Taking the finished newspapers to the elevators that lift them to the mail-room. An eight-page paper is the standard of measurement of the capacity of a press, though ten, twelve, and more pages can be printed, cut, pasted, folded, in short turned out ready for sale on a standard machine. A single press completes 12,000 an hour, but the great newspapers have from two to ten quadruple or sextuple presses which deliver respectively 48,000 and 72,000 an hour each. When papers of more pages, like the Sunday editions, are run off, they are printed in parts or sections, sometimes a day or two in advance of the date of issue, and are put together in the folding-room or, sometimes by the dealer who has been getting the paper in sections by several mails. He dividend, aimed primarily at power. strove to make a great organ, so he preferred the daily which has all day and half the night to grow big and complete in, and plenty of time (on comparatively slow presses) to be printed. The old evening paper was high in price, small in size and circulation, and its influence, often very powerful, was not popular. It had no attractions for editors with an ambition for democratic power. It was the commercial journalist who saw the possibility of a popular evening paper. That it had to be cheap meant, as he saw it first, that he could not afford able writers, nor could he print very much news, but both these drawbacks were economies to him. The readers existed. More people have time to read in the evening than in the morning, and, what was still more vital, papers bought on the way home were carried into the family. insured him advertisers, business. That It is not to be wondered at that the evening newspaper field has been oversown with penny papers, or that they are, when successful, the most profitable ventures in journalism. All the "extras" are not successful, how To pick an opening is not all that has to be done. The publisher must satisfy the demand he has perceived, which requires that his perceptions shall be definite and numerous, or some more thorough man without his initiative will surpass him in imitation. The executive and organizing faculties must second the powers of observation. The only sound sources of income for a newspaper are from the sales of it and from the letting of space to advertisers. Journals that have special features in the way of news or of judgment (like an expert financial column), sometimes have a revenue from the sale of them to papers in other cities. But this is comparatively small. The circulation is the measure of the earning power ordinarily, for that brings in the wholesale price and is the basis both of the amount and the charge for advertisements. The publisher's most constant care, therefore, is the circulation. The ideal would be universality within the limits of daily delivery. Since no paper in a place of any size has ever approached it, however, the first thing to be defined is the character of the circulation to be sought. If the publisher has an established paper with a field that he proposes merely to extend, the lines Here sections are put together and the papers are enclosed in wrappers or bundles, addressed long ahead to the dealer, marked with the number ordered or sent, and parcelled out in routes for the wagons to deliver. From forty to sixty-seven men are employed in this department on all the great dailies. Thirty-two wagons, carts, or trucks, eight with teams of horses, are used regularly by one New York paper, and on Saturday night big dealers call for their own papers, and the superintendent of delivery often goes out to hire wagons to handle his papers. Each wagon or group of wagons serves a route or a train. The laborers who carry out the papers go from tables that supply their routes to the wagons that haul them. Here sections are put together and the papers are enclosed in wrappers or bundles, addressed long ahead to the dealer, marked with the number ordered or sent, and parcelled out in routes for the wagons to deliver. From forty to sixty-seven men are employed in this department on all the great dailies. |