Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 February 1916 — EXCELLENT PAPER HAS SPACE TO RENT [ARTICLE]

EXCELLENT PAPER HAS SPACE TO RENT

Brook Reporter An Excellent Newspaper But Merchants Don’t Seem to Appreciate the Fact.

The Brook Reporter under the management or rather under the editorship of Mark Foresman has become one of the best papers that comes to our exchange table. He has exceeded the field and made a paper that should cause the merchants and every person in the town to stand up and fight for. -But the fighting seems to have been done altogether by Editor Foresman and it has been a fight for existence. The current issue contains eight pages, all home print. It bristles with home news, general news and discussions of timely topics. It’s a real newspaper, but the current issue comes out without a display advertisement by a Brook merchant. If they had combined to boycott the paper the effect could not have been more striking. - The Republican does not pretend to know the reason why there are no ads. We recall that a few years ago when Editor Stonehill published the paper and had only four pages home print that there were lots of ads. We know that the office now contains a typesetting machine and that the editor has printed the news big and little in a fair and honert way and that with a vastly better and more dignified paper the advertisers have dropped out until the current issue has none. So Editor Foresman decided to advertise the spaces for rent and he blocked off a number of quarter pages, double column spaces and single column spaces and appropriated them to some business. For instance, in one he said: “Here is a Good Space For Some Enterprisinb Dry Goods and Grocery Firm That would like to see some new faces in the store occasionally.” In another he had printed: “HERE IS A SPACE For a Good, Live HARDWARE STORE, One That WANTS MORE BUSINESS Than It Has Now.” A dozen different spaces were thus used, and banks, drugstores, automobile salesmen and about every line of business was included in the effort to make the merchants and businessmen appreciate the fact that the paper is being shamefully neglected. In a splendid two-colmn article the editor then tells how an old Brook pioneer, Mr. Home Publicity, who for years was so prominent in the activities of the town, now lays at home a mere skeleton. The article is so clever that The Republican has decided to publish it in"full in a later issue. If every merchant in Brook don’t go down to the office and sign a year’s contract with The Reporter we will think they are due to be shelved and ihake room for a few live ones, that kind who used to keep The Reporter brim full of ads when the news was almost as scarce as the ads are now.