The future will belong more and more exclusively to organization and machinery; and this obiter dictum may be held to be as true of newspapers, as of anything else. It is necessary in the first place to make a clear distinction between these two terms, as they each describe a method of effort, which runs very easily into the other, without any obvious dividing line. Roughly speaking, the term, organization, is generally applied to a systematic use of human endeavour; while the term, machinery, denotes that part of our activities which we have succeeded in delegating to steel and iron and thereby in saving the wear of flesh and blood. Obviously the two terms to some extent overlap on the same ground, because system requires the use of machinery, and machinery must be employed in systematic fashion.
From the point of view of organization the chief requirement of a newspaper is continuity; and this continuity must be maintained in two ways. A newspaper in order to be successful must maintain the same kind of continuity of opinion that a politician has to establish for himself in order to secure the permanent support of his constituents. Side by side with the other and equally necessary for success is the same continuity of good management and energetic business development, such as is aimed at in the course of any prosperous business. This double life of newspapers thus distinguishes them very markedly from any ordinary enterprise and leads to certain very distinct and not generally observed results.
Should a newspaper be conducted with conspicuous success for a long period by its editor and staff and also enjoy the benefit of wise and far-seeing management, the work of each redoubles the value of the other to an astonishing extent. The result will be the establishment of a property of enduring value, not to be paralleled in any other business, not even by the history of any powerful banking concern. On the other hand a permanent failure in either respect will sooner or later bring about the ruin and decease of the oldest established journals. The process of such a failure will, however, be different from the course of natural decline to be observed in ordinary commercial life. Successful editorial conduct of a newspaper will often prolong its career in spite of mistakes of management, while good business ability will keep alive for some time a journal, whose readers are dropping off day by day. It seems to be a law of newspaper life that mistakes in this business have far-reaching and not easily discoverable consequences; the fatal decision and critical mistake will not receive its inevitable recompense until after a period of delay, which makes the original cause of the disaster only a matter of conjecture. There is nothing more mysterious, even to a highly-skilled and discerning eye, than the decline and fall of many powerful and long-established newspaper properties.
The commodity, which a newspaper has to dispose of, is the most valuable in the world; publicity. This commodity it dispenses freely for no consideration whatever in its news columns. It has the power to set generals, politicians and artists on pinnacles of success and glory by keeping them before the public and under other circumstances it can ruin and drive to despair the courtier, the public servant or even the humblest individual. Any one who has taken a practical part in our mysterious calling will appreciate its terrible power, especially in the latter sense. We have all been witnesses of the despairing appeals “to keep something out of the paper”; as we are equally aware of prominent men, whose careers, sometimes contrary to merit, have been created for them by the newspapers. It is out of the same commodity, supplied under different conditions for purposes of business, that the newspaper acquires the magnificent revenues from which it can defray the enormous expenses required by a modern fully-equipped organization for the collection and presentation of news.
Advertising is the newspaper’s backbone. The world is only beginning to realize how vitally necessary it is to business. Probably from £40,000,000 to £50,000,000 a year is spent on advertising with various journals and periodicals in this country alone. Perhaps as much is spent in Central Europe and at least four times as much in North America. All these vast revenues are a subsidy paid by the public in aid of journalism and for the provision of news. They enable the newspaper proprietor to give to his readers a product, which costs him from four to ten times the amount, which he receives from them in purchase of his papers and in return they give to him and his advertisers part of their daily attention and ultimately they requite him by buying more or less of the articles advertised in the paper. Thus there is an ingenious exchange of services, which makes the management of a newspaper in a commercial sense almost as complicated a process as its editorial conduct.
The process is attended by a subtle danger. With the increasing expenses of modern newspapers under the stress of competition the necessity of swelling the advertising revenue of a paper becomes of paramount importance. So the courting of prominent advertisers is every day more and more the preoccupation of a newspaper manager and he is apt to listen too favourably to any representations made by strong monied interests and himself to exercise a corresponding pressure on the editorial side of the enterprise. Here is the point, where the newspaper, as an essential feature of its career as a business, may be said to have a conscience or should have one. The tendency to a decline and fall into the last stages of commercialism must at all costs be resisted. If not resisted, it may become suicidal and by ultimately weakening and losing the hold which a newspaper has on its readers, it may sacrifice its capacity for usefulness to the public and lose its own source of strength and revenue. Or worse still, the tendency may be followed downhill almost to a criminal extent and lead to organized fraud and systematic blackmail.
Although there are in the United Kingdom considerable differences both as to accepted principles and also practice between one journal and another in this respect, yet we are fortunately, with rare and insignificant exceptions, free from the criminal methods of prosecuting success. The press of other countries in this aspect we need not consider. With us the problem of relative independence with regard to advertisers presents itself within a comparatively small compass. It is a question of how far newspapers and other periodicals allow the use of their news columns to the puff preparatory or supplementary for the benefit of those firms and businesses who contribute freely to the revenues of the advertising columns. This practice is on the whole fairly common. There is in it nothing in any way immoral or disgraceful and it really resolves itself into a question only of dignity and expediency. Perhaps one might be within the mark in attributing such practices to a greater or less extent to the weaker half of the press of the United Kingdom. Those who avowedly adopt these methods place themselves on an inferior plane and to a certain extent lower their reputation and weaken their bargaining power. Still it must be admitted that such surreptitious puffing is often adopted under pressure even by wealthy and powerful journals to an extent, which makes resistance on principle to the same demands exceedingly difficult for their weaker competitors. Among other disadvantages these puffs ultimately tend to lower the value of the columns openly sold to advertisers and thus to impair these as a source of revenue.
As I have said elsewhere,[7] the philosophy of publicity is rather hard to grasp. In some forms it comes perilously near to charlatanry and quackery and yet in the modern world it is not only a valuable aid to business but absolutely indispensable. Although the practice has been known to all ages, it is only the development of the immensely productive power of the factory system, which has caused its enormous extension during the last century. In former times goods were produced with difficulty and found their hungry markets waiting for them. It is entirely different now-a-days. The chief modern problem is to sell goods fast enough to prevent a glut of production. To take a concrete instance from modern America, the output of motor cars as these lines are written is considerably more than one a minute and in order to secure continuous cheapness of production this rate of output must be maintained and probably even increased. All this flood of production has to be marketed without delay and without intermission. The missing of even one month’s sale of such a prodigious output would entail the bankruptcy of half the manufacturers in the kingdom.
[7] See “The Laws of Supply and Demand,” Cap. XV.
It is advertising which supplies the remedy for their ever-present difficulty. It affords the chief practical solution of the paradox of modern industry, which requires that goods shall be manufactured in immense quantities in order to secure cheapness of production and yet will not allow that they should be put on the market in too large quantities at a time for fear of creating a glut and lowering prices. Demand must never be satiated. It must be perpetually stimulated so as to maintain a steady suction at least equivalent to and preferably exceeding, the normal rate of output. The most effective and almost universal method of obtaining this stimulation of demand is by advertising.