Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/28

Rh have made in the last few years. since Pulitzer made a place for "The Yellow Kid, of Hogan's Alley."

Circulations have gone up, amazingly. Newspaper prices have not declined much since the early years But newspaper improvements in news coverage and in the number of appealing "features" carried, has created increased demand for the fewer papers printed. What is going to happen to circulation is not yet "history," so we'll not go into that.

The next topic, radio, is something that is taking the attention of newspaper publishers more and more. This, of course, is the result of an invention which the old-timers would have regarded as impossible—and many of us can hardly realize it yeti What has happened is, that the radio, through increasing invasion of the news field, has already altered the attitude of newspapers and their readers toward the treatment of spot news. Extras—which used to be shot out to the readers with every important flash that came in over the wire to the old, capable, much lamented Phillips code operators, now a memory—are rare in these days. The radio broadcaster already has chanted the news into your ear without your having to do anything more than turn a knob (you, of course, sometimes have to go to the trouble of shutting the station off again when someone begins to tell you why a certain cigarette is better for your throat, or is it your liver?) The field of detail and of interpretation appeared to be left for the newspapers; but the radio commentators are, some of them, now very popular, and detail appears to be lengthening. Then there is television coming in—but that's hardly history yet. But what is going to happen to the newspaper boys who think the only way to run a paper is to cut everything to the bone and give the reader's eye less than the broadcaster gave his ear an hour or two before?

Formats have changed more in the last few years than in the whole previous period of Oregon journalism history. This is not to say that a "tabloid" shape was not known in early days. The little Astorian in 1873 was a graceful tabloid in form—5 columns. The Oregonian and the Statesman were small in area when they started their dailies in the sixties. But these were the exception, and newspaper sizes ran all the way from the awkward six-column through the more graceful sevens, to the eights and the nines. But only within the last few years have Oregon weekly papers taken heavily to the tabloid form (not the sensational tabloid tone). The number of country tabloids is growing in Oregon. More pages, and smaller, appears to be the idea. Reader convenience is being considered. There is not a single sensational tabloid in Oregon, and with an occasional short—lived exception in Portland, there has not been.

Pictorial journalism—under which the Oregonian, formerly almost solid type, is now nearly one-fourth picture, has made a rather more rapid advance than other aspects of the changing newspaper.