influenced. When you read a news story in the Register you may be sure that an honest effort has been made to give you the facts as they occurred. Do not get the idea that the Register has no opinions of its own. It has opinions in plenty, but it confines expression of them to the editorial page."
By the use of familiar examples Mr. Jenkins justifies the newspapers' practice of featuring the unusual rather than the usual, healthy, normal events of human life. "Even back-fence gossip," he says, "is concerned with the unusual doings of the neighbors."
The Associated Press forms the subject of another talk in which Mr. Jenkins explains the organized methods of foreign news gathering and dissemination.
In a following number he describes local news gathering, exploding one or two erroneous ideas that have grown up in the public mind. "There is a superstition, more or less current, that anyone who offers news to a reporter, especially personal news, will be looked upon with some contempt as 'seeking publicity.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The business of the reporter is to find news, and his best friend is the man who is able to give him accurate, reliable and printable information."
"About Ourselves" is of interest not only to the "laity" but to those of the profession as well who read the answers of a fellow journalist to the questions they themselves are often asked to face. Mr. Jenkins, by explaining the newspaper "game" in these readable little chats, almost entirely free from technical terms and newspaper slang, is clearing up the hazy points for his readers and in many cases is giving them an entirely new and modern conception of journalism.
"We are advertising and explaining and exploiting other businesses in every issue," he says, "why is it not equally important for a newspaper to work directly for a sympathetic and intelligent understanding of its purposes and methods! The Register is one of the large business enterprises of the upper Willamette valley. We want our readers to realize that we have good reasons for doing the things that we do. A newspaper is very easily misunderstood, and is frequently subjected to criticism and suspected of ulterior motives. We think that these little frank talks are useful to the paper and the public alike."
A Home-Made Perforator
First buy your wife a new sewing machine so you can use her old one, the older the better. Next have some student in the machine shop make you a new throat piece with a hole one-thirty-second of an inch wide and two or three hard steel punches the size of the needle previously used. This is all, unless you desire some kind of a guide. Anyone who can use a sewing machine can use this kind of a perforator. This machine sounds like a Maxim automatic when in operation but it will punch holes through a dozen sheets of bond, clean as a whistle, and the number of holes to the inch may be gaged by the stitch gage.
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