Motography (Apr-Dec 1911)

May. 1911. MOTOGRAPHY 65 tious account. The last few lines are a deliberate fabrication. The film released by George Kleine never bore the "gory" ending described by the reporter. We state this on the authority of the George Kleine company. What defense can the motion picture make against charges brought by ignorance and malice and grandstand plays? Almost none, except to nail the lies as they occur, and trust that an ever-ascending effort will eventually win an unassailable position in the eyes of public opinion. THE HOUSE ORGAN. HOUSE organs are advertising circulars or bulletins made up in imitation of bonafide trade journals and issued periodically. Mose of them are distributed free, at least in large part; although they frequently contain enough original information to make them worth a subscription price. Indeed, in some respects they have the advantage of genuine trade papers in the matter of news-gathering and preparing technical articles. They generally have at the disposal of their editors the whole technical staff of the manufacturers who publish them, as well as the services of the field representatives of those manufacturers, who, if not actually directed to furnish material for the weekly or monthly organ, do so nevertheless from various motives. Therefore we have no argument with the house organ on the basis of quality. When such a publication is issued by a large and powerful house, or even a group of such houses, any lack of interesting material must be wholly due to inefficient editing rather than to an inherent defect in the scheme. But we do say that the actual effect of the house organ is always more or less vicious. Listen to what Hugh M. AVilson, vice president of the McGraw Publishing Company, said about such publications in an address before the Technical Publicity Association, New York : It needs no argument to prove that the chief requisites of a good medium in the industrial field are: 1. A journal with resources enough to provide an adequate staff, and with courage enough to have opinions of its own and to publish essential facts pertaining to the ideas and events of the day. 2. A paid circulation large enough to thoroughly cover its field, and 3. A policy regarding advertising that will make its advertising pages look like a well-tilled field and not like a graveyard. Now, you ask what all this has to do with house organs. It has this to do with them: The house organ journalistically considered is essentially reactionary. It assumes the airs and the habiliments of a periodical. It is a special exclusive advertisement in the guise of a trade journal. The more it looks like, and the larger the number of people who believe it to be the "real thing," the more the "house" likes the melody of its organ. The more widespread the belief among those who receive it that it is an impartial exponent of truth, pure and undefiled, the more completely it serves the purpose for which it is published. When the reader awakes, when he realizes that he has been reading a special plea, his distrust is aroused. He generalizes from the special instance, and what is the result? The result is that he puts the house organs and the technical papers all in the same category and doubts the good faith of the whole lot. The house organ, therefore, tends to rob the technical journal of its most valuable asset, its most precious attribute — the trust and confidence of its readers in its purity of purpose. And what has the house organ gained for itself? Absolutely nothing that it could not have got in other ways at less cost. But the damage does not stop there. Take the question of circulation. The advertisers of this country in recent years very properly have been insisting that trade and technical journals should show up and tell their actual paid circulation. A great deal of good has been done by this demand. The business has been purged of its sample copy secretions. It has given the honest publisher the advantage to which he is entitled. People are more likely to buy a well-edited than a poorly edited journal. But they are not likely to buy a thing that they think they should get for nothing. The house organ comes to them without money and without price. The house organ again "wears the mien and simulates the voice of the trade journal. The reader reasons, "If this comes to me for nothing, why should I pay for that?" The house organ again has muddied the waters. And again, the prize obtained by its piracy is not worth what it might cost. Some of the house organs are able and attractive productions. They must cost a great deal of money. Some of them publish engineering articles of almost incomparable merit. They are able to command the pens of the highly cultivated engineers employed by their own houses. They acquire on demand manuscripts which would but for the first call of the house organ find their way to the editorial offices of the technical papers where they would be welcomed at good prices. I believe that it is fair to say that these articles if published in the best technical papers would reach a much larger audience, would do more good to the profession and industry, and in so far as they contain or imply commercial publicity, they would do the "house" far more good than when confined to the more limited and less attentive audience of the house organ. The advocates of the house organ may say: "Granting the truth of all you claim, we still contend that we get better results from our organs than you can give us in your papers. If you are hurt that is your funeral. We are not our brothers' keepers." My reply to that is that it has yet to be proven that the same care and attention, the same intelligent and enthusiastic effort to make good copy, the same expenditure of money in addition to that already so generously spent by many of these concerns in the technical papers would not produce better returns than are now obtained from house organs. But let us leave that and look at the larger question. You are your brothers' keepers. You cannot divorce yourselves from your environment. And the technical press is a vital part of your environment. A weak, inefficient, servile press i? a curse to a nation. A contemptible, impotent, unsympathetic technical press would be a blight upon the industry in which it has its being. The business interests of this country might, conceivably, by concerted action, take measures to milk and dwarf its technical press, but the calamity would fall most heavily upon those business interests. If the trade and technical papers have not hitherto in all cases produced satisfactory returns, the remedy is not to be found in advertisers going into the publishing business. The better way would be to improve the publications already established. The editors and publishers of these journals are not heedless to suggestion, nor are they lacking in that professional spirit which is ever eager to embrace ideas looking to improvement and progress. Those advertisers who publish house organs seem to me to occupy a "most inconsistent and untenable position. They demand (and rightly demand) that we shall publish matter of Hie first order, and they do what they can to close to us the source of supply for much of that matter. They insist upon their engineers and experts giving them first call on technical articles pertaining to their operations, and they are hurt in their feelings when we refuse to reprint as original matter those articles at second hand. They call for courage and impartiality in us, and the breath of their nostrils is prejudice and special pleading. They complain that there are too many trade and technical journals, and they do what they can to make this confusion worse confounded. They endeavor to gain special prominence by differentiating themselves from the common herd with their own periodicals, and these organs have become so numerous that they are likely to drown in their own flood. They insist (and rightly) on paid circulation for us. and they are riotously generous with a free circulation of their own.