DANBURY ON SOUTHERN STATE PAPERS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4553, 23 October 1875, Page 2 (Supplement)

DANBURY ON SOUTHERN STATE PAPERS.

(Prom the Danbury News.) The South has many poorly printed and feebly managed country journals. This is because of its sparsely settled districts, we presume. But a district which cannot support a neat, newsy paper should have none at all. _ A poor paper is no advantage to its community. It is a positive injury. It claims to be a representative of its section and is believed to be so. The proprietor falls into the error that the public is obliged to support his enterprise, as if it differed from any other business venture. He has got together a few dollars worth of second-hand type, and a battered useless press. He is pool' dreadfully poor. He is too infernally lazy to dig, and too proud to acknowledge it. He is no more qualified to run a newspaper than he is to upholster a sunset. A citizen too stingy to advertise gives him a half-dozen apples, and he in return advertises editorially Ids whole crop, to the great disgust of the apple dealer who regularly advertises. He uses the columns for the benefit of his personal favorites, and to the damage of his personal enemies. He takes a twenty-five dollar advertisement for two dollars cash, as it saves setting reading matter. He uses his paper as many a farmer does his land—getting all that is possible from it, and giving nothing to it. And so he goes on—claiming his paper to be a public enterprise, so that the public shall support it, yet using it all the time for his own selfish interests. It is printed so badly that it can scarcely be read; itsadvertisementsare setawry; itslocalcolumnsareneglected,andstaleclippings are used instead. Quite frequently the article selected is not because of its merit, or local applicability, but because of its length, and the mess is set off with winnings for money, and growlings at the hard times. There are many such papers in the South, and they should be weeded out. The editor of the Courier Journal says the country editor should hold the same position that the country doctor or country lawyer does. So he should, but the reason he quite frequently doesn’t is because everybody with a hundred dollars cannot be a country doctor or a country lawyer.