The Neighborhood

Circulation is a commodity which must be bought with the same common sense used in selecting potatoes, cloth and real estate. It can be measured and weighed—it is merchandise with a provable value. It varies just as much as the grocer's green stuff, the tailor's fabrics and the lots of the real estate man.

Your cook refuses to accept green and rotten tomatoes at the price of perfect ones. She does not calculate the number of vegetables that are delivered to her, but those that she can use. When your wife selects a piece of cloth she first makes sure that it will serve the purpose she has in view. When you buy a piece of property you consider the neighborhood as well as the ground. Just so when you buy advertising you must find out how much of the circulation you can use. You must judge the neighborhoods where your copy will be read, with the same thoughtfulness that you devoted to selecting the spot where your goods are sold.

A dealer in precious stones would be foolish to open up in a tenement district, and equally short-sighted, to tell about his jewelry in a newspaper largely distributed there. Out of ten thousand men and women who might see what he had to say not ten of them could afford to buy his goods. These ten thousand readers would be mass without muscle. He could make them willing to do business with him, but their incomes wouldn't let them become customers.

One of the greatest mistakes in publicity is to drop your lines where the fish can't take your bait.

Circulation is, as you see, a very interesting subject, but very few people know anything about it. It would surprise you to know that this ignorance often extends to the business offices of newspapers. I have known publishers to continually mistake the class of their readers and have met hundreds of them who had the most fantastic ideas upon the figures of their circulation.

While I would not be so harsh as to accuse them of anything more than being mistaken, none the less their tendency to infect others with this misinformation renders it extremely advisable for you to become a member of the Missouri society—and “be shown.”

Don't rely solely on circulation statements. You don't understand the tricks in their making. Make the newspaper which carries your advertisement show you the list of its advertisers. A newspaper which prints the most advertising, month after month, year after year, is always the best medium. This is equally true in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kenosha and Walla Walla.