Our Coat And Our Cloth

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 157, 26 June 1942, Unnumbered Page

Our Coat And Our Cloth

NCE more, and we hope for () the last time, we find it necessary to make a further cut in our pages. As a result readers will get less for their money than we want to give them, a little less than we have somehow contrived to give them so far, but as much still as any other broadcasting journal can now offer in any part of the English-speaking world. There is one broadcasting weekly in Australia which gives its readers a few more square inches of type than we give ours in this reduced issue, but with that excep- | tion we fill more space than any other threepenny journal printed in English even when the comparison extends to the British Isles. The Radio Times, for example, which used to be 96 pages, is now 24. The English Listener has shrunk from 52 pages to 32. London Calling goes steadily along at 24 pages. Space is of course not everything, space or bulk. A big paper may be like a big head, mostly padding. But our point is that although we have reduced and reduced, till we are now at the irreducible minimum, we still retain most of the features to which our readers have been accustomed from the beginning of the war. Nor do we say any of these things, or make any of these comparisons, to boast about them. We say them to keep faith with our readers-to let them know what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to convince them that we did not reduce our measure until we were well past the danger point. What we have done has been forced on us by our enemies. We shall undo it the day they have been driven away from our sea-lanes and cornered at a safe distance from the channels of peaceful trade. Meanwhile our coat can’t be bigger than our cloth.