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of presenting the world's news according to its relative importance, and to add feature after feature solely for the purpose of securing additional circulation circulation, mind you, which is sold at a loss. Particularly has it led to playing up those aspects of the news in which the public is supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be profoundly interested.

Sex, crime, and sport are featured with pictures, headlines, special articles, interviews, and other devices, until they overshadow the real news, but sell more papers to Mr. Mencken's two largest groups, Boobs and Yokels. When the legitimate news value ends and the event is spotlighted beyond its importance and desert, it becomes exploitation. And exploitation of either enterprise or individual in a position to cash in on publicity furnishes extraordinary instances of the newspaper's generosity with free advertising.

At the moment I write, the columns of the newspapers are still reverberating with echoes of the great prize fight at Philadelphia, a stupendous spectacle from any angle, but especially illuminating as an example of what can be done by liberal advertising. As far as I know, the promoter and chief beneficiary of the fight did not spend one cent for publicity. He was advertised by his loving friends, the newspapers. Nearly 150,000 people paid $2,000,000 for admission, besides additional sums for railroad fares. Some traveled thousands of miles and endured great discomforts to witness from remote seats a spectacle which lasted about half an hour. What made them do it? Interest in the fight accounts for a certain number of them; the rest were sent there by the irresistible influence of the newspaper drives that went on day after day, from the time the arrangements had been concluded until the moment of the

fight, and most of these newspapers have already started on their campaign to make the next meet, a few months or even a few years hence, an even bigger spectacle, and still more profitable to Mr. Rickard and his principals. Every metropolitan newspaper kept on duty at the training quarters of the two combatants a corps of reporters, feature writers, and camera men, which turned in something like a page a day of stuff, some of it forced to the limit in the endeavor to keep alive the interest. This constant and stimulating advertising transformed into fans thousands who would never have gone on the simple announcement that such a fight was to be held. They were sold the fight, as millions of customers have been sold other commodities, modities, by newspaper advertising.

The winner and the loser received $900,000 between them, and Rickard's share was $500,000. The rest went for expenses, but the expenses did not include advertising. They did include a small slice of profit for the Sesquicentennial, whose promoters must have realized wistfully that even a portion of the free advertising poured forth for Tex Rickard would have made their fair a success. In a rather complacent interview with Mr. Rickard after the show, he announced that he had realized the ambition of a lifetime in assembling a greater paid crowd in one spot than had ever been assembled before, and gave some outline of his plans for the next one, but he uttered no expression of gratitude to the newspapers, nor even an acknowledgment that without them he could not have achieved his ambition.

Let us try to arrive at some conception of what such publicity means in terms of money as advertising men estimate space. There are 2008 daily morning and evening newspapers published in this country, and 548 of

them issue Sunday editions. Say the average space given by each to advertising the Tunney-Dempsey fight was only three pages. (And that is conservative to a degree. The New York Times, which does not often overstep the bounds, ran eleven pages.) Three pages in daily and Sunday newspapers alone would cost at regular rates $1,075,200. This figure takes no account of the weekly newspapers, or of the magazines, all of which did their bit. Two million dollars would not have bought that much and that kind of advertising. Promoting prize fights is Tex Rickard's business. There is no question of public interest involved. It is a private commercial enterprise. It is profitable largely because its most necessary ingredient, advertising, is furnished free. Many manufacturers would like to engage in business on those terms. But no newspaper is aware of its contribution. At least none has said so, though Heywood Broun admits that the fight was overwritten, that too much space was given to the preliminary write-ups, and that in this instance the public, for whose benefit it was all done, got too much of it. The newspapers are debarred from admitting, much less claiming credit for, their yeoman service because of that other ethical pose of theirs toward free advertising. They must observe the letter of their ethics, even though the exigencies of circulation compel them to violate the spirit.

The Philadelphia fight is one example of an organized commercial industry receiving an inexplicable boost from the newspapers, but there are also many instances in which profitable publicity created around a personality has been capitalized after the fact. A gallant young German-American swims the English Channel. Here is a good news story if there ever was one,

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and so each paper in its desire to turn to itself the public interest adds to that public interest and makes Miss Ederle so valuable a property that she must be surrounded and guarded by an attorney, press agent, or what you will, to protect her interests and see that the valuable asset wished upon her by the newspapers is turned into the most profitable channels. And whatever Miss Ederle does with her asset of publicity, whether she grants the use of her name to swimming suits, bathing caps, sport clothes, or beverages; whether she goes into vaudeville or the movies, writes signed articles for the newspapers or the story of her life for the confession magazines, be sure it is not her ability as a long-distance swimmer that these people are buying, but the golden publicity heaped upon her by the newspapers. If poor Floyd Collins, who died in a hole in Kentucky, had been so fortunate as to come out alive, he too would have needed press agent and attorney, even more than a doctor, because he would have found that Kentucky cave a gold mine of nationwide publicity, which could and would be exchanged for large checks in payment for services for which he had no other fitness than that his name was known to millions. Rudolph Valentino was fortunate even in death. His estate benefited by the publicity the newspapers gave his funeral. Every theatre in the country immediately put on a film in which the great sheik was a hero.

The visit to this country of Marie, Queen of Rumania, is the latest topic concerning which the newspapers spare us nothing. Again the newspapers are asking, 'Why all this pother?' The New York World inquires:

Now that Queen Marie is safely aboard the Leviathan, and now that she is duly reconciled with her son; now that we know

exactly how her hair is cut, how long her skirts are, how many trunks she has, and what she will drink, would it be fair to ask someone, the Queen herself, her official spokesman, or anybody else's official spokesman, what the purpose of this visit is?

But on the front page of the World, and most other newspapers, is a detailed account of Marie's first day on shipboard, including the negligee she wore on going to her bath. When she lands, what price Queen Marie as an endorser of lipsticks, or a godmother to boudoir caps? The World editorial reveals a curiously detached attitude toward its own news activities, as if the diligent recording of unimportant details were a natural process which it can only wonder at but cannot control.

The other day a remarkable interview appeared on the front page of every newspaper served by the Associated Press. Its significance did not lie in the fact that in distributing it the Associated Press broke one of its own unwritten laws, not to send out interviews as news; nor in the fact that the little corps of Washington correspondents was stirred to its depths and greatly incensed that the President should give such an interview to a rank outsider, and an advertising man at that, instead of to a regular newspaper man with a union card and everything. No, the remarkable thing about it was that Bruce Barton took one of the sacred cows of journalism gently but firmly by the halter and led it out from the consecrated cowshed and turned it loose to graze among other contented cows in the pasture.

No cherished belief of journalism has been more sedulously cultivated than that people like to read about politics. All over our land newspapers have been christened "The Democrat' or 'The Republican,' in the belief that

their mission was to discuss politics, and they have continued to discuss politics until the cows came home. But Bruce Barton told the President that the people were not nearly so much interested in politics as the folks down at Washington thought, and that he would like to ask some of the questions the average American would ask if he were sitting there on the porch steps with such an opportunity to talk to the President. No newspaper man, and certainly no politician, would have dreamed of asking the President such questions. And it appears that Bruce Barton was right, and the politicians and political reporters were wrong. The public were more deeply moved to learn how the President did his shopping, or that when he was up home in the country he liked to putter around and fix the lock on the woodshed door, exactly as you or I, than to learn his views on Farm Relief or the World Court. In short, they were more interested in the President as a human being than as a politician or a statesman.

III

There is no implication in all this that newspapers should be more complaisant to bona fide commercial advertisers. On the contrary. A newspaper's value as an advertising medium is directly in proportion to the conscientiousness with which it discriminates between news and advertising. Its righteousness at a mere casual mention of an advertised article is contrasted with its liberality toward other classes of business enterprises which are just as commercial as soaps and cigarettes, though going under the name of sports or amusements. The names of many articles created by advertising have become household words. They have passed into the language. They appear familiarly in

conversation. When they appear naturally in the news they are a part of the news. To omit them is a vain gesture. But the overplaying of certain phases of the news to the point of public surfeit, which results in publicity around certain people that can be and is a source of large profit, gives a suggestion of hypocrisy to the meticulous elision of a name which is already familiar to everyone because it has been made so in newspaper space paid for with cash.

But, at the best, that accidental publicity is at least the newspaper's own work. It has not been promoted by the beneficiaries. It is to them a gift of the gods. But there is another far too large volume of free publicity not so untainted. Its presence in newspaper columns snatches the last vestige of sincerity from an otherwise admirable newspaper ethic. This is the releases run at the request of business houses, corporations, public utilities, benevolent societies, theatrical managers, and many publicity-seeking individuals. The motive here is different. There is no circulation-building power in this stuff. It is the result of various forms of pressure brought to bear on the newspapers, ranging from the obvious tricks of the press agent to the more dignified and skillful technique of the public relations counsel.

The growth of this business is enlightening. In the early days of paid advertising it was customary for the advertiser to accompany his order for space with a few reprint stories about his product, which the newspaper was expected to run free as pure reading matter in return for the advertising patronage; and in most cases the newspaper did so. In those days advertising was largely patent medicines; the reprint told of miraculous cures, and some of the smaller newspapers carried columns of this stuff. Its value lay in

the supposition that it was published spontaneously by the newspaper, but even in those days few people were so credulous as not to recognize these paragraphs for what they were. Most newspapers sandwiched them between news paragraphs, and readers soon learned to skip automatically.

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A growing sense of fair play to the reader, and also a greater appreciation of the value of that commodity which a newspaper has to sell, — namely, advertising space, led later to these reading notices being marked with an asterisk or the abbreviation ‘adv.,' or to their being set in slightly different type. As paid advertising grew in volume, producing greater demands for free reading matter, the better newspapers became less and less compliant, and gradually these crude early efforts disappeared from the columns of any but the smallest and weakest newspapers. Tightening the lines provoked the seeker of free advertising to greater ingenuity. As the newspapers became more rigid in their limitations, a whole race of publicity men sprang up, whose ingenuity has up till now stripped off the editorial camouflage.

Gradually departments were added to the regular news layouts - books, amusements, sports, and later, more specifically, automobiles and radios. These pages are glorified advertisements, promoting the industry as a whole, and specifically boosting individual products inside these lines, discriminating against some classes of business in favor of others no more worthy. The cleavage in the newspaper mind is that the one contains nothing to interest the public and would therefore amount to free advertising, while discussion or promotion of the other makes circulation. If it also yields free advertising, that is unfortunate. These departments became the dumping ground of all the reprint publicity

stuff in their respective categories, until the pressure became too great. Now such departments are conducted by a skilled advertising man disguised as a department editor.

The great industrial corporations and the public utilities, because of their size and their activities, were constantly getting into the news columns, and much that was written about them by reporters working from the outside was untrue, and much that was true was unpalatable. So it became the custom for some officer to give out to the press a carefully prepared statement, which at least presented the corporation's side of the matter. Sometimes these things were used as written; sometimes they were edited; and sometimes they were thrown into the wastebasket. Being prepared by amateurs, as far as any sense of news value was concerned, the only inducement the newspaper had to publish them was that they contained some real news which the rewrite man could handle better, or the obligation of the newspaper to that corporation was so great that it felt compelled to use the material.

Out of this situation - that is, the need of the corporations for an efficient spokesman, and the complacence of the newspapers in regard to matter which was really more or less advertising has grown a new profession, that of the public relations counsel, generally spoken of as the publicity man. The publicity man is the old press agent with a high hat. The press agent grew out of the old advance agent of the circus or traveling theatrical company. It was his business to get free notices about his play or his star, and the childishly simple devices used in those days, such as the escape of a wild animal or the stealing of an actress's jewels, have become clichés. It was his job to find a story good enough to print which in some way

brought in the show or actors that it was his business to exploit. Most newspapers ran a theatrical or dramatic column in which such stuff could be run and was run until the supply greatly exceeded the space of many columns, but it was the ambition of the press agent to get his story on the front page, and often he did so; and some were clever enough to make their stories real news. Many of the press agents were trained newspaper men with a sense of news value who knew how to write a story. They had the entry of the newspaper offices. They frequently sold their stories at space rates and collected at both ends. Not only actors, but steamships, hotels, summer resorts, public men, and philanthropic causes employed press agents, and still do; some of them are good and some are not, but they all flourish on the principle of getting something for nothing out of the

newspapers.

But the public relations counsel operates on a much higher plane. His primary and original purpose was to edit the pronunciamentos which the corporation issued to the newspapers of the country in such a way that they would be palatable to the news editor. But he goes much further than that. As Ivy Lee put it, it is his business to advise his clients to such courses of action as will produce live news, and then of course see to it that no newspaper misses the news.

The technique of this kind of work was greatly improved by the war. It became a public duty to spread propaganda, and an immense amount of talent was available for the purpose. This experience and this talent have since found a profitable field in working for corporations instead of nations, with many new and tried devices at their disposal. Every drive that has run its course in the few years since

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