It’s no wonder that metro newspapers of the 1950s were extremely profitable: They had a virtual monopoly on classified ads, employed kids to deliver their product and had few if any skilled graphic artists on the payroll. Just try to make sense of this 1955 "picture-graph" from the Minneapolis Tribune. Appearing with a story headlined “Simple Guide to State School Finances,” it’s most likely a legislative handout hauled back to the newsroom by the beat writer and slapped directly into print.
 
If you squint really hard, you can see that the credit for this mess goes to the State Citizens Committee on Public Education.