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December, 1917

To the Editor Oregon Exchanges:

I have read with some interest F. S. Minshall’s article on “Organization of County Units,” published in the November number of Oregon Exchanges, and while his theory seems logical, I believe it can be conclusively shown that such an organization is not practical.

In the first place, while the interests of the small town weekly publisher and the big town daily publisher are in a manner identical, the big town publisher is too apt to have a desire to corner the bulk of the business in the county, regardless of the fact that by so doing he cripples the small town publisher.

While we dislike to accuse the big town publishers of having selfish motives in the matter, the fact remains that they have taken but little interest in questions which advocated changes in existing laws that would tend to give the small town publishers business justly due them. As an illustration, we will take the matter of notices for teachers’ examinations, usually sent to the two papers in a county having the largest circulations. The fact that these two papers may be published in the same town makes no difference. The county superintendent of schools must comply with the law, and as a result it is not infrequent that two papers in the same town or the same locality publish the notices. This is not only an injustice to the teachers, who are to be found in every town and hamlet in the state, and who depend upon their local papers for information, but it is also an injustice to the small town publisher, as it results in his paper losing prestige as a medium of information, and eventually he learns that some of his former subscribers are regular readers of one or the other of the papers with the alleged largest list of subscribers.

Then again, the publisher of the big town daily or weekly is too apt to conclude that he is in a class a little above the small town weekly publisher, and is entitled to a little more consideration in the way of patronage than his humble brother. This was demonstrated at the meeting of the Oregon State Editorial association in Medford in 1916. On that occasion the publishers of the county dailies and big town weeklies got together at a meeting from which the small town publishers were excluded, and entered into an arrangement whereby print paper was to be purchased in carload lots and distributed from two or three central points to those publishers who were “in” on the deal. In this manner print paper could be obtained at a lesser cost than where publishers were buying in dozen bundle lots, and therefore meant a considerable saving on the cost of publishing a newspaper. As this arrangement was a saving proposition in production, why were the small town publishers excluded from the benefit! As the object of the editorial association is presumed to be for the mutual benefit of all its members, why was it that the small town weekly publishers were not invited to cooperate in this matter of obtaining print paper at a lower price! Would such a procedure as this invite the organization of county units as suggested by Mr. Minshall?