NEWSPAPERS HIT BY THE WAR

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXVII, Issue LXXVII, 19 July 1918, Page 6

NEWSPAPERS HIT BY THE WAR

SOME INTERESTING FACTS

'•What a jolly good thing this war is for tiie newspapers. They must be making a pot of money/ This casual remark, so frequently made by the "man in ths street" (says a contemporary), has almost passed in to something like 'sober fact. But it is not a fact. Many newspapers are having the worst time of their histories. Paper costs five times as much as it did before the war, mid even then it is hard to get. One shipment comes to hand and the next is left to the glorious uncertainty of the future. There is always the chance- that when the paper does comes it will have jumpanother £10 or £20 a ton above the X^revious shipment. England is feeling the paper^ famine tremendously. Papers that before the war printed 12, 14, 16 and even 24 pages (the size of the Daily Telegraph) as a regular daily thing for a penny, now creep out with four, six or eight pages, and charge twopence. . The' halfpenny dailies, which gave eight to twelve pages daily for the small coin named, now issue but four pages —six on a T>inch —for a penny. Th-t? most marvellous production of the whole- lot is the Daily News. Before and during the earlier stages of the war it published six to eight pages, size 17in. by 24in., for one halfpenny. Today its size- is eight pages, 12in. by 17m., for one penny, and on more than one occasion it brought out a fourpag«? sheet the size oi :i good big pockethandkerchief, and t l;© price still one penny. The Daily Mail, 7 r.xpress and Chronicle, all famous? halfpenny dailies, have cut down their pages-from 12 to 6, and occasionally 4, and doubled their price. The Times, which, used to bring otit 90 to -4 pages daily—with special cd. tions up to 48 pages —for one penny, now gives 14 pages for threepence, and limits its outmit to 150,000. The Morniiifr Post and Daily Telegraph have also curtailed their p r<ges and increased their price. Where their daily issue used in be anything from 14 to 24 pages for one penny, they now give only eight pafres, with occasional jumps to id"and l 5 wages for tvopence. Even in "America, the home of paper, and the land of big editions, prices have gono u ll and sizes come down. In Fran1":? the newspapers ore mere sheets, in some cases two. and at the most four pages. Tlio vvico-- have been increased in a good number of cases, and quite a lot of papers, nimble to bear the added cost, have quietly dropped out —■ waiting for peac^, and cheaper paper.