How hard the Royal Commission on the Press is working
I don't know, but it is making a powerful amount of work for other people. Quite apart from its voluminous questionnaire-32 questions, the last divided into twelve sub-questions—on an immense variety of aspects of journalistic activity, demands are made for information regarding the finances of each journal which even in the case of so modest a publication as The Spectator would, it is computed, provide an accountant with a full week's work. Take part of a single
sub-head of one clause :
"Expenditure of each newspaper or periodical, divided into manage- ment and establishment ; editorial ; advertising department salaries and expenses ; paper and ink ; production ; circulation and publishing, including transport ; canvassing and publicity ; readers' insurance ; other expenditure." This (and more), it may be observed, is required for each of the last ten financial years. With the strongest desire to be scrupulously polite to the Commission, and a profound consciousness of the importance of papers like The Spectator in the general order of things, I cannot refrain from asking what useful purpose can be served by the laborious excavation of this and other similar information—for much more is asked for—at a time of notorious labour shortage.
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