Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/396

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of the various roads and to attract settlers to the new territory opened up along their lines. Manufacturers of patent medicines seemingly entered upon competition to see which one could use the most printer's ink in American newspapers. New adver- tisers appeared with announcements of breakfast foods, laundry soaps, baking powders, in fact everything used in modern American homes. Local gas companies urged women to "cook with gas"; electric light and power companies pointed out how easy it was to attach the sewing machine to the current from the incandescent light; telephone companies started campaigns to get housewives to "shop by wire"; book publishers, usually the most conservative advertisers, caught the advertising fever and by the close of the period were, in exceptional cases, using a whole page in certain newspapers to advertise a popular novel; etc. Classified advertising grew from a column or two of "Help Wanted" and "Houses to Let" to several pages. The worst feature of this tremendous increase in the amount of advertising was the fact that it was possible to insert at a higher cost almost any advertisement disguised as a bit of news. Sometimes these paid reading notices of advertisers were distinguished by star or dagger, but more frequently there was no sign to indicate to the reader that the account had been bought and paid for and was not a regular news item.

JOURNALISM THAT MAKES NEWS

Though the journalism that makes news really started when The New York Herald sent Henry Morton Stanley to find David Livingstone, the English missionary who was lost "somewhere in Africa," the newspapers were somewhat slow in sowing seed in a field so long fallow. The Herald on July 2, 1872, startled the world with its exclusive announcement that Stanley had found Livingstone at Ujiji and that the latter had discovered the source of the Nile. At the time this remarkable piece of news was looked upon as a piece of good fortune on the part of an American war correspondent who had been sent to witness the opening of the Suez Canal, to report the results of Baker's Expedition up the Nile, to learn the truth about the Russian Expedition bound for Khiva, and to write interesting letters from Bagdad, Persep-