Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/25

18 as well as its good. The editor was not always wise or just in the use of his great influence. The result—loss of much of that influence and the development of a less personal type of journalism which "ascribes motives only when motives go to the root of the matter" and respects, in general, the reputations of those dealt with in the paper.

There has been no sudden change in Oregon journalism which can be discovered anywhere along the line in the first 92 years of its life. The changes, for the most part, have been evolutionary. The greater part of the progress, however, has been in the last half-century.

In the first few years after the appearance of the little old Oregon Spectator, no particular general change took place in Oregon journalism. Since then the changes have come —

In typography and appearance of the papers

In mechanical equipment and processes

In news content and handling

In editorial attitude

In size of the newspaper investment and in nature of newspaper ownership

In size of circulations and extent of advertising

In nature and quality of advertising

In entertainment features

In quantity and treatment of sports

In handling of society

In width of subject-matter covered—due, practically, to expansion of what there is to be reported

Let us refer briefly to each of these points:

Newspapers were quiet-looking, dull-appearing, gray, when Oregon journalism had its birth. The heads in the Spectator were just as big as the eastern metropolitan papers were using. Newspaper make up was something less than an art in those days. Sameness, lack of variety, prevailed.

The Civil war, as elsewhere, built up and stimulated headlines in Oregon. The multiple-deck head appeared, though not extensively used. Within the next decade they were standard, and the Spanish-American war headlines, spreading to hitherto undreamed-of blackness, even redness, and area and dynamics, became, albeit somewhat reduced, the standard headlines of the next forty years.

The printers were setting their seven-point, sometimes six, solid, and the lines were close together, making the reading relatively hard; had there been in those days the kind of competition newspaper read ing has now from other forms of instruction and entertainment, such illegible printing would scarcely have been read at all. The change did not come, in general, until the cheaper paper, enlarged news papers, and increased business made large type faces possible. Authori-