The Newspaper

by George Binney Dibblee

Advertising began by aiming at mere publicity. Then it became combative and assertive of individual superiority over rivals. As this grew stale, it assumed blandishing and seductive methods, flattering the customer and appealing to his intelligence, his discrimination and his good taste. The latest tendency especially in the technical journals, where immense sums are spent in this business, is to become soberly educative. The customer is offered gratuitously the benefit of the immense experience acquired by the advertiser from an extended business in meeting the particular needs of the buyer. This is an eminently legitimate and highly successful method. It is perfectly true that, where a speciality is concerned, the seller may have far more detailed experience than the buyer himself. But it hardly meets the more general case, where the nature of the want is trivial and it is only a question of which satisfaction to take out of a choice of several.

One of the difficulties about advertising, of which the newspaper manager has to take account, is the element of misrepresentation, which is apt to creep into it. The stereotyped precaution, which has always been taken to prevent misrepresentation being such as to involve the newspaper proprietor in damages or to embroil him with other customers is to refuse to insert any reflection or disparagement of any recognizable rival goods. The advertisement is therefore driven back on to a rather tame proclamation of general excellence and of the pre-eminence of the article advertised over rivals in general. Of course the utility of any device, so tame as this, is rapidly exhausted, so that advertisers have long learnt to vary the appeal and the claim in every possible way. But although the form changes, the methods are few. The earliest method was the attempt to use literary skill, but as this necessarily appealed only to a class of people very much on their guard against advertising of all kinds, it was soon abandoned. Another method was the surprise. A long story would be printed with a little tag at the end advertising some nostrum or necessary. This was speedily discounted and disused. Then mere blatancy became the general rule. Advertisers appealed only to the eye by wearisome iteration. Curiously enough such a policy, apparently trivial to a primitive degree, has held its own for decades against devices of a much more elaborate kind. But in the newspaper itself severe limitations are imposed on this method both by the paucity of type faces and the mere cost of space. It has come therefore to be almost exclusively the weapon of the very rich, who are able to buy whole pages at a time of the most widely circulated and most expensive journals. Lastly and perhaps the most successfully of all, illustration has come prominently into use. Here again the limitations of the medium impose themselves. It is not every kind of design or sketch, which is effective under the rough conditions imposed by the rapid printing of the daily press. The managers of newspapers themselves being aware of this are not anxious to encourage this form of enterprise and some of them exclude it from their columns. The legitimate field for its full florescence has now become the pages of the popular magazine, which are printed with monthly deliberation on the flat and thus secure a high degree of excellence in technical execution and reproduction. The American magazines are the most suitable home for brilliant expository work of this kind and in many cases the ingenious advertisers have succeeded in making their advertisement pages a serious rival in interest with the pages in the text.

All these efforts, while they are strictly speaking the chief concern of the advertiser, become by proxy the daily problem of the newspaper manager and of his familiar spirits, the advertisement solicitors for the journal or periodical. This is a task very much better understood and executed in America than in Europe and a high degree of expertism in advertising has become a sine qua non of newspaper management everywhere. The work is as often as not now carried on by a highly-trained staff including writers, artists and canvassers, so that the manager himself has nothing more than a general supervision and direction of policy. It is especially his province rightly to appraise the class of readers, whose patronage he has, so to speak, to sell to advertisers, to advise as to the best methods of approaching them and to lay down general rules and a scale of prices regulating the advertising, which his paper is prepared to take. Such a responsibility is a very serious one because the rules and conditions, under which this traffic has to be carried on, cannot be changed very often and once established the rules must be observed with judicious strictness, as any suspicion of partial or favoured treatment would unite his customers fatally against his paper. He must never forget that the bulk of his custom comes to him through a profession of the most suspicious people in the world, the advertising agents, whose pre-occupation it is to secure most-favoured-nation treatment each for his own customers and to prevent any one else stealing a march on them.

Let us examine this problem as it presents itself to the manager of a London daily morning newspaper. The complication of it can be seen by carefully examining the columns of a typical daily like the Morning Post or Daily Telegraph. Advertisements for these papers divide themselves into two classes, displayed and classified. In the first class come all those miscellaneous announcements, whose character we have discussed in general terms above. The advertiser in these cases practically buys so much space, sometimes in column form, sometimes across column rules, in which case he is almost invariably charged a higher rate. In this space he frames his advertisement using the special kind of type laid down by the rules of each paper, which in the United Kingdom vary greatly from the extreme conservatism of the Morning Post to the unlimited license of some of the smaller provincial dailies. It is becoming increasingly the practice to sell space of this kind at a “flat rate,” which is an American term meaning a fixed price per inch with reductions for a quantity, allowing the advertiser to make his advertisements what size he likes and to repeat them at his own convenience, as opposed to the older English custom, where so many specific columns and half-columns were sold at certain regular intervals of recurrence, restrictions which imposed needless trouble on the advertiser and often interfered with the most effective display of his advertisements.

But with regard to classified advertisements, that is, advertisements grouped under regular headings, more old-fashioned usages prevail. Probably no two papers in the country have exactly the same scales for this kind of advertising. The reason is not far to seek. Every paper has some little connection in a special class of advertising arising out of the ineradicable habits of the public. For instance the Morning Post is pre-eminent for domestic servants, the Daily News for pressmen and compositors and I remember one provincial daily, now dead, which even in articulo mortis was the only organ through which the barbers and hairdressers of Lancashire sought for new situations. It followed that the scales charged for this extremely varied volume of custom are roughly governed by the simple rule adopted by railways in fixing their freight rates, of charging whatever the traffic will bear. Each paper will put up the rates on its own specialities and charge less for custom which it is trying to draw from a rival paper.

The expectation of attracting custom from elsewhere in classified advertising is very seldom fulfilled. The habits of the public are extraordinarily stable in this respect. When once a paper is recognized as the special organ for a particular purpose every one has to buy it in this connection and people save themselves the trouble of looking elsewhere. The most outrageous overcharging will very seldom drive this custom away, but it is very unwise for any manager to attempt it, as he may easily injure his general reputation for justice and thereby lose other business. The most important groups of classified advertising are as follows: financial, theatrical, public notices, losts and founds, educational, auctions, property to let or for sale, situations for clerks, situations for servants, births, marriages and deaths. Of course there are a good many general announcements under special headings and in addition there are cross classifications, as when special prices are asked for special positions in the paper, of which the most usually prevailing variations are an extra charge for advertisements next reading-matter and for announcements printed in what has come to be universally known as the “agony column.”

Next to the skilful handling of his volume of advertising, the chief pre-occupation of a newspaper manager is the cultivation and increase of his circulation. Some people would say that it precedes the other in importance, but this is hardly the case. It would be so, if it were the business of no one else but the manager to secure readers, because circulation must antedate advertising or any rate it must appear to do so. The fundamental responsibility for the circulation remains with the editor, who has to produce a paper permanently interesting to his readers, whether these are drawn from a small and select class or from the masses of the general public. The manager’s function with regard to circulation is to improve his machinery of distribution to the limit allowed by the means at his disposal and to secure the utmost publicity for the efforts of his colleague.

This is a very much more difficult task than appears at first sight. One would naturally suppose that to an expert in advertising and publicity, as a newspaper manager has to be, the marketing of his own wares would be an easy task. That it is not so, is due to the fact that the commodity he has to offer for sale differs in kind from any other. The chief form of publicity, whose peculiar virtues he is perpetually extolling, namely advertisement through the press, is almost closed to him. He can use his own columns to puff special features only to a limited extent and probably to very little advantage. He can hardly use rival papers to his own, except on very special occasions, without increasing their revenue and prestige and to some extent confessing his own weakness. To appeal to the readers of papers of a different class is to approach a public, which probably does not want him. Worse still is the habit of using for the purpose of newspaper propaganda other means of publicity, such as the hoarding in the country or the placard in public places. These are inevitably cheapening in their effect on the public mind and it is his daily business to say so to his own clients, who bring their advertising to him.

He is driven in the end to occasional and impromptu methods such as the distribution of interesting copies of his paper, the production of various subsidiary publications, whose circulation may keep his paper before the public or the organization of little tricks and surprises. None of these devices however can ever be expected to advance the interests of his paper very seriously. The real propaganda for a newspaper therefore remains in the hands of the editor and his resources are of a simple nature and must be used continuously and with the greatest possible skill. First and foremost he must make for his paper the reputation of being the most efficient and, more important still, the most alert in his own district. He must miss nothing and score a “beat,” when he can. Secondly he must identify himself and his paper conspicuously with all local efforts, needs and opportunities. He must be prompt to hear and take up grievances, to track down scandals, to open subscription lists for the sake of important public charities of an occasional kind and to bring prominent names conspicuously before the public. Lastly he must watch anxiously for any legitimate object of sensationalism, such as is sometimes offered in a war or, as is at other times the case, may be invented and planned in the office of the newspaper. Such were the New York Herald’s expedition to discover Livingstone, the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to the North Pole, or the rescue of a white girl from Cuba by a New York paper. This class of sensation is only within the reach of a very long purse and moreover is valuable to none but popular journals. The readers of higher class circles are apt to be thoroughly bored with reiterated details on a subject, which soon becomes stale, while yet there is no other method than this by which the newspaper can secure a suitable return for its enterprise and heavy expenditure.

One of the vexed questions for the publisher of periodicals is properly to assess the relative value of a large or small circulation. Some small circulations especially of a technical kind have a far higher value for advertisers than a large one of poorer quality. On the other hand, if the readers are of too high a class, they are not to be hit by the efforts of the advertiser and the revenue therefore remains small. I know of one paper, which is unique in this respect in the world. It is the Zeitschrift des Ingenieuren Vereins, whose editorial product stands on a level of technical excellence unapproached in the engineering world. Yet it has the large circulation for this class of journal of 20,000 or 22,000 a week and a very considerable advertising revenue. The secret of this success lies in the fact that it is a class organ circulating to all the members of the immense association of German engineers, which includes not only all German engineers but innumerable foreigners, who have come to Germany to be educated in Charlottenburg or in their other admirable technical schools.