or do more than indicate that some vaguely indeterminate part of the responsibility for the evils of the newspapers must rest on the people who buy them. From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The newspaper is a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a profit; it is also a department store, and it has some characteristics that suggest the variety show and the brothel. But the newspaper differs from all other commodities in that it does not live by what it receives from the consumer who buys it. Three cents multiplied a million times does not support a newspaper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the manufacturer’s point of view, and also to a great extent from the reader’s point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of “reading matter,” so called, are little more than bait to attract enough readers to make the paper worth while as a vehicle for advertisements. It is of no importance to the management whether a given column contain news from Washington or Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny story, as long as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it and so to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits of a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit of clothes at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be a good variety and a certain balance of interest in the columns of reading matter to secure the attention of all kinds of people. This accounts for two things, the great development in the newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment, of more or less clever features, at the expense of space that might be devoted to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out by his chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the office, to get a “story.” This is sound psychology. Everybody likes a story, and there are only a few souls in the world who yearn at breakfast for information. To attack the newspaper for being sensational is to forget that all the great stories of the world, from the amatory exploits of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs. Black, the banker’s wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news columns except their power to attract the reader and so secure circulation and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser has as his primary interest only that of bringing to the attention of a certain number of people the virtues of his suspenders, shoes, and soothing syrup.