weekly newspaper. After a period of difficult
competition with city dailies the surviving weeklies are becoming
recognized as community institutions. Those which are succeeding are
doing so by becoming the voice of the community and the means of its
self-acquaintance. No agency may be more powerful in unifying or
disrupting the life of the local community. This new concept of the
country weekly has been well expressed by W. P. Kirkwood, of the
University of Minnesota:

"Community building was a concept unknown to the editor of
thirty or forty years ago. To-day it is an accepted concept
of dynamic force, full of significance in most of the
country towns of America.

"Community service, as such a concept, is fast finding its
way into the country press--in the Middle West, at least. As
this ideal gains acceptance, giving definite direction to
newspaper effort for the upbuilding of communities, the
press gains an enlarged constituency with a truer conception
of the power and usefulness of the newspaper....

"Community service, community building, then, as a master
motive, establishes the country weekly newspaper publisher
securely in his position of leadership. It assures added
community prosperity and the local development of the finer
satisfactions of life in which he must share, and no other
agency can take this from him, neither the city daily,
coming in from a distance and concerned with the larger
affairs of the larger community, nor the school, nor the
church, nor any other."[44]

In a bulletin on "The Country Weekly in New York State,"[45] Professor
M. V. Atwood, of the New York State College of Agriculture and for
several years a successful publisher, discusses the purposes and future
of the country weekly. He holds that the country weekly is not, as often
stated, and should not be a molder of public opinion, but should rather
express and interpret the sentiment of its constituency.

"The country newspaper," he says, "is a service agency; it
is a community institution like the church, the school, the
library, and the farm and home bureau. It helps all these
institutions to do their work....

"If the country newspaper does not do much thought-molding
it does offer a medium for the dissemination of thought, for
the propagation of ideas of the people of the