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.

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

the war, to raise money for various philanthropies, to build cathedrals, to endow colleges, to furnish funds to Y. M. and Y. W. C. A.'s, or the Salvation Army, or the Red Cross, has been planned and engineered by a publicity expert. Every line that has appeared in print, except a comparatively small amount of paid advertising, has appeared because of the newspaper's dilemma between its duty not to run advertising as news at the urgent appeal of a publicity expert and its uncertainty as to how much of this matter is real news or for the good of the public. At any rate it is safe to say that to all of these great funds that have been raised for various good purposes in the last few years the newspaper has been the largest actual contributor. Its name does not appear in the list of donors, but anyone who is used to buying newspaper space and paying for it can easily figure out the millions that have been donated to each one of these funds by the press of the United States.

IV

It would seem, then, that newspapers know nothing about advertising, that they are professionally oblivious of it. They throw free advertising about like drunken sailors. They allow columns to be 'wangled' through the wiles of the publicity man. They keep the professional advertising department walled up by itself, hedged in by an alleged code of newspaper ethics. When a single product that belongs in the advertising manager's domain leaks through into the news they eliminate it with gusto. When stories of advertising activities get into the news they handle them with a curious unfamiliarity. Apparently they know no more about the tremendous force they produce than the

man who wired your house knows about electricity. If at an advertising convention something kind is said about newspaper advertising they give it space, but an advertising agent is called an 'advertiser,' and a telephone booth which transmits 'want ads' to newspapers is styled an 'advertising agency,' and all advertising is lumped together, without discrimination between the fake advertising of a baldhead cure and the constructive institutional advertising of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Apparently either kind is equally anathema. The advertising man wonders if other departments of human endeavor are as sketchily handled as his own appears to be, and it seems that they sometimes are.

I once wrote about this anomaly to the business manager of perhaps the greatest journal in the country — not because his paper was the most guilty, but because it was the most eminent. He pointed out that Henry W. Taft had made a similar charge about the handling of legal matters, but that it was impracticable for a newspaper to maintain a staff of experts. It must work with reporters and 'gradually build up the level of the news staffs to a point where anyone is a good general-news man, able to cover intelligently any story requiring ordinary information educated persons should possess; and where every reporter or desk man has in addition some special field of knowledge in which he is qualified and up to date. Then a newspaper would arrive at its desired goal, and its news columns would be read with interest by all persons and with respect by the expert.'

And yet an editor could, if he would, find under his own roof pretty fair knowledge of advertising. One New York newspaper maintains a staff of two hundred men to solicit advertising,

but only about half of them are engaged in selling space. The remainder are busy studying advertising, digging up the facts upon which the solicitors depend for their selling story. But they never uncover the fact that the newspaper is constantly making various individuals rich with unearned publicity. It is a pity the city editor does not send one of his bright young men downstairs to interview the advertising manager. Instead the editor despises the business office and resents any attempt to bring pressure to bear on his news columns. The business manager might with greater justice take umbrage at the free gift of the very commodity he is employed to sell.

The object in playing up certain phases of the news is to secure more readers readers making circulation, and circulation increasing advertising profits. When a piece of news breaks that the editor knows is good for this sort of treatment, he takes advantage of all his resources to make his presentation outshine the others and stimulate more sales. When the facts give out, as they often do, then recourse is had to more remote details, and each line of investigation is pushed to its ultimate paragraph.

Since this is done to attract more readers, the advertiser asks what sort of readers. People who read newspapers as 'escape' literature are worth less to him than the legitimate natural circulation. The motive that makes a man buy and read a particular paper is important to him, and since he supplies the profits that make the newspaper possible his view should be considered.

The best newspapers for the advertiser's purpose are those which best perform the function of a newspaper. Circulation secured by giving premiums is less desirable than straight circulation—that is, readers who buy

the publication for its own sake. A premium is a gift to induce a man to subscribe. Many of the features used by newspapers to extend their circulation are nothing more or less than premiums. They are inducements outside the legitimate field of presenting the news. Comic strips, 'syndicate,' heart-to-heart talks, guessing contests, crossword puzzles, symposiums, articles alleged to have been written by channel swimmers, baseball players, prize fighters, mayors, and other stars of the day's sensational news, are all devices to induce the reader to read that particular paper, and do not strengthen the hold of the paper itself in its real character. A book given to secure a subscription is a premium. Certainly a serial story published in the columns of a newspaper differs only in degree, not in kind. In this category belong all stories of current happenings extended beyond their worth. They are premiums offered that portion of the public which cannot be induced to read the news.

This policy carried to its logical conclusion produces the tabloid. This peculiar apotheosis of the worst in modern journalism not only plays up the sensational news to the last shriek of 70-point Gothic headlines, but omits other kinds of news altogether. It is no more a newspaper than Spicy Stories is a newspaper. It adds a new tinge to the expressive word 'yellow.' And the tabloid, like the chart of a drunkard's stomach, serves the useful purpose of the horrible example, showing the legitimate newspaper where overplaying some phases of the news at the expense of others will lead it.

But neither æsthetics nor morals, good taste nor decency, enters into this discussion. The question is one of expediency. The best newspaper is the best advertising medium. If circulation is extended beyond legitimate