that in the fifteen years preceding the Civil War he did the political thinking for the North. His readers would refer quite as often to what Greeley said as to what the Tribune said. Greeley and the Tribune were synonyms. Greeley died fifty years ago.
"Personal" Editors Gone
At least ten editors with intellectual equipment almost equal to Greeley's established papers which became great. The youngest of them, Henry Watterson, founder and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, died last December. Watterson did the thinking for the South, beginning with the reconstruction period following the Civil War. With him the breed of editors who controlled great newspapers—the personal force that moulded public opinion—died out.
About thirty years ago three entirely unrelated things combined to develop the modern daily. The first was the expiration of the patent on wood-pulp paper. The cost of newsprint, which is a tremendously large item in the expense of producing a daily paper, was reduced about 75 per cent. The second was the invention of the linotype, which reduced the still large expense of composition about 80 per cent. The third was the development of the department store which required large advertising space. The quantity of reading matter was increased in proportion to the volume of advertising. Publishers felt the need of giving one column of reading matter for every column of paid matter. Thus the four-page daily of the middle 80's was enlarged to the normal 20 and 24-page paper of today, and with it the Sunday paper of 75 to 150 pages.
The city newspaper plant today is a great factory. What does it produce? H. G. Wells gives a witty answer in his wonderfully fascinating dream-book, "The Salvaging of Civilization." He speaks of the British newspaper as pages of advertising with news and opinion printed on the back. May not this definition be applied justly to the American daily? Even so, does it follow that a newspaper be cause it has a gross yearly income of a million dollars from advertisements, or more than ten millions a year which comes, for instance, to the New York Times, is any the less an organ of sound opinion? True, the great newspaper to day lacks a Greeley or a Watterson to dictate its policies with respect to all things that concern the public. But this lack does not imply that the profitable newspaper is not in sympathy with the needs and the hopes and the aspirations of the plain people. Salaried editors-in chief are as honest and conscientious and as well informed as the great editors of the past generation, but they have not the old autocratic power. If in espousing a cause which would inflict deep injury to the business of the paper, they would be checked, and even where the editor-in chief is also the owner, he would be an extraordinary man if he wrecked his property for an ideal.
Watterson's Costly Slogan
But Henry Watterson made such a sacrifice. Within one month after Germany invaded Belgium and when our country was neutral, he sounded a slogan and kept it at the head of the editorial page until it became the slogan of the American people. This was the slogan: "To Hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs." He all but bankrupted the Louisville Courier-Journal, but he refused to remove the slogan which he had nailed to the paper's masthead.
We need not leave home to note sacrifices by newspapers in the public interest. The fight made by the Oregonian in 1896
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