Medford Mail. He ran a four-page, seven-column paper, all homeprinted. The paper had been running Populist. Mr. Bliton changed it to independent and lost a lot of his subscribers.
The town in those days had a population of less than a thousand, but the paper had 500 circulation when Bliton took it over. This was soon cut in two by the newcomer's unpopular political attitude, for neither Democrats, Republicans, nor Populists fancied this "independent" idea.
He kept to his line of policy, however, and, with the town prospering, managed to pick up friends. One of his earliest tasks was to quell quarrels and fights between east-side and west-side factions—divided by the Southern Pacific station, then near the center of the little town. In a year and a half he had the circulation up to 1500—much of it in the surrounding territory. For a time after 1894 he had W. T. York as a partner.
A line on Medford scales and standards in those days is gained from the fact that when the Mail in 1899 moved to new quarters in a brick building it was forced to pay what Publisher Bliton regarded as exorbitant rent of $15 a month. After ten years the landlord erected a new brick building and sent the rent up to $16!
About that time, 1909, Mr. Bliton sold the paper to George Putnam, who since 1907 had been the editor of the new Tribune and had brought an era of livelier journalism to Medford. Mr. Bliton, after many years with the C.-O. Power Company, is now an in surance agent.
Born in New Orleans and educated at the Universitv of Nebraska, Putnam already had accumulated a lot of newspaper experience and had his journalistic character well formed. In 1896 he was reporter on the San Diego (Calif.) Tribune; 1899-1900, private secretary to N. W. Scripps; 1901, coast manager of the Scripps MacRae press service; 1902-04, founder and editor of the Spokane (Wash.) Press; 1904, editor of the Eureka (Calif.) Herald; 1904-07, news editor of the Oregon Journal, part of the time under Johin F. Carroll, former Denver newspaper man who was helping C. S. Jackson make a crusading paper of the new Oregon Journal.
With this background nothing flabby in journalism could have been expected of the new acquisition to Medford journalism. He stirred things up.
Before taking up his Medford career, let's go back and sketch in briefly the rest of the Medford journalism background. The old Monitor had been revived in 1896 and, combined with the Gold Hill Miner, ran through two free-silver campaigns under the editorship of E. Everett Phipps as a silver organ, the Monitor-Miner. The Medford Enquirer, established as a weekly in 1894, was running along as a Democratic paper under the editorship of Horace Mann, suspending in 1904.
