Actor Perspective: The Newspapers

A regular series of legal Q&A columns could attract readership and help sell newspaper subscriptions in a competitive situation between lib­eral and conservative Fennoman newspapers.^[680] Indeed, Q&A columns were special features of the newspaper enticing potential readers to preor­der it. As early as 1883, the newspaper Laatokka, published in southeast­ern Finland, announced in Uusi Suometar that even if people had raised legal questions few experts had answered them in their pages. Consequently, the editors of Laatokka announced that from the next year on, they would use the services of an experienced lawyer to answer such questions. (However, the identity of this lawyer remains unknown.) This was repeated in Laatokka’s own subscription advertisement in 18 8 6.^[681] The same applied to the liberal Fennoman newspapers Wiipurin Sanomat and Uusi Savo: legal questions and answers were expressly mentioned as a reason to subscribe.^[682]

The public may have started to expect them. Ita-Suomen Sanomat, a liberal Fennoman newspaper, established in 1894, also announced in December 1897 that “competent lawyers” answered legal questions in its Q&A column.^[683] For example, Helsingin Sanomat invested heavily in its legal Q&A columns for many years hiring two important Helsinki lawyers to answer over a hundred yearly questions. This was also used as a market­ing strategy.

Another paper that invested heavily on dozens of expert contributors from various fields was the agricultural periodical Pellervo. Since its estab­lishment in 1899, its mission was to sow “seeds of knowledge and skills” for Finnish farmers, thereby improving their position. As Pellervo wanted to become the newspaper of choice of all its readers, it welcomed their questions and promised to answer them.^[685] However, demonstrating that the use of experts in legal Q&A columns was by no means cheap, Pellervo had to refrain from starting a special section for communal administration and other communal matters with questions being answered by specialised lawyers. As this was both relatively expensive and outside Pellervo's actual scope, the editorial staff had appealed to the communes asking their will­ingness to contribute with a yearly ten-mark fee in exchange of their get­ting legal advice for free. However, the project was not realised because of insufficient interest.^[686]

Even with a more generalist approach, Pellervo's strategy in creating a rapport with its readers was so successful that within the decade, it had become the biggest agricultural newspaper in the Nordic countries with its over 33,000 subscribers. In 1911, Pellervo demonstrated using statistics that it had been answering its readers' questions more than ever in 1910: in 1906, it answered 77 questions, and in 1910, the number of answers had increased to 230. Only a fraction of these queries were legal. Still, Pellervo observed that in 1910 the experts answered several legal ques­tions related especially to the new Land Tenancy Decree of 1909 (maanvuokra-asetus), road building and maintenance, boundary disputes, fencing, and ditching duties.^[687] Even other specialist journals, such as the teachers' Opettajain Lehti, provided a Q&A column on professional teaching-related legal questions.^[688]

The Socialist newspaper Tyo advertised the “Workers’ Calendar”— which was going to include a short legal dictionary and also came to con­tain, for example, legal formularies.^[689] Its editors obviously knew that workers needed more legal advice and knowledge than there was available.

Mixtures of ideology and commercial interest lay behind the topical legal Q&A columns in Finnish newspapers and journals. However, as a regular legal Q&A column required both human and financial resources, several columns were discontinued after a period. Yet, they could form an important channel of interaction between editors and readers which helped boost circulation as did the “Legal Helps” column in the Chicago Defender in the 1910s.^[691] Some legal questions and answers provoked many letters from readers and lively debates ensued as in Opettajain Lehti in 1907.^[692] Such reactions indicate interest from the readership, and they helped to forge the relationship between editors and subscribers as well as sell the periodical.