ter-century, in numbers the press has just about stood still. Twenty-five years ago there were 2200 daily papers in the United States. To-day there are less than a hundred more. Yet the number of cities in the country with a population of 30,000 cities large enough, ostensibly, to support new papers-has virtually doubled in this same period of time. Where every other figure in the newspaper world shows huge gain, the number of papers being published has for twenty-five years remained virtually static. The answer is that smaller and less prosperous papers are continually being squeezed out, either by being forced to the wall, or by mergers.

Mr. Munsey was wont to say that "the same law of economics applies in the newspaper business that operates in all other important businesses to-day; small units in any line are no longer competitive factors." More than likely this is true. At the same time, as far as newspapers are concerned, the tendency toward consolidations has certain definite disadvantages in democratic theory. Every "consolidation" is necessarily a step toward further centralization of control over news and opinion. Surely Surely the greater the number of divergent points of view represented in the press, the more protection there is against propaganda, demagogy, and hysteria.

Consolidation is one consequence of big business methods applied to modern journalism. A second consequence is the growth of "strings." In a survey undertaken for "Editor and Publisher," Mr. A. T. Robb has arrived at figures which are instructive here. An analysis of the

American press as of January 1, 1924, discloses more than 150 papers now owned in "strings." owned in "strings." The longest of these strings is the property of the Scripps-Howard syndicate, which controls and operates twenty-six papers in as many different cities, with an aggregate daily sale of 1,200,000 copies. The biggest string in circulation, not in numbers, is the Hearst syndicate. Thirty-five years ago Mr. Hearst began to collect newspapers with the "San Francisco Examiner" as a nest-egg. In 1894 he invaded New York, bought the old morning "Journal," and renamed it the "American." The early nineteen-hundreds found him acquiring a paper in Chicago. He owns to-day a string of twenty-two newspapers published in fifteen cities with a combined daily circulation of 3,350,000 copies. This is only a little less than ten per cent of the aggregate daily circulation of all the newspapers in the country. The circulation of Mr. Hearst's Sunday press is 4,084,000 copies; one Sunday reader in every six reads Mr. Hearst.

The Hearst string and the ScrippsHoward string are the giants of the family, but owners of smaller strings are scattered widely through the country. There is ex-Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, with a string of four papers in Dayton, Canton, Springfield, and Miami. There is the Lee syndicate of five papers in the Middle West, the Shaffer group of six papers with headquarters in Chicago, the Clover Leaf dailies, the Booth syndicate in Michigan-and so on, up to a total of more than 150 papers. We have reached a point where one week-day paper in every four and one Sunday paper in every

To say that we are on the verge of a "press monopoly" is to overstate the case. But not to recognize the amazing growth of newspaper chains in recent years is to overlook one of the chief characteristics of the press since 1900. Like the merger, chain ownership tends toward centralization of control.

A third development follows from this same set of facts; namely, a sudden great expansion in "syndicates" of every possible and seemingly impossible variety. And by this I mean not only syndicates which own and control strings of newspapers, but syndicates which make it their business to sell "features" to papers which they do not own; such features as interviews with celebrities in every quarter of the globe, cartoons, market news, life stories of great divorcees, Broadway gossip, comic strips glorifying a thousand Mutts and Jeffs. There is an old-time name for all of this material; for years it was known as "boiler-plate."

The name derived from the fact that such material was sent out in the form of metal strips. To-day it is commonly sent out in the form of a paper matrix from which type itself can be produced with a dipperful of molten lead-and a much vaster quantity of it is now manufactured daily. For syndicated material is

and big-scale production quite on the pattern set by Henry Ford. There is scarcely a newspaper in the country that does not make the most of syndicate material. And one result is a certain sameness about the looks and manners of the press regardless of its place of publication. When Queen Marie talks confidentially to the readers of the "Daily Tweedledee” in Boston, she talks equally confidentially, and by way of the same syndicate, to the readers of the "Daily Tweedledum" in San Diego. When Mutt slips on a banana-peel he falls with the same thud on the same morning in Oregon and Maine. Try buying papers in each railway-station, sometime when you are traveling, and see if there are any two that you can tell apart, except for names. And try to discover, in the same field of experiment, what has become of the old-time mellow individuality of the village press. For in the swift developments of this quarter-century it is the village press that has been most changed by modern syndication. So far has the process gone in this case that whole pages, known to the trade as "patent insides,' are frequently furnished to the country editor nowadays by big-city syndicates which bring to these rural papers, in a somewhat grotesque and artificial manner, the sophistication of the towns.

A debate flourishes periodically, whether the enormous development of modern methods of syndication is a good thing—because it furnishes Smalltown with metropolitan features at Smalltown rates, and incidentally unites the country by making it likeminded-or a bad thing, because it

What is not shipped to-day in cargo lots?

If we stop here to sum up, and to pull together the loose threads of different changes, we shall find nothing that is not in keeping with the times.

The pace of modern living changes. In a day when motor-cars are put together on a moving belt, when all New England "listens in" on a concert broadcast from one station, when the same moving picture plays at the same moment in a thousand towns, and collars enough for the whole State of Nevada are made in a single factory in a single town, it would be idle to look about for a press that is diversified, old-style, individualistic. The moral of these changes which we have been discussing is simply that the press is keeping step with its own generation.

Thus the press has become a bigbusiness enterprise. So has the baking of bread, the weaving of cloth, the making of dish-towels, horseshoes, ash-trays, moving-picture thrillers.

Thus again the press, with its enormous circulation, has managed to give its patrons more for their money's worth, particularly in the matter of foreign news. In like manner, as a result of wider markets and mass methods of production, we have seen dollars or cents cut from the cost of pianos, mouse-traps, handkerchiefs, and limousines.

We have seen in the press a tendency toward mergers. This same tendency, as exemplified in modern food trusts, tobacco trusts, and electric power trusts, is a natural consequence of an effort to produce in mass lots, cheaply-a conspicuous economic characteristic of the times.

We have seen in the press a tendency toward chain ownership. Who is unfamiliar, meantime, with the same tendency in other industries? Who does not know, in these days, the Tydol and Veedol signs, the United Cigar Stores, the red front of the A. & P.?

We have seen, finally, a tremendous increase in the amount of syndicated material of which the press makes use-rubber-stamped from one end of the country to the other. But in the meantime we have also seen Spokane, Washington, and Augusta, Maine, insist on having the same brand of rubber heels, breakfast food, codfish, dollar watches, rustless fly-screens.

The good points of all this are plain enough: lower prices, better goods, and more efficient service.

The bad points, as far as the press itself is concerned, are likewise plain enough: canned ideas, lack of diversity and individuality, concentration of power-through mergers, chains, and syndicates-in fewer hands.

On the contents of the newspaper page itself, meantime, these forces exert a tug and pull. Circulations increase; it is more to the interest of the publisher to keep his news unprejudiced, lest, by coloring it with a partizan point of view, he scare off readers. The Associated Press, for instance, is a non-partizan organization with both Republican and Dem

ocratic clients. It must furnish both Republican and Democratic news. There was a howl from the Republican papers, in the last presidential campaign, because the Associated Press was furnishing more Democratic news than Republican news. Mr. Davis was making speeches, Mr. Coolidge was not. Huge circulations Huge circulations and syndicate methods make for nonpartizanship, as far as news itself is concerned. But huge circulations also breed timidity on editorial pages. For the theory is, why tread on anybody's toes?

Conflicting tendencies arising from the same set of forces are at work here. The press is moving toward both nonpartizanship in news and regularity in opinion, toward both efficiency and conformity, toward both accuracy and centralized control. We have yet to see what the result will be. But it is interesting, meantime, to find editors and publishers meeting to debate these issues, meeting to discuss what honesty requires, what decency requires, where impartiality leaves off and partizanship begins. Within three years we have had the adoption of no less than eleven "codes of journalistic ethics, by such organizations as the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Southern Newspaper Publishers' Association. These are the first codes of their kind ever to be written for and by the press.

21

In the lower half of the Atlantic Ocean, midway between the coast of South America and the tip of southern Africa, and about as far as it could be from both, lies the island of Tristan da Cunha. It is a small shelf of rock with a few thousand

souls aboard. The path of no transatlantic steamship service touches it. No cable hooks it to a mainland. News of the outside world arrives casually, and at rare intervals, when some tramp steamer touches at the island. Tristan da Cunha has no press, and needs no press. If the Wall Street market is collapsing, there is no way for any one in Tristan da Cunha to overtake his broker. If a quarrel between two powers is brewing in the East, it is no concern of an island without money, trade, or manpower.

An island community living in isolation from world affairs can afford to do without a press. The rest of the world would be hard hit if the motors stopped to-morrow morning. In the closely interlocked and immensely complicated modern world of finance, politics, and social intercourse, the press furnishes eyes with which we see and ears with which we listen. It is worth while to follow this press with sufficient attention to observe at least the chief outlines of its progress.

1900-McKinley was president, the "New York Times" printed a thin paper of twelve pages, radio despatches were unheard of, Mr. Hearst had not yet bought his first paper in the Middle West, bicycles were in vogue, news by cable came in nuggets, somebody was just organizing the Associated Press.

1926-there have been changes enough for any quarter-century, and among them these: a press more centrally controlled, more informative, more machine-made, more a necessary adjunct of the business of keeping pace with life, and much stronger in its striking-power, both for good and bad.