“Well, I’ve got aspiration enough, if it comes to that,” smiled Hal.

“Aspiration’s a good starter:  but it’s perspiration that makes a business go.  Are you ready to take off your coat and work?”

“I certainly am.  There’s a lot for me to learn.”

“There is.  Everything.  Want some advice from the Old Man?”

“I most surely do, Dad.”

“Listen here, then.  A newspaper is a business proposition.  Never forget that.  All these hifalutin’ notions about its being a palladium and the voice of the people and the guardian of public interests are good enough to talk about on the editorial page.  Gives a paper a following, that kind of guff does.  But the duty of a newspaper is the duty of any other business, to make money.  There’s the principle, the policy, the politics, ethics, and religion of the newspaper in a nutshell.  Now, how are you going to make money with the ’Clarion’?”

“By making it a better paper than the others.”

“Hm!  Better.  Yes:  that’s all right, so long as you mean the right thing by ‘better.’  Better for the people that want to use it and can pay for using it.”

“The readers, you mean?”

“The advertisers.  It’s the advertisers that pay for the paper, not the readers.  You’ve got to have circulation, of course, to get the advertising.  But remember this, always:  circulation is only a means to an end.  It never yet paid the cost of getting out a daily, and it never will.”

“I know enough of the business to understand that.”

“Good!  Look at the ‘Clarion,’ as it is.  It’s got a good circulation.  And that lets it out.  It can’t get the advertising.  So it’s losing money, hand over fist.”

“Why can’t it?”

“It’s yellow.  It doesn’t treat the business interests right.”

“Sterne says they always look after their own advertisers.”

“Oh, that!  Naturally they have to.  Any newspaper will do that.  But they print a lot of stuff about strikes and they’re always playing up to the laboring man and running articles about abuses and pretending to be the friend of the poor and all that slush, and the better class of business won’t stand for it.  Once a paper gets yellow, it has to keep on.  Otherwise it loses what circulation it’s got.  No advertiser wants to use it then.  The department stores do go into the ‘Clarion’ because it gets to a public they can’t reach any other way.  But they give it just as little space as they can.  It isn’t popular.”

“Well, I don’t intend to make the paper yellow.”

“Of course you don’t.  Keep your mind on it as a business proposition and you won’t go wrong.  Remember, it’s the advertiser that pays.  Think of that when you write an editorial.  Frame it and hang it where every sub-editor and reporter can’t help but see it.  Ask of every bit of news, ’Is this going to get me an advertiser?  Is that going to lose me an advertiser?’ Be