Rural Titan

Since country weeklies are distinctive for their local flavor, great chains and publishing titans in this field are rare. However, their widening interests have meant greater dependence on centralized services. For editorial matter outside of local topics, some of them use the Western Newspaper Union, world's largest and oldest publishing syndicate. With 34 branch plants in principal U. S. cities, W. N. U. sells type, printing machinery, paper and 400 features to 10,732 daily and weekly newspapers. For national advertising, some 5,000 country papers are represented by the American Press Association, which is no association but an advertising representative, which last year placed about $2,500,000 of the $7,000,000 of national advertising in country weeklies.*

The man who dominates both W. N. U. and A. P. A. qualifies as No. 1 in the rural press. Last week it seemed that the man would be 57-year-old John Holliday Perry. Already president of A. P. A., which at one time competed with W. N. U. in selling feature boiler plate, Mr. Perry has long sought control of W. N. U. Two years ago, he barely missed it when W. N. U. called off a plan to throw itself into 77-B bankruptcy to scale down interest payments (TIME, April 27, 1936). Last month, he bought enough voting trust certificates and common stock shares to give him controlling interest, was elected president of W. N. U. to succeed Herbert Henry Fish who had served for 20 years. W. N. U. Directors R. Hosken Damon and Homer M. Preston, who had plans of their own, promptly sought a temporary injunction and the appointment of a receiver. Last week their application was denied.

Mr. Perry's qualifications as a rural press titan include ownership of the American Press, trade paper for weeklies, and Publishers' Autocaster Service, which has cut costs for national advertisers by selling country publishers thousands of casting boxes for making plates. Mr. Perry entered the publishing business as an attorney for the James G. Scripps papers in the Northwest. Later he became national counsel for the United Press Associations, the Scripps Newspapers and the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Publisher Perry owns four dailies in Florida/- and the bright Reading, Pa. Times. He has made money in Florida real estate.

Rural journalism began as a sideline for job printers. Its editorial basis was local gossip; its financial foundation was patent medicines--Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, Sloan's Liniment, Beecham's Pills, Carter's Little Liver Pills, which were among the first national advertisers. Today there are 11,852 country papers, nearly half of them more than 50 years old, 151 more than 100 years old.

Comparatively stable financially, only 126 have folded or merged during the past seven years. Their average circulation is nearly 2,000. They serve more than half the population of the U. S. While their columns now include many of the features found in dailies, and streamlined autos have joined the pills among the ads, they remain the most authentic expressions of U. S. rural life.

*Nearly 50% of the country weeklies refuse ail liquor ads.

/-Jacksonville Journal, Pensacola Journal, Pensacola News, Panama City Herald.

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