Article December 30, 1911 Issue

Last week [Nov. 29] there was published in Boston a...

Boston Saturday Sun

Last week [Nov. 29] there was published in Boston a ninety-six-page special Thanksgiving edition of a newspaper; designed to celebrate the close of its third successful year as a pioneer of clean journalism. This newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, was founded by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. The bringing forth each year of a Thanksgiving number, because the first issue of the paper came at that season, calls the attention of other newspaper publishers and the public to the ideals upon which the Monitor was founded, and causes fresh comment every twelve months as to the degree in which this unique newspaper has succeeded in making its ideals of practical benefit to mankind.

That the paper has progressed is revealed on every page of its third anniversary number. It has found and catered to a field unoccupied by any other daily journal. Some have said it has created a field of its own. Probably it is more just to say that the field was always there, waiting for the coming of a clean, reliable, high-purposed newspaper that could always be counted upon to censor its news and advertising in such a manner as to leave the contents live and sparkling, meeting the needs of readers of all classes and all shades of opinion, yet so elevated in tone that the most refined reader could not object to a single word. A comparison of today's Monitor with the early copies of three years ago proves unmistakably that the paper has accomplished more than merely to go forward with the times. Its larger and broader method of treating world news, its exhaustive manner of handling special articles that supplement the news, its institution of additional departments to meet popular needs as the editors have discovered those needs—all this shows the adaptability of the Monitor to the desires of that increasing proportion of the public which is demanding cleaner and more rational newspapers.

Three years of service on the part of the Monitor have changed the opinion of many newspaper publishers, who once voiced the thought that clean journalism was doomed to failure at the outset because of lack of any popular interest in "good news." Taking the majority of newspapers as a criterion, it was true that the evil in the news seemed to overbalance the good, and it was not strange that the average editor acquired a habit of looking for the bad news. He found that for which he looked; hence it seemed to him that the disasters and distresses of humanity actually filled a greater part of the calendar of social activity than did the constructive and uplifting elements.

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