Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/155

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good health of the public are commercialized and how far they are free from those outside influences that tend to limit the press

in its discussion of them . The newspaper is a large factor in the industrialworld . It faces the question of union or non -union labor, - many newspapers to -day bear the union label, of strikes, of hours of work , of night work , of the employment of women and children, and of

the introduction of machinery. In its advocacy of the protection ofworkmen from dangerous machinery it has sometimes incurred the bitter enmity of mill owners and manufacturers ,- Alaric Watts, in the Leeds Intelligencer, was one of the first to urge such protection and the immediate result was that " he received as many letters discontinuing subscription to it as filled a breakfast

tray,” though he subsequently won back his subscribers, states his biographer.32 In strikes the weekly press seems often more dependent on industrial conditions than does the daily , but it is

usually able to rise above defeat and by its resourcefulness adapt itself to adverse conditions.33 In Australia and New Zealand a minimum wage for journalists

has been established through statutes representing an agreement made in September , 1913 , between the Australian Journalists' Association and the Proprietors of the Metropolitan Daily News

papers and Weekly Newspapers in regard to the classification of 33 A . A . Watts, Alaric Watts, II, 159 - 160. 33 The disagreements between publishers and compositors in October , 1919 , led to the issuing of various weeklies by entirely different methods.

The successful experiment of the Literary Digest in typewriting and photo

graphing its regular edition and other experiments by other weeklies led some to anticipate that “ the whole future of magazine publication may be

revolutionized by the elimination of what has hitherto been its costliest operation - the type-setting.” This resourcefulness was not new and it had led the Publishers'Weekly to remark : “ Journalists are said to be much sought after by the British army

authorities because they make good officers, by reason of the initiative and resource that they have to show constantly in their civil occupation . One

London newspaper has forty -eight members of its literary staff holding commissions. ” — August 4, 1917, p . 410 .

A serious strike among the printers in Paris in November, 1919, resulted

in fifty -three papers collaborating to bring out temporarily a joint paper called La Presse de Paris.

The Manchester, England, Evening Chronicle, issued a typewritten , one

page edition, 8 X 13, during the printers' strike in Manchester, September ,