Newspaper owner to biz editor: Do what you want with biz section

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Talking Biz News recently reviewed a letter from a daily newspaper owner to the business editor of the paper.

The letter, in total, read:

Wont you kindly lay out the financial pages exactly as you would have them if you had full authority in the matter and if you wanted to produce the best financial pages in town? I don’t think we have sufficiently important quotations, and I don’t think we cover quite enough departments in sufficient detail to make a complete and fully authoritative financial page, and further than that I think we ought to cover produce quite fully in order to make the paper valuable in the country as well as in the city.

There are a great many things in the other papers that we do not have. Personally, I don’t know which of these are valuable or whether all of them are valuable or not. But I know that you can decide all of these matters, and I wish you would kindly lay out two financial pages made up mainly of departmental matter of a kind to compel the interest and to satisfy the demands of the business community.

The date of the letter was May 13, 1914, and the writer was William Randolph Hearst. The letter was to Bertie Charles Forbes, the financial editor of the New York American, Hearst’s paper. It’s doubtful such a letter would be written today.

Forbes, of course, would start a business magazine three years later, but continue to write a column for the American.