ress has been made in adapting such devices as electric-telegraphic typewriters and high-speed octuple rotary presses to the fine requirements of printing giant editions between midnight and early morning; but in addition, the whole business of gathering the world's news in a hurry and bringing it within reach of the hungry presses has been put upon a new and modern basis.

It is a coincidence that the beginning of the last quarter-century witnessed also the organization of the Associated Press. There had been press associations in existence before that time: the old Associated Press of Illinois, founded in 1893, the Western Associated Press which first saw the light of day in 1863, and others. But it was in 1900 that what we now know as the Associated Press was first put together, and it has been within the last two decades and a half that modern methods of blanketing the wide world for news have been developed by this organization, by the United Press, and by similar associations which have followed in their trail. It is within this period that the collection and distribution of news have for the first time been organized on a really national scale, and alliances for the first time formed with foreign news-gathering agencies such as Reuter's. The Associated Press, first in the field, now commands more than a hundred thousand miles of leased telegraphic wire, profits from the service of eighty thousand trained reporters, and distributes its news over seven great trunk-lines which are "milked" by no end of local circuits as they span the country.

With such resources to draw on, and with the mechanical equipment

of its plants intensely modernized, the press of 1926 is immensely better equipped than the press of 1900 to print more news and to appeal to wider circulations. It does both.

It is one chief characteristic of the press at the end of a quarter-century that its editions are enormously increased in size and closely packed with much more detailed information. In 1900 a week-day edition of twenty pages was something to justify the use of fireworks. Now twenty pages is a poor day's work in cities of the size of Rochester, Seattle, Buffalo, and Newark. In 1900, fourteen pages was a good run for the "New York Times"; now four times fourteen pages is not unheard of in St. Louis. What this means is that a good deal of thin soup and warmedover fudge in the form of "features" are necessarily poured in to fill empty corners; but what it also means is that there has been a vast increase in the volume and the detail of straight news-reporting. When the last Republican convention met at Cleveland 150 news-circuits handled fifty words a minute. When Washington played Pittsburgh in the first game of the 1925 World Series a circuit of 46,500 miles was hooked into a single telegraphic system never behind the news two seconds. When Bryan and Darrow fought over John T. Scopes at Dayton, Tennessee, that small village was actually the shipping-point for two million words of telegraphic news within ten days-the equivalent of two full volumes of the "Encyclopædia Britannica."

Figures of this sort may mean little, in a day when big figures are overcommon and every print-shop, every restaurant, every mill, is busily pro

claiming that it either produces or consumes more books, more eggs, or more overshoes than ever before in the history of mankind. But the fact is that the range of daily-reported information concerning contemporary events has been increased at least four times for the average man within the short span of twenty-five years, and that when men's minds begin speculating about the daily happenings of the world in which they live, there is more fresh material to play with. The significance of this change is especially obvious in the field of foreign news.

I turn at random to an issue of the "New York Times" in the early months of 1900. Its first page carries the news that the W.C.T.U. intends if it can to put a stop to a charity ball that proposes to serve cocktails. Its first page also reports a "crime story" and a shipwreck, a plea from Mark Hanna for a White House elevator and a Republican dinner addressed by Chauncey M. Depew. There is news here from a dozen cities in East, West, and South. But foreign news? It is well over on an inside page before the first cable speaks with a story of the Boer War, then in progress. There are not three full columns of cable news in the whole issue of twelve pages. What do we see nowadays? News from Locarno, Mukden, Moscow, Danzig, Delhi, Cairo, Kashmir, Angora, and TacnaArica elbowing news from nearer home for first-page head-lines. Of course American interest in foreign affairs has increased substantially in recent years. But the press has more than kept pace with that sharpened interest. It is really only within the last dozen years that the first-hand detailed re

porting of foreign news has been undertaken seriously by cable. Until 1914 a single cable message of a thousand words was an extraordinary thing. To-day cable messages of ten thousand words are by no means record-breaking. The full text of the Dawes report-44,000 words—was handled by the Associated Press in four hours. The full text of the Locarno treaties reached San Francisco. even a little before it arrived in Paris. The speed shown in such a performance is really amazing. It was 3:15 on a Monday afternoon when the first word of the Locarno treaties began ticking across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. It was 3:18 when the first word of the Locarno treaties began ticking, on a relay, across the American continent. It was 3:38 when the first thousand words had passed Kansas City en route for the Pacific coast. Twenty-three minutes from London, at this point. And the entire circuit to perform this feat was made ready in the headquarters of the Associated Press on ten minutes' notice.

Surely when the press is organized for work such as this, when news from the far corners of the earth is sought as methodically as news from just around the corner, when incomplete and tardy information is in so large measure supplanted by news which is both exact and prompt, a new instrument is provided by which men, if they choose, can keep pace with events on the other side of any frontier in existence. We have, in the modern press, a new factor in the field of international relations.

pace of 44,000-word cables, of maintaining huge organizations and publishing editions that have quadrupled in size, is enormous. One thing has made such ventures possible. If we leave the front pages for a moment, and go back into the business office, we shall observe that other changes have been taking place. For if it is characteristic of the years from 1900 to 1925 that the press has enormously increased its range of news and equipped itself with new machinery to collect and print that news, it is also characteristic of these years that the press has enormously increased its earning-power.

We are living in a day of giant circulations. There are actually sold in this country, every week-day in the year, no less than 36,000,000 newspapers. There are in the country, by official count, something like 24,000,000 families. We have accordingly arrived at an era of splendor for the press in which each family in the country buys an average of a paper and a half a day. And this average, it must be remembered, includes outlying rural districts beyond the reach of news-stand circulations. In urban areas the density of circulation is of course much greater. Circulations mount. And with each new horde of readers, advertising gains. The two things play into each other's hands: the more readers the more advertising, the more advertising the more money to spend in pursuit of readers. In 1923, the last year for which figures are available, the press received $222,000,000 in circulation revenue, and more than twice that sum-$580,000,000-in advertising revenue. Advertising pays the bills. The business of news

paper publication, in this first quarter of the twentieth century, has become more than ever a "big business,' with a vast increase in earning-power and the amount of capital which a successful paper needs. For the press, no less than for Henry Ford, this is a day of mass production, huge income, and huge outgo. Ownership, as a rule, has escaped from the hands of the editor and passed into the hands of great newspaper corporations and wealthy business-ownWe may set it down as one characteristic of a quarter-century's change that if the press of 1926 is more enterprising and informative than the press of 1900, it is also less the personal product of an editorowner and more the product of an efficient machine.

ers.

One consequence is an era of "absorptions.

Witness New York, where Mr. Munsey bought paper after paper, only to destroy the identity of each latest acquisition by merging it into a new combination. Witness Chicago, where the "Record" swallowed the "Herald," and then Mr. Hearst ate both. Witness Cleveland, which at the beginning of this quarter-century had three standard morning dailies, and now has only one. Witness Philadelphia, where nothing is left of the "Times," "Press," "Telegraph," "News," "North American," and "Item" except empty names.

What has happened in these cities is only typical of what has happened in the country as a whole. It is one of the striking but little known facts about contemporary journalism that while the size, the income, and the circulation of the press have all increased enormously in the last quar

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 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." 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 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, 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 a natural product of the same factors which have produced mergers and chain ownership; and these factors are the growth of giant circulations, the necessity of drawing crowds, the era of mass production which prompts the purchase of features in wholesale lots, to be assembled later

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