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consideration of serious life problems. The appeal for help and advice is often made to the newspaper and the magazine through fear of betrayal of confidence, if counsel is sought from local advisers, and undoubtedly the press in such cases has rendered aid and comfort.41
But it is interesting to note that this relationship between the press and welfare work is apparently not reciprocal. “ The case reading for this book ," says the author of the most significant work yet published on social welfare, “ brought to light no
illustrations of the use of newspaper files and news indices to establish the date of one event by associating it with another ,
or to discover the notice of an accident, an arrest, an award, a death , a disappearance, or any of the thousand and one happen
ings that are recorded in the daily press,” 42 — an omission difficult to understand since newspaper indices make such information easily accessible .
The newspaper both encourages an interest in all educational matters and also profits by this interest. It publishes advertise ments of colleges and private schools, it frequently maintains a
bureau to help parents in the selection of schools for their children , it reports changes of personnel in the teachers of the private schools, and it announces the comings and the goings of the
teachers in the public schools. It reports the meetings of boards of education and publishes the annual reports of school super intendents and principals . It takes an active interest in the
selection of sites for school building and in the letting of contracts for their erection and equipment. It opens its columns for the
discussion of the curriculum and questions of general educational policy, and it frequently maintains a department for settling among its subscribers their disputed questions of grammar, orthography, pronunciation , and similar vexing subjects. It even enters the field itself and announces that it has organized
free courses “ of nine lessons” in French , and that it will give in its columns “ a free business education ” by publishing a
complete course in shorthand, business arithmetic and bookkeep ing. It rents assembly halls and provides free lectures for citizens 4 Survey, November 3 , 1917 , 39 : 124 .
42 M . E . Richmond , Social Diagnosis, pp. 268–
