Have you noticed that newspapers get to be huge just before holidays and especially on Fridays before any week end? Monday newspapers are thin and after holiday rushes are over and THE special day recedes into the past, the sales begin and the thin first of the week papers swell in size until they get to be humungous for the week end.  I bring this up because I recognize, as must everyone who buys these papers, that advertising is the life blood of newsprint and the news itself cannot pay for the costs of paper, ink and the people who write, edit and organize the pages in the papers.

When I was a Boy Scout Leader many years ago there was a campaign to get the Scouts to buy Boys Life, the magazine of that organization.  There was a kit that showed you how to influence the thinking of the kids to buy Boys Life by showing the percentages of pages in each publication devoted to stories, news and ADVERTISEMENTS.  It was an interesting project.

You had to buy two copies of Boys Life and two copies of a daily paper.  Then you cut out all the news (or stories in Boys Life) and strung up four strings across the room at eye level.  You then draped the news and stories on half the strings and the advertisements on the other two strings.  The comparison was compelling and the contrast was dramatic.  What you bought in Boys Life was practically no advertisements and what you bought in the NEWSPAPER was mostly advertisements.  This is true today although I haven’t seen a Boys Life in years.  We buy daily papers that contain more advertisements than news and sometimes you have to hunt to find something that you were looking for amidst the color and art of pages designed to catch your eye and sell you something.

Television is the same and, I fear, so is the use of the internet – or, at least, the attempt is to make you pay for what you read in the pages of internet stories except where the payment is made by advertisers who have their wares pop up in many colors and actively catch you attention while you only wanted one article that you needed.

What this is all about is that commerce drives the economy and the successful economy drives the life of the nation.  I can understand why this is so although I would wish for a different arrangement.  I have one complaint and that is connected to the availability and readability of the COMICS. In our local paper, the Miami Herald has reduced the size of the comic strips to the point where they are so small that it is hard to read or understand them. They bury them in something called Tropical Life. Of course, at my age, I look to the good old days when the newspapers had something of value in them.