cation, and a membership in the Oregon State Editorial Association, with regular attendance at its meetings, is one of the greatest means of education. The Association during the past year, through a few of its able men in their work during the last session of the legislature, accomplished more for the newspapers as a business than the newspapers as a class are entitled to. They accomplished a forward step in the elimination of price cutting in the legal advertising field.
In summing up let me say: If your competitor is a price cutter—show him that you are not one. Cultivate his acquaintance—you may be able to help him and to show him where he is making a mistake, and that he alone is the loser. Invite his family to ride in your automobile and eat a picnic lunch with you. If the cheap-skate customer tells you that he has been quoted a much cheaper rate, phone the competitor and ask him about it. Get together on prices of standard work. Invite him to join this association, pointing out the ad vantages to he gained.
In the main, you get what you are looking for. If you are looking for a price cutter the chances are that you will act in such a manner as to develop a price cutter. If you are looking for a legitimate competitor you will probably be a legitimate competitor yourself.
Swatting the Free-Space Grafter
By Ed. C. Lapping, of the Astoria Budget
“Business as usual” is going to be a mighty poor motto for a host of the knights of the glue pot during the present war. If many country publishers don’t put their houses in order for the upward trend of everything from printer’s ink to household provisions, there are going to be more unemployed and fewer newspapers.
When a ship begins to take water the crew doesn’t get along as best it may; it looks for the cause. Moral: Stop the leaks.
And that’s what the country publisher must do if he is going to meet his creditors and maintain a respectable front. No doubt there are more leaks in the good ship Fourth Estate than I know of or perhaps will ever hear of even, but there are a few leaks—and mighty big ones—that no man in the front office of a paper can help but notice.
There are the grafters who want advertising space at low rates and get it; there are the advertisers who never pay; there are men who are so “kind” as to give you a two bit ad and expect a dollar’s worth of free readers on the side. And then there are the gentlemen who will give you a bathtub, a corkscrew (and this is Oregon), a mouth organ, or anything your heart might wish—anything for a bit of advertising space. Yes, anything—anything but the coin of the realm.
And here is my plaint, perhaps a tonic for the country publisher. It’s not new by any means, but perhaps through Oregon Exchanges united action may be called to the attention of Oregon publishers that “United, we stand; divided, we fall.”
Why not hang out the sign that advertisers who expect free reading notices with their ads are out of date, and that the editors of Oregon have passed the stage where they can be fooled by a silvery tongued space-grafter traveling under the title of press agent? Why not stand firm and refuse to print as news the hundreds of little “items” that profit or interest no one but the person who seeks entrance into the news columns with his concealed ad?
