OK, you get ONE MORE wish. Don't waste it!

Michael Miner can be forgiven for his rather unimaginative wish for the New Year—that more people will start reading newspapers. Why should they? We’re tired of this perennial kvetch, especially coming from Chicago, where just about every trick has been tried other than improving the quality of the actual newspaper.

We were reminded the other day of the fact that Chicago, during the Gilded Age, used to have more than thirty daily newspapers. (We’re also reminded: That’s a helluva lot of tinder set at the feet of old Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow. A purifying fire, to be sure.) Even up until 1960, the windy city had eight major dailies.

In almost every other field of publishing, the drift has been clear: toward specialization and away from generalization. You find enthusiasts and you service them. You stop worrying about quantity in your demographics and start worrying about quality. This, it seems to us, is where advertising departments have been light-years ahead of editorial departments. THEY’LL be glad to tell you the unique selling proposition of their publications, while the editors sit on their thumbs and send around instant messages carping about this afternoon’s “business seminar.” But newspapers are the last great holdouts of the Bigger is Always Better school.

In a curious way, editors and advertisers are the idiots in this equation. It is the advertisers—well, more often their knucklehead media-buyers—who distrust the smoke-and-mirrors of the media kit. They like to see raw, audited circulation numbers, and hang the rest of it. Editors, too, distrust “reader profiles” and the endless smorgasboard of pie-charts and bar-graphs that purport to isolate every minor buying habit of their beloved reader, from a vague intention in the next fiscal quarter to buy a refrigerator from Southest Asia, to which direction they put the toilet paper on the roll. This skepticism is understandable, especially if you are an editor who has no clear picture in your own mind of who your reader might be. One does not create a reader from a collection of purchasing habits. One creates a reader with the imagination. (This is the real failure of the Chicago “reds.”)

We have no real quarrel with our own advertising people. We love them. They dress beautifully, they’re smart, they’re quick with a dirty joke, their pinkies are in the air almost as often as our own, and so on. Most important, they understand that the editors’ committment to a ~certain kind of reader~ is inviolable. And that this a bankable asset.

Newspapers should not wish to be widely read. They should wish to be more thoroughly and passionately read. Consider it a matter of public safety.—The Editor in Cheese