I found this article below by our local historian H. M Brown and just could not be believe the struggle the Perth Examiner had getting paid for their newspapers. It reminded me of my paper delivery days when I would wait for weeks to get paid. Thank goodness no one gave me a chicken or a side of pork. There was definitely trouble my friend, yes trouble my friend in the town of Perth.
A struggle for journalistic existence was claimed before long in the Perth Examiner editor’s pleas for subscription payments. Some of John Stewart’s five hundred subscribers seemed to have failed to pay their annual fifteen shillings, either in cash or in kind. At the first of January in 1830, traditional time for the settling of debts, the editor made this forthright demand:
To Our Patrons. We want our payment for the Examiner, and we must have it ; for we can do no longer without it. When our Agents distribute the papers, they will please ask every mother’s son of a subscriber for his cash, and all kinds of grain will be received at this office, at the market price, from our friends in the adjoining townships. Since the commencement of our establishment we have sunk above 600 pounds in it, and (will it be believed?) we have not yet received enough to pay our Foreman’s wages.
Two weeks later he added:
Wanted. Wheat, Corn, Rye, Barley, Oats, Pork or Cash, in payment for the Examiner. Last year we did not press any one for payment, as we knew the failure of crops was the sole reason of the farmer not paying us. This reason no longer exists. All the appeals which we made for payment, since the new crops came in, have been hitherto disregarded. The sleighing time has now come on, and payment we must have in one way or another. Our patrons, we trust, will have no excuse.
Finally two months later came a further appeal:
Acknowledgments. Since the winter set in we have received from our Patrons 15 bushels of oats, 7 of wheat and about as much cash as would pay for one week’s boarding for our workmen. Our total receipts since the first of Dec. are not sufficient to cover the cost of one week’s publication. Now if our friends mean to bring us anything they had better set about it in reality, and avail themselves of the very first dash of sleighing, as the season is far advanced, time is precious, and we cannot wait for payments till next winter.
lindaseccaspina 