Does it Pay to Put Life Into the Editorial Page?
Excerpt from Paper Written for Oregon State Editorial Association by C. E. Ingalls
Editor of the Corvallis Gazette-Times
If I were going to answer this thing seriously, in other words if I were in a high school debate about the matter, and had the affirmative side I would first look about and examine all the live editorial pages and fat bank accounts I could find and then decide. My acquaintance, unfortunately, with editorial pages, where I also have had an acquaintance with the cash register, is not in the immediate vicinity of Oregon. I have to go farther east. For instance, selecting a small country daily such as the Medford, Albany, Oregon City, and Corvallis papers I naturally think of the Emporia Gazette and the Atchison Globe. * * * * *
All thru my observation of newspapers, the ones that put life into them editorially are the ones that have been successful. I know half a hundred live country papers that are making easy money but whether the money is the result of the life put into them or whether the life is put into as a result of the money they make I do not know. I know, and you know, dozens of country dailies and weeklies that have no more life nor individuality than the mummies of Egypt, but they seem to be getting along and some of them are making money. I would like to mention a few of them to illustrate my point, but I have a wife and two children dependent upon me for such support as they get and while living expenses are mounting higher and higher on account of iniquitous food pirates, I do not feel that they could afford a funeral in the family at this time. There can be little danger, however, in naming some of the good ones in Oregon to illustrate what I understand by newspaper “life.” After the Pendleton papers, of course, one of which I have never seen, the best edited paper in Oregon is the Medford Sun. The so-called heavy editorials combine the proper happiness of expression with their logic and the paragraphs are clever, spontaneous and full of spice and variety. Other editorial writers have the same idea and express the same idea that the Sun conveys, but they do it with a dull, heavy monotony, which, while it leaves no doubt of the writers’ sincerity and wouldn’t offend their worst enemies, yet you would have to love the writers with an affection that would make the friendship of Damon and Pythias seem like a Kentucky feud before you would wade through their copy if you had anything else to do. And the Sun looks prosperous.
Another prosperous paper with a live editorial page is the Salem Journal. If Charles Fisher ever wrote anything that I agreed with I must have overlooked it, yet his page is one of the few I regularly look at because he expresses his discontent in such a live and original way that it is readable. I don’t know whether or not that is why the Journal has the largest circulation in the state outside of Portland, but it must have because it says so itself and it ought to know, and no newspaper ever tells lies about its circulation.
I know this is dangerous ground, this commenting on newspaper contemporaries, but it is the danger that makes the first skating good, therefore I will mention the Oregon Journal. From my point of view, how in the world did the Journal ever succeed in putting over its peculiar form of political and eco-
