tion was made to his frequenting an informal club of newspaper men because he was known to be connected with a penny paper ,
and that for the same reason his presence was protested against in the room where men connected with the aristocratic high priced papers met to write up their notes after the speeches made
at public dinners.12 Reduction in price may indicate a desire for a larger circulation or a wish to reach a different class of readers. The business manager may fall far short of paying for the cost of
production with the receipts of circulation and therefore depend unduly on advertisements to make up a threatened deficit, or he
may secure a nice balance of forces between all the factors of in come and outgo and maintain at the same time the lowest price, the largest circulation , and the largest dividends. A sense of proportion or a lack of it enters into the personality
of the newspaper,and this affects both the amount of space given to the questions of the moment and the position in the paper accorded them . One paper may give twelve columns to a scandal and another dismiss it in twelve lines. One paper may feature the
latest discovery in science , and another a wedding in high life or below stairs . “ A Scripps newspaper has in [the preferred ) posi
tion an account of a working men 's strike in Sweden, a Hearst newspaper a breach of promise suit, an Ochs newspaper a railway merger.” 13 Times may also change and the same papers may
within a comparatively short period show an increase in the pro portion of space given to gossip , scandal, and sport and a pro
portionate decrease in news concerning religion , science, litera ture, and art.14 Changing standards of conventionality affect the personality of a newspaper. Edward Dicey tells us that among the unwritten
laws of early journalism were those that every leading article should have three paragraphs, that it should be not less than one and one-fourth columns in length or more than one and one-half columns, that under no pretence should the name of another 12 Life and Adventures, I, 333 -334. 13 Will Irwin , Collier's Weekly , April 1, 1911. 14 J . G . Speed , “ Do Newspapers Now Give the News? ” Forum , August, 1893, 15 : 705 -711 .— The author gives tables showing the comparative
amount of space given thirteen selected subjects in 1881 and in 1893 by the New York Tribune, World , Times, and Sun .
