WASTE PAPER JOURNALISM

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17606, 10 January 1929, Page 6

WASTE PAPER JOURNALISM

The English High Court has declared that football coupon competitions as conducted by several newspapers in England arc contrary to law. . A resume of the judgement was given in our issue of yesterday. Without doubt such competitions do not come within the scope of legitimate journalism, and the prompt manner in which the newspapers accepted the decision and decided to discontinue the competitions showed that they welcomed release from a monster which had them lightly in its coils. The case, as the Manchester Guardian pointed out, was of extreme interest from various points of view. There was for instance, the question how far a competition which certainly can be regarded as in some degree a matter of skill was also a gamble, since there are, in the latest form of competition, many million chances against a competitor getting the whole of the required number of correct results. But there was another issue involved which was of importance to the general public and to newspapers. The Court devoted attention to the question whether coupon competitions led to the buying of newspapers not for the sake of newspaper-reading but simply for acquiring coupons. It is notorious that they did. That was why newspapers ran them. They were what are known as circulation stunts, designed to increase the circulation figures and so to impress the advertiser, who is supposed to regard figures so obtained as representing as genuine a newspaperreading public as those obtained by journalism. Whether he does ( .so as much as he did is impossible to say, but there is little doubt that he has done so in the past more than he should, and there can be no doubt at all that newspapers have pushed this method of competition to increasingly extravagant lengths in the belief that they could not do without the figures which the method brought to them. Yet is was notorious that countless numbers of people bought papers to which they applied nothing more rational than scissors, and in some cases newsagents were commissioned to buy quantities of papers, cut out the coupons* for their customers, and to throw the rest away. It is therefore of considerable interest to newspapers, advertisers, and the general public that this method of acquiring not readers indeed but circulation, and the advantages which go with it, is to Cease, and that to this extent 1 at least all newspapers will be equally—well, newspapers. The announcement that the circulation of the several journals

concerned showed a remarkable decline when the competitions were withdrawn is proof that the basis of the big circulation claims they 'put forward was not the excellence ol the publications from cither a lilerarj standpoint or as purveyors of news.