Newspaper Folk Are Idealists, Not Such Good Businessmen, 1922

From The Independent in Elizabeth City, as reprinted in the Albemarle Press, Thursday, August 10, 1922

Why Editors Die Poor

Looking over the gathering of weekly newspaper publishers at the North Carolina Press Association meet at Shelby last week I think I discovered why so many of them die poor. Sizing up the bunch at Shelby, I wrote them down as 70 percent idealists.

Idealists are not good business men. Their goddess is not the dollar. And yet there is a very important business depending upon the patronage of business men. In attempting to run a newspaper business the idealist publisher is too often victimized by the superior business brains of the community. The best business brains are forever alert to hammer down his advertising rates and hundred not in business conspire to beat him out of the subscription of his paper. The average country publisher has a hard row to hoe. Very few people care how he lives or whether he lives at all and many persuade him to attempt to run his business on a margin of profit that makes no allowance at all for overhead. 

Is it any wonder so many weekly publishers live from hand to mouth?

The newspaper is just as important to your town as your school or churches. You cannot progress without a newspaper any more than you can progress without your schoolhouse and your church. Somewhere out there in Iowa there is a thriving town that has no churches and here and there you will find a town that has no newspaper of its own; but these are exceptions.

With its many and complex activities today, with all the outside affairs re-acting upon and affecting it, you could not know your own town without your own newspaper. And the great mass of people outside your town would not know your town at all but for its newspaper. Elizabeth City grows and thrives much because The Independent broadcasts interesting stuff about Elizabeth City to the home of thousands of rural readers and to investors and capitalists far away from home, week after week.

That The Independent has succeeded far better than most weekly papers in the state is because there are more appreciative people in Elizabeth City than in so many towns in the state. The best business brains of Elizabeth City are alive to the value of a live and forceful organ of publicity for their town.