he wrote, never print
anything that a scrub-woman
cannot understand
‘no paper of mass appeal could afford to be without a staff astrologist or a palmist who could tell you how to improve your fortune’. ‘The space we devote to politics is a dead loss in circulation.’ He wrote ‘Never print anything that a scrub-woman in a skyscraper cannot understand’, a statement paralleled by R. D. Blumenfeld in England ‘never to forget the cabman’s wife’.
So said Emile Gauvreau in his book, My Last Million Readers (New York, 1941) as quoted by Harold Adams Innis in his book, The Press: A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, London, 1949).
Mr. Innis writes: “In the intense competition for circulation and for advertising success was won by the use of reading matter and picture appeal in competition with the magazines and by the use of features which emphasized gossip about movie stars.“
That year again?
1949.
No Haiku For You 