Page:Final Report of the Northwest Territory Celebration Commission.pdf/45

 The budget originally set up only $5,000 for publicity of all kinds and this was intended to be spent for direct mailing pieces, photographs, drawings, cuts, stereotype mats, etc.

Federal Writer's Project had agreed to furnish personnel. No space was to be bought and paid for.

As the matter turned out. Federal Writer's did not furnish personnel past April, 1938, and it was necessary to hire and pay men to handle it.

Also, even though the legislation was passed to permit the sale of literature, the cost of much of that literature was paid for out of the budget allotment for publicity.

These situations plus a demand for literature beyond the expectation of the commission made the actual expenditure for publicity about $9,200—or a $4,200 over-run of publicity budget.

However, the literature sold brought in $8,200 in cash sales, so that the actual net expenditure was but little.

From the standpoint of the best publicity handling possible, a better job would have been done if one publicity man had handled this work straight through. The result was handicapped by three changes in its direction—the last change during the very climax of the program.

Perhaps the press generally, both as to national news services and individual papers and writers, performed the greatest, and an almost unbelievable publicity service. Nor was this for any few days or brief period, but continued during the entire year of celebration. Aside from the start of the caravan at Ipswich-Hamilton; its becoming lost in the mountains, the boat building and arrival at Marietta, and other incidents which were of national news value, each newspaper along the route gave splendid cooperation as to the visit of the caravan to that community. A large number of papers issued special souvenir editions.

The commission bought no clipping service, as to have so done would have expended thousands of dollars of needed funds. Only clippings voluntarily sent to the commission or miscellaneously acquired are on file. But with this very limited coverage, there are 700 pages 11 inches × 16 inches in size which are filled with clippings pasted three and four deep.

In addition to the straight news stories a number of staff and special writers prepared feature articles which appeared from New York to California.

While obviously no exact figures can be obtained as to the total newspaper space devoted to the celebration, the clippings in the commission scrap books, had the space been bought in the amount used in and at the display rate charged by that particular paper, would represent an expenditure of $86,860.00.

This figure does not include writers' cost, or art work, and cuts used.

There is no doubt that twice as much appeared as the commission has clippings to show.

This safe computation would indicate newspaper publicity which alone would have cost $173,720. Actually, newspaper men