I asked this on the Honolulu Advertiser comments section of the article about “Persistent Requests for Obama’s Birth Certificate”. The person I was conversing with wouldn’t respond but I know we’ve got some good, sound minds here so I’ll ask it here.
If the Hawaii DOH office in 1961 made a master list of births each week and sent it to the newspapers what would you expect to see in the actual newspapers?
Would the editors have the option of printing some, all, or none of the announcements? Would they have discretion to print the names at different times?
Given the requirement that birth certificates from the local registrar were to be delivered to the state registrar weekly except for the outlying islands which sent theirs in by mail on the 4th of the month, what patterns would you expect to see in the newspapers? What variables would create flukes?
Part of the scientific process is to come up with a hypothesis and then to test it by seeing how well it predicts the outcomes. A hypothesis that doesn’t accurately predict what is actually observed fails the test and has to be tweaked or outright abandoned.
So let’s do that with the birth announcements. The hypothesis is that the state DOH made up a master list of births for the week and sent the list to the newspapers which then published those announcements.
If that was true, what would we expect to see?
If this was an accepted and regular weeklly practice, which it appears to have been, the newspaper would have a firm deadline for receipt of such a list that would be well in advance of the publication date. Maybe due on Thursday for Sunday publication. Do we know date of publication for the Obama announcement?
This kind of information, not time-sensitive, would have been typeset in advance (this was still during the days of linotype), when there was no deadline pressure. Unless there was some huge breaking story, those columns would be ready for printing before the daily news copy was sent to the backshop for setting.
Barring an exceptional event, the announcements would be printed in full, the entire list. And the editor in charge of that section of the paper would likely expect the list to be longer on the weeks when the outer islands reported.
Things like birth announcements (and weddings, and obits) sell papers. That’s why small local papers are doing better than the big newsy dailies in the internet era. Folks like to see their names in print, and those of their neighbors. This was not just a public service, but also a way to boost circulation.
Yes, I worked at a newspaper in linotype days, watched firsthand the switch to offset.
Pardon me now while I go feed the pet pterodactyl.