Meriden (Connecticut) Morning Record, June 15, 1910, page 9:
NEWSPAPER BY 'PHONE FOR CHICAGO
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Chicago, June 13--Chicago is to have a daily newspaper that will leave nothing to be desired by the laziest man in the world. It will not only megaphone its news to its subscribers, thus doing away with the labor of reading, but will lull him to sleep in the evening with the strains of grand opera or the score of the newest newest musical comedy in the downtown theatres.
The company is the Telephone Herald, an offshoot of the Telefon Hirmondo, an institution which has been in operation in Budapest, Hungary, for many years. Patent rights have been purchased by an American corporation, an arrangement has been entered into with the Bell Telephone Company, and yesterday promoters of the concern, who up to this time had been working in New York, arrived in this city to make preparations for installing the Telephone Herald plant. A demonstration is to be given some time during the middle of the month, which it is claimed will convince all the skeptics that the plan is bound to be a success.
The advance agent of the company is a Hungarian, Ladislaus de Doory, who is at the Kaiserhof Hotel. The president of the company is Manly M. Gilliam and the secretary and treasurere William H. Alexander, both of New York city. The capital stock is given as $1,000,000, fully subscribed.
According to Mr. de Doory, Chicago is going to rise up and give the Telephone Herald such a welcome as it has not extended in any other enterprise that ever came into the city. He sees in the Telephone Herald not only a boon to lazy men, and busy men too, for that matter, and a blessing to housewives, but a household convenience that children will cry for and invalids praise from their sickbeds.
"For 5 cents a day," said Mr. de Doory, "we will put into the home of Chicagoans an arrangement that will not only serve them from 8 in the morning until 11 at night with all the news of the world for the day just as quick as it comes into the city by wire, but will give them a concert for luncheon, together with a resume of the day's news and all the gossip of the city. In the evening we will entertain the whole family with a concert--not a phonograph concert, mind you, but a real concert, just as it is sung, or played downtown--and at night we will put them to sleep with popular selections or music of the greate masters. Can you beat it? Why, within a year everybody in Chicago, from hod carriers to millionaires, will have the Telephone Herald in the house. They can't live without it.
"But that isn't all. That is the bare skeleton of our program. Once or twice a week we propose to furnish lectures to subscribers. The woman of the house can sit down to her sewing and hear what some eminent speaker is saying to a body of club women--at Orchestra Hall, for instance. Between numbers we will let them know what the latest bargains are in the big department stores.
"We have also a special program for children, and I think that this will fill a long felt want with couples who are trying to bring up families of young children in flats so crowded that the youngsters drive their parents nearly insane to find something at which they can amuse themselves. This program will consist of stories, told during fixed hours of the day. A special "stentor"--that is the name we use to describe the persons who talk into the distributing end of the Telephone Herald--will be employed for this work, and the stories will be of a character calculated to make the most restless child sit up and take notice.
"However, the chief part of our business will be the megaphone of news. Our idea is--and we have the facilities for carrying it out--to give our subscribers a resume of what the afternoon newspapers are carrying just as fast as the news happens. We will carry not only the regular market quotations, the racing news and the baseball results, but the news of every character, from cyclones, and earthquakes, to the newest discoveries in stage stars and the latest styles in millinery. It will be possible with our facilities for a subscriber to sit in his home and hear a jury return its verdict in a big trial down town."