f the morning papers
are given by "Dauchy's Newspaper Catalogue" for 1891, as follows:
_Tribune_, daily, 80,000; Sunday, 85,000. _Times_, daily, 40,000;
Sunday, 55,000. _Herald_, daily, 100,000; Sunday, 120,000. _Morning
Journal_, 200,000. _Press_, daily, 85,000; Sunday, 45,000. _Sun_,
daily, 90,000; Sunday, 120,000. _World_, daily, 182,000; Sunday,
275,000. Of the afternoon papers, _Commercial Advertiser_, 15,000;
_Evening Post_, 18,000; _Telegram_, 25,000; _Graphic_ (not the old,
but a new one), 10,000; _Mail and Express_, 40,000; _News_, 173,000;
_Evening Sun_, 50,000; _Evening World_, 168,000. The entire
circulation of New York dailies, including with those named others of
minor importance, and the German, French, Italian, Bohemian, Hebrew
and Spanish daily newspapers, is 1,540,200 copies.
Obviously, there is and must be ceaseless, incisive and merciless
competition in securing and holding circulations, as well as in the
outward statements made of individual circulations to those who
purchase advertising space. In this, as in all other forms of
enterprise, there are honest, clean-cut and business-like methods, and
there are the methods of the time-server, the trickster and the liar.
The vastly greater number of publications secure and hold their
clientage by making the best possible goods, pushing them upon public
patronage by aggressive and business-like means, and selling at the
lowest price consistent with excellence of product and fairness alike
to producer and consumer. But of the baser sort there are always
enough to make rugged paths for those who walk uprightly, and to
contribute to instability of values on the one hand, and on the other
to flooding the country with publications which the home and the world
would be better without. Every great city has more of the rightly made
and rightly sold papers than of the other sort, and the business man,
the working man, the professional man, the family, no matter of what
taste, or political faith, or economic bias, or social status, or
financial plenty or paucity, can have the daily visits of newspapers
which are able, brilliant, comprehensive, clean and honest. But all
the time, these men and families will have pressed upon their
attention and patronage, by every device and artifice of the energetic
and more or less unscrupulous publisher, other papers equally able and
brilliant and comprehensive, but bringing also their burden of
needless sensationalism and me
|