The future will belong more and more exclusively to organization and machinery; and this obiter dictum may be held to be as true of newspapers, as of anything else. It is necessary in the first place to make a clear distinction between these two terms, as they each describe a method of effort, which runs very easily into the other, without any obvious dividing line. Roughly speaking, the term, organization, is generally applied to a systematic use of human endeavour; while the term, machinery, denotes that part of our activities which we have succeeded in delegating to steel and iron and thereby in saving the wear of flesh and blood. Obviously the two terms to some extent overlap on the same ground, because system requires the use of machinery, and machinery must be employed in systematic fashion.

From the point of view of organization the chief requirement of a newspaper is continuity; and this continuity must be maintained in two ways. A newspaper in order to be successful must maintain the same kind of continuity of opinion that a politician has to establish for himself in order to secure the permanent support of his constituents. Side by side with the other and equally necessary for success is the same continuity of good management and energetic business development, such as is aimed at in the course of any prosperous business. This double life of newspapers thus distinguishes them very markedly from any ordinary enterprise and leads to certain very distinct and not generally observed results.

Should a newspaper be conducted with conspicuous success for a long period by its editor and staff and also enjoy the benefit of wise and far-seeing management, the work of each redoubles the value of the other to an astonishing extent. The result will be the establishment of a property of enduring value, not to be paralleled in any other business, not even by the history of any powerful banking concern. On the other hand a permanent failure in either respect will sooner or later bring about the ruin and decease of the oldest established journals. The process of such a failure will, however, be different from the course of natural decline to be observed in ordinary commercial life. Successful editorial conduct of a newspaper will often prolong its career in spite of mistakes of management, while good business ability will keep alive for some time a journal, whose readers are dropping off day by day. It seems to be a law of newspaper life that mistakes in this business have far-reaching and not easily discoverable consequences; the fatal decision and critical mistake will not receive its inevitable recompense until after a period of delay, which makes the original cause of the disaster only a matter of conjecture. There is nothing more mysterious, even to a highly-skilled and discerning eye, than the decline and fall of many powerful and long-established newspaper properties.

The commodity, which a newspaper has to dispose of, is the most valuable in the world; publicity. This commodity it dispenses freely for no consideration whatever in its news columns. It has the power to set generals, politicians and artists on pinnacles of success and glory by keeping them before the public and under other circumstances it can ruin and drive to despair the courtier, the public servant or even the humblest individual. Any one who has taken a practical part in our mysterious calling will appreciate its terrible power, especially in the latter sense. We have all been witnesses of the despairing appeals “to keep something out of the paper”; as we are equally aware of prominent men, whose careers, sometimes contrary to merit, have been created for them by the newspapers. It is out of the same commodity, supplied under different conditions for purposes of business, that the newspaper acquires the magnificent revenues from which it can defray the enormous expenses required by a modern fully-equipped organization for the collection and presentation of news.

Advertising is the newspaper’s backbone. The world is only beginning to realize how vitally necessary it is to business. Probably from £40,000,000 to £50,000,000 a year is spent on advertising with various journals and periodicals in this country alone. Perhaps as much is spent in Central Europe and at least four times as much in North America. All these vast revenues are a subsidy paid by the public in aid of journalism and for the provision of news. They enable the newspaper proprietor to give to his readers a product, which costs him from four to ten times the amount, which he receives from them in purchase of his papers and in return they give to him and his advertisers part of their daily attention and ultimately they requite him by buying more or less of the articles advertised in the paper. Thus there is an ingenious exchange of services, which makes the management of a newspaper in a commercial sense almost as complicated a process as its editorial conduct.

The process is attended by a subtle danger. With the increasing expenses of modern newspapers under the stress of competition the necessity of swelling the advertising revenue of a paper becomes of paramount importance. So the courting of prominent advertisers is every day more and more the preoccupation of a newspaper manager and he is apt to listen too favourably to any representations made by strong monied interests and himself to exercise a corresponding pressure on the editorial side of the enterprise. Here is the point, where the newspaper, as an essential feature of its career as a business, may be said to have a conscience or should have one. The tendency to a decline and fall into the last stages of commercialism must at all costs be resisted. If not resisted, it may become suicidal and by ultimately weakening and losing the hold which a newspaper has on its readers, it may sacrifice its capacity for usefulness to the public and lose its own source of strength and revenue. Or worse still, the tendency may be followed downhill almost to a criminal extent and lead to organized fraud and systematic blackmail.

Although there are in the United Kingdom considerable differences both as to accepted principles and also practice between one journal and another in this respect, yet we are fortunately, with rare and insignificant exceptions, free from the criminal methods of prosecuting success. The press of other countries in this aspect we need not consider. With us the problem of relative independence with regard to advertisers presents itself within a comparatively small compass. It is a question of how far newspapers and other periodicals allow the use of their news columns to the puff preparatory or supplementary for the benefit of those firms and businesses who contribute freely to the revenues of the advertising columns. This practice is on the whole fairly common. There is in it nothing in any way immoral or disgraceful and it really resolves itself into a question only of dignity and expediency. Perhaps one might be within the mark in attributing such practices to a greater or less extent to the weaker half of the press of the United Kingdom. Those who avowedly adopt these methods place themselves on an inferior plane and to a certain extent lower their reputation and weaken their bargaining power. Still it must be admitted that such surreptitious puffing is often adopted under pressure even by wealthy and powerful journals to an extent, which makes resistance on principle to the same demands exceedingly difficult for their weaker competitors. Among other disadvantages these puffs ultimately tend to lower the value of the columns openly sold to advertisers and thus to impair these as a source of revenue.

As I have said elsewhere,[7] the philosophy of publicity is rather hard to grasp. In some forms it comes perilously near to charlatanry and quackery and yet in the modern world it is not only a valuable aid to business but absolutely indispensable. Although the practice has been known to all ages, it is only the development of the immensely productive power of the factory system, which has caused its enormous extension during the last century. In former times goods were produced with difficulty and found their hungry markets waiting for them. It is entirely different now-a-days. The chief modern problem is to sell goods fast enough to prevent a glut of production. To take a concrete instance from modern America, the output of motor cars as these lines are written is considerably more than one a minute and in order to secure continuous cheapness of production this rate of output must be maintained and probably even increased. All this flood of production has to be marketed without delay and without intermission. The missing of even one month’s sale of such a prodigious output would entail the bankruptcy of half the manufacturers in the kingdom.

It is advertising which supplies the remedy for their ever-present difficulty. It affords the chief practical solution of the paradox of modern industry, which requires that goods shall be manufactured in immense quantities in order to secure cheapness of production and yet will not allow that they should be put on the market in too large quantities at a time for fear of creating a glut and lowering prices. Demand must never be satiated. It must be perpetually stimulated so as to maintain a steady suction at least equivalent to and preferably exceeding, the normal rate of output. The most effective and almost universal method of obtaining this stimulation of demand is by advertising.

Advertising began by aiming at mere publicity. Then it became combative and assertive of individual superiority over rivals. As this grew stale, it assumed blandishing and seductive methods, flattering the customer and appealing to his intelligence, his discrimination and his good taste. The latest tendency especially in the technical journals, where immense sums are spent in this business, is to become soberly educative. The customer is offered gratuitously the benefit of the immense experience acquired by the advertiser from an extended business in meeting the particular needs of the buyer. This is an eminently legitimate and highly successful method. It is perfectly true that, where a speciality is concerned, the seller may have far more detailed experience than the buyer himself. But it hardly meets the more general case, where the nature of the want is trivial and it is only a question of which satisfaction to take out of a choice of several.

One of the difficulties about advertising, of which the newspaper manager has to take account, is the element of misrepresentation, which is apt to creep into it. The stereotyped precaution, which has always been taken to prevent misrepresentation being such as to involve the newspaper proprietor in damages or to embroil him with other customers is to refuse to insert any reflection or disparagement of any recognizable rival goods. The advertisement is therefore driven back on to a rather tame proclamation of general excellence and of the pre-eminence of the article advertised over rivals in general. Of course the utility of any device, so tame as this, is rapidly exhausted, so that advertisers have long learnt to vary the appeal and the claim in every possible way. But although the form changes, the methods are few. The earliest method was the attempt to use literary skill, but as this necessarily appealed only to a class of people very much on their guard against advertising of all kinds, it was soon abandoned. Another method was the surprise. A long story would be printed with a little tag at the end advertising some nostrum or necessary. This was speedily discounted and disused. Then mere blatancy became the general rule. Advertisers appealed only to the eye by wearisome iteration. Curiously enough such a policy, apparently trivial to a primitive degree, has held its own for decades against devices of a much more elaborate kind. But in the newspaper itself severe limitations are imposed on this method both by the paucity of type faces and the mere cost of space. It has come therefore to be almost exclusively the weapon of the very rich, who are able to buy whole pages at a time of the most widely circulated and most expensive journals. Lastly and perhaps the most successfully of all, illustration has come prominently into use. Here again the limitations of the medium impose themselves. It is not every kind of design or sketch, which is effective under the rough conditions imposed by the rapid printing of the daily press. The managers of newspapers themselves being aware of this are not anxious to encourage this form of enterprise and some of them exclude it from their columns. The legitimate field for its full florescence has now become the pages of the popular magazine, which are printed with monthly deliberation on the flat and thus secure a high degree of excellence in technical execution and reproduction. The American magazines are the most suitable home for brilliant expository work of this kind and in many cases the ingenious advertisers have succeeded in making their advertisement pages a serious rival in interest with the pages in the text.

All these efforts, while they are strictly speaking the chief concern of the advertiser, become by proxy the daily problem of the newspaper manager and of his familiar spirits, the advertisement solicitors for the journal or periodical. This is a task very much better understood and executed in America than in Europe and a high degree of expertism in advertising has become a sine qua non of newspaper management everywhere. The work is as often as not now carried on by a highly-trained staff including writers, artists and canvassers, so that the manager himself has nothing more than a general supervision and direction of policy. It is especially his province rightly to appraise the class of readers, whose patronage he has, so to speak, to sell to advertisers, to advise as to the best methods of approaching them and to lay down general rules and a scale of prices regulating the advertising, which his paper is prepared to take. Such a responsibility is a very serious one because the rules and conditions, under which this traffic has to be carried on, cannot be changed very often and once established the rules must be observed with judicious strictness, as any suspicion of partial or favoured treatment would unite his customers fatally against his paper. He must never forget that the bulk of his custom comes to him through a profession of the most suspicious people in the world, the advertising agents, whose pre-occupation it is to secure most-favoured-nation treatment each for his own customers and to prevent any one else stealing a march on them.

Let us examine this problem as it presents itself to the manager of a London daily morning newspaper. The complication of it can be seen by carefully examining the columns of a typical daily like the Morning Post or Daily Telegraph. Advertisements for these papers divide themselves into two classes, displayed and classified. In the first class come all those miscellaneous announcements, whose character we have discussed in general terms above. The advertiser in these cases practically buys so much space, sometimes in column form, sometimes across column rules, in which case he is almost invariably charged a higher rate. In this space he frames his advertisement using the special kind of type laid down by the rules of each paper, which in the United Kingdom vary greatly from the extreme conservatism of the Morning Post to the unlimited license of some of the smaller provincial dailies. It is becoming increasingly the practice to sell space of this kind at a “flat rate,” which is an American term meaning a fixed price per inch with reductions for a quantity, allowing the advertiser to make his advertisements what size he likes and to repeat them at his own convenience, as opposed to the older English custom, where so many specific columns and half-columns were sold at certain regular intervals of recurrence, restrictions which imposed needless trouble on the advertiser and often interfered with the most effective display of his advertisements.

But with regard to classified advertisements, that is, advertisements grouped under regular headings, more old-fashioned usages prevail. Probably no two papers in the country have exactly the same scales for this kind of advertising. The reason is not far to seek. Every paper has some little connection in a special class of advertising arising out of the ineradicable habits of the public. For instance the Morning Post is pre-eminent for domestic servants, the Daily News for pressmen and compositors and I remember one provincial daily, now dead, which even in articulo mortis was the only organ through which the barbers and hairdressers of Lancashire sought for new situations. It followed that the scales charged for this extremely varied volume of custom are roughly governed by the simple rule adopted by railways in fixing their freight rates, of charging whatever the traffic will bear. Each paper will put up the rates on its own specialities and charge less for custom which it is trying to draw from a rival paper.

The expectation of attracting custom from elsewhere in classified advertising is very seldom fulfilled. The habits of the public are extraordinarily stable in this respect. When once a paper is recognized as the special organ for a particular purpose every one has to buy it in this connection and people save themselves the trouble of looking elsewhere. The most outrageous overcharging will very seldom drive this custom away, but it is very unwise for any manager to attempt it, as he may easily injure his general reputation for justice and thereby lose other business. The most important groups of classified advertising are as follows: financial, theatrical, public notices, losts and founds, educational, auctions, property to let or for sale, situations for clerks, situations for servants, births, marriages and deaths. Of course there are a good many general announcements under special headings and in addition there are cross classifications, as when special prices are asked for special positions in the paper, of which the most usually prevailing variations are an extra charge for advertisements next reading-matter and for announcements printed in what has come to be universally known as the “agony column.”

Next to the skilful handling of his volume of advertising, the chief pre-occupation of a newspaper manager is the cultivation and increase of his circulation. Some people would say that it precedes the other in importance, but this is hardly the case. It would be so, if it were the business of no one else but the manager to secure readers, because circulation must antedate advertising or any rate it must appear to do so. The fundamental responsibility for the circulation remains with the editor, who has to produce a paper permanently interesting to his readers, whether these are drawn from a small and select class or from the masses of the general public. The manager’s function with regard to circulation is to improve his machinery of distribution to the limit allowed by the means at his disposal and to secure the utmost publicity for the efforts of his colleague.

This is a very much more difficult task than appears at first sight. One would naturally suppose that to an expert in advertising and publicity, as a newspaper manager has to be, the marketing of his own wares would be an easy task. That it is not so, is due to the fact that the commodity he has to offer for sale differs in kind from any other. The chief form of publicity, whose peculiar virtues he is perpetually extolling, namely advertisement through the press, is almost closed to him. He can use his own columns to puff special features only to a limited extent and probably to very little advantage. He can hardly use rival papers to his own, except on very special occasions, without increasing their revenue and prestige and to some extent confessing his own weakness. To appeal to the readers of papers of a different class is to approach a public, which probably does not want him. Worse still is the habit of using for the purpose of newspaper propaganda other means of publicity, such as the hoarding in the country or the placard in public places. These are inevitably cheapening in their effect on the public mind and it is his daily business to say so to his own clients, who bring their advertising to him.

He is driven in the end to occasional and impromptu methods such as the distribution of interesting copies of his paper, the production of various subsidiary publications, whose circulation may keep his paper before the public or the organization of little tricks and surprises. None of these devices however can ever be expected to advance the interests of his paper very seriously. The real propaganda for a newspaper therefore remains in the hands of the editor and his resources are of a simple nature and must be used continuously and with the greatest possible skill. First and foremost he must make for his paper the reputation of being the most efficient and, more important still, the most alert in his own district. He must miss nothing and score a “beat,” when he can. Secondly he must identify himself and his paper conspicuously with all local efforts, needs and opportunities. He must be prompt to hear and take up grievances, to track down scandals, to open subscription lists for the sake of important public charities of an occasional kind and to bring prominent names conspicuously before the public. Lastly he must watch anxiously for any legitimate object of sensationalism, such as is sometimes offered in a war or, as is at other times the case, may be invented and planned in the office of the newspaper. Such were the New York Herald’s expedition to discover Livingstone, the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to the North Pole, or the rescue of a white girl from Cuba by a New York paper. This class of sensation is only within the reach of a very long purse and moreover is valuable to none but popular journals. The readers of higher class circles are apt to be thoroughly bored with reiterated details on a subject, which soon becomes stale, while yet there is no other method than this by which the newspaper can secure a suitable return for its enterprise and heavy expenditure.

One of the vexed questions for the publisher of periodicals is properly to assess the relative value of a large or small circulation. Some small circulations especially of a technical kind have a far higher value for advertisers than a large one of poorer quality. On the other hand, if the readers are of too high a class, they are not to be hit by the efforts of the advertiser and the revenue therefore remains small. I know of one paper, which is unique in this respect in the world. It is the Zeitschrift des Ingenieuren Vereins, whose editorial product stands on a level of technical excellence unapproached in the engineering world. Yet it has the large circulation for this class of journal of 20,000 or 22,000 a week and a very considerable advertising revenue. The secret of this success lies in the fact that it is a class organ circulating to all the members of the immense association of German engineers, which includes not only all German engineers but innumerable foreigners, who have come to Germany to be educated in Charlottenburg or in their other admirable technical schools.

But with regard to the general and daily press it may be said that both in the United Kingdom and in America newspapers tend to range themselves in grades and in each grade it is the largest circulation, which brings in the greatest advertising revenue and profits. The highest grade has the smaller circulation but a monopoly of certain kinds of advertising, which is the backbone of its security. The lowest grades have immense circulations, high rates for advertising and very large revenues. But because the readers in this grade are mostly people of small means these newspapers are not the best organs for those expensive articles of luxury on the sale of which the largest sums of money are spent. The largest volume of business therefore undoubtedly goes to the middle grades, where considerable circulations prevail among the wealthy middle classes. The most profitable clientÈle for a newspaper is among the vulgar rich, who are easily led in their habits and expenditure by the suggestions of fashion and the interested blandishments of the skilled exploiter.

Of all the functions exercised by the manager of a great newspaper property the most serious and responsible is his collaboration with the editor in weighing the relative advantages to be gained and the cost to be incurred by enterprise of all kinds. Unfortunately for newspapers, while they are driven by a law of their being to assert themselves wherever possible by venturing on new ground this can practically never be done without the outlay of very large sums of money. Here is certainly a case, where two heads are better than one. The editor is generally the executive, as he knows that very little effort is permanently remunerative, which does not improve the quality or extend the influence of the publication. But he is very seldom the best judge of how much can be risked for a certain object and whether the object itself, even when successfully gained, will really be worth the sacrifice. There are certain cases, such as war correspondence, when reckless expenditure, perhaps of two or three years’ income, may be forced on a newspaper by competition. There are others where the risk and expense may be optional, such as the organization of special correspondence abroad, the establishment of new and permanent features of the paper, the starting of a new edition for local distribution, or perhaps of extending the area of circulation of the journal by going earlier to press and catching special trains.

The special train has been a very important feature in the changes, which have come over journalism in this country, both in the provinces and especially in London. Unlike America where spacious habits in geography confine every newspaper to the suburbs of the populous towns, Great Britain can almost be reached in all its corners before breakfast by morning papers printed in central positions. The result is a perpetually recurring struggle for better facilities of distribution involving increased expenses and altered habits. There was a time when provincial newspapers “went to press” early in order to utilize the ordinary mail trains which generally left at or near midnight. London on the other hand, which had no large towns near to it, generally closed for press only at 3 a.m. But the special trains have radically changed these habits. To the best of my knowledge the first paper to run special trains of its own was the Manchester Guardian, whose object was to improve the paper by giving more time before “press”; the special train in this case postponed publication from 12.30 to 1.30 a.m. with very beneficial results.

In London the process of change was reversed. London has the serious disadvantage of being at one end and in one corner of our little island. To reach the great populations of the Midlands, the North and the South West a series of special trains costing enormous sums of money were started about 2.15 or 2.30 with the result that the hour for “going to press” was moved forward from 3 or 3.30 a.m. to 1.30 a.m., seriously cutting down the possibilities of considered literary production. The example of this exacting competition was first set by the Daily Mail at the outbreak of the Boer war and was necessarily followed by every London morning paper. How severely this was felt by the weaker brethren of the press, the following story will illustrate. I was assured by the proprietor of a prosperous newspaper that the increased expenditure on this competition at that time entirely wiped out his current profits for some years and reduced his property to the position of a journal struggling to establish itself. The indirect effect on the editorial staffs of newspapers was also disastrous to some. The result of curtailing the time for journalistic effort placed those papers, whose speciality was superior literary style and well weighed judgments, on much the same footing as the cheaper papers. As a partial relief from the expense of special trains and carriage of newspapers it has become the practice for the progressive popular papers of London to print elsewhere local editions, which have also the advantage of meeting local needs both with regard to news and advertisements in a way that a purely metropolitan issue can never do. In this respect also the initiative was taken by the London Daily Mail, which at the turn of the century established a branch office and printed a northern edition in Manchester, from whence it could reach all the north and the greater part of Scotland by breakfast. This was followed some years later by a special edition in Paris, in which the local edition is printed in French. It has since extended its grasp by starting a Midland edition in Birmingham. The Daily News followed the example of the Mail by establishing a Manchester office but it anticipated the Mail by being the first to go to the Midlands. The London Daily Chronicle has followed the other two to the Midlands and will probably end also by going up north. To the best of my knowledge the first daily paper in England to start a special local edition was the Manchester Guardian, when it produced its Welsh Edition about the years 1894 or 1895. But the practice had long been common among the weekly papers of the country.

Analogous to the enforced expenditure on communication is the provision that has to be made for cabling foreign or special correspondence. In this matter the pressure to follow the example of a richer competitor is not overwhelming, as readers have different tastes and many are almost indifferent to foreign news. Yet every paper feels very severely the indignity of being obliged to admit inferiority in enterprise and of publicly taking a seat in the second row in any respect. Yet the cost of cable messages is sometimes prohibitive and they have to be summarily cut off on occasion. In any system of foreign correspondence by cable, the salary of the correspondent is a mere trifle compared to the expense of telegraphing. Every foreign correspondent is aware that his fate, as far as that particular position is concerned, is determined much less by the quality of his own work than by financial plethora or stringency at home. It has been the fate of many, as it has once been mine, to find themselves quietly snuffed out by the application of this effective extinguisher.

A new terror has been added to journalism in America, though hardly yet to the same extent here by the use of wireless telegraphy. In New York all the leading papers have wireless plants, which they use not only to transmit and receive their own news but to intercept where possible those of others. It is credibly repeated that after the Titanic disaster one of the causes of the appalling confusion of reports and rumours was that every newspaper kept getting fragmentary messages intended for every other and the most absurd and self-contradictory accounts passed current without any attempt to verify them. Clearly in future the manipulation of press messages by wireless telegraphy will have to be very severely curtailed in any future naval war. In fact it seems to me that the only possible road to security will be to forbid it without any exception.

The latest development in enterprise of this kind was recently devised by the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Express in conjunction with the Yorkshire Post and the Manchester Guardian. When Mr. Winston Churchill made his sensational irruption into Ulster at the beginning of 1912 the public wires were entirely taken up with general orders and the lease of a special wire was impossible. The speech was then reported by undersea transmission over the electrophone, the first time that this instrument had ever been used in that way. There were thirty-two transmitters placed round the platform where Mr. Churchill spoke and his voice was heard distinctly in the Liverpool offices and his words were then taken down as he uttered them.

The mention of the telephone reminds me that much that has been said in this chapter and elsewhere with regard to the telegraph applies also especially to the telephone, which in some respects is an equal and even better competitor. Some of the London press agencies use this form of communication for reporting police cases and other immediate items of news to the complete exclusion of the telegraph. At one time I had to examine very carefully the merits of a wireless system of telephoning through the ground for this purpose but could not persuade myself, that it would operate with accuracy and inevitable success. I have heard no more of it.