January, 1922
POPULATION, 40; CIRCULATON, 627
By ALFRED POWERS, School of Journalism
NO OTHER newspaper in the United States is published in so small a town as the La Pine Inter-Mountain.
La Pine has a population of forty, but, the Inter-Montain has a circulation of 627. You can count the business establishments of the town on the fingers of your two hands, but—another marvel—eleven of the twenty-four columns of the paper are regularly filled with paying ads.
This “biggest paper in the smallest
ever, in a satisfactory and interesting way.
Just before he came to La Pine .
a saw mill had burned down. He went out among the ruins and found shafts and pulleys, by an ingenious use of which he regulates the speed of the engine for various purposes. He also has a saw
trimmer and a stereotyping outfit, both
of which he made.
When he moved into his building he fell heir to an old counter, into the spacious back of which he placed racks to hold forty cases of type, all right there handy without taking up any extra room, he
town” was established in 1910, and shows no signs of an early demise. The publisher is William F. Arnold, a young man with lots of push and go, and versatility enough to print a paper clean of mechanical errors and filled entirely with local news and ads. He uses no boiler plate, or practically none. The front page is entirely free of advertisements, and its makeup and heads are attractive. The contents do not give
says.
first things to be decided in the morning between him and his wife, who is his
only helper, is how long they are going to work. Maybe they decide that three o’clock in the afternoon will be the proper time to knock off, or maybe it is six o’clock. Whatever the morning decision is as to the hour, the whistle blows at that time for them.
the impression of being laboriously pre pared and of sometimes being put in to
fill up, but rather as being carefully
The Inter-Mountain is the only paper
in a territory of a thousand square miles. It takes the editor 1? days by automobile to cover his field. La Pine itself is 32 miles from Bend, on the main automobile road from The Dalles to California. It
selected from a large grist.
Apropos of a statement made at the state convention by Farmer Smith, that
personals usually said too little, generally being content to remark that Mr. and Mrs. Bill Jones came to town, without saying what they came for, Mr. Arnold said
This matter of efficiency and do
ing away with waste motion is in fact something of a hobby of his. One of the
is a stage town, with daily connections
that no personal in the Inter-Mountain
with Silver Lake, Fort Rock, Fremont and Bend, and tri-weekly connections
was worth less than six lines.
with Crescent, Fort Klamath and Klam
While the Inter-Mountain was estab lished in 1910, Mr. Arnold did not take charge of it until 1912. During the war
ath Falls. All these stages one day in the week carry mail sacks heavily laden with copies of the Inter-Mountain.
be suspended the paper, and started it up again a little less than a year ago.
One copy of a paper to every one and a half square miles would not be con sidered a high average by a metropolitan
His equipment consisted of a unitype machine, a diamond press, a ten by fif
teen jobber, and a gas engine with the one speed of four hundred revolutions. He worked out the speed situation, how
circulation manager, but it is no indict ment if the people aren’t there, and it is all right, as in this instance, if there are enough square miles.
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