The Birmingham age-herald., 1902-12-09
ADVERTISE TO REACH THE
 MAN WHO IS ABLE TO BUY

desire as large a constituency as possi- ble. but in his anxiety for numbers he may find that he is gaining in readera among one class of people and losing readers from another. He may add to his circulation in quantity. but lose In quality. He may catch more jelly fish. but not so many trout.
 Undue stress has been placed on the value of large circulation; even some of i. our good friends among the advertising agents have sought to reduce advertising 10 an exact science and to fix rates for advertising on the hasls Of so much per line per thousand of circulation. You cannot measure newspaper advertising as you do cordwood. You cannot fix rates that could be made applicable to all papfrs. because conditions are so differ ent An influential paper of 5000 circula- ton in small town might be of more value to an advertiser than a paper of ten times that circulation in large city. The quality of the paper and the charac- ter and standing of the people who read it are factors, in my judgment, of far more importance than the question of how many papers are printed.
 It is not so much the number of papers which go out of the press room which should be carefully examined. as the fact where those papers go to and who are the people who read them. Are papers hastily read and thrown away? Are they purchased to help pass away a few mo- ments' ride on a car, or are they deliver- ed in the homes to be carefully read by each member of the family? Are they read for information and instruction, to become the source of our knowledge of contemporaneous life? The higher the mere literary quality of a newspaper, the smaller will be the circulation. The masses of the people do not require such paper nor could they appreciate it. It is not necessary, however, for a news paper to become pedantic or scholarly to have high grade of excellence, but it is possible for @ paper to be ably edited, to be alert and enterprising. carry all the news, to use such illustrations as will make clearer the text, to be up-to-date in every particular anu yet maintain that high degree of quality that will bring to it such a large number of readers that advertisers will generously use it's col- uInns and the revenues of the paper will be such that the best talene and the iln- est mechanism can be employed in the production of it. Yet such a paper must necessarily be limited in circulation. To meet the requirements of its readers 1t must carry all the news of the warld and of the country and in addition large amount of local news. society events, obituary notices, sports, movements of trade, politics. religion and hundred other subjects in which their readers are personally excluded.
 After all, the local advertiser knows the best mediums. Study the papers in this country which seek the restricted quality of circulation, and are not man. aged by the affidavit man, whose only idea of success is large circulation, ana you will find that the home advertisers are large patrons of those papers. This test alone ought to decide the relative value of quality as against quantity Fortunate indeed is the paper that can have quality and a generous amount or quantity. ss-4e aff