Following World War II the Soviet press became more concerned about the "stylistic perfection" of journalists and started to reduce the number of published letters from actual workers in favor of more professionally written articles. In one such example, in the early 1950s the party's Gorky oblast paper (a small regional) had 1,890 worker correspondents and 1,150 village correspondents, and reduced that to 530 and 550 respectively. Young journalists working as editors of these submissions from workers and villagers had complained that the "re-writing" was a type of "donkey-work" and was less dignified than writing for other departments. These opinions, though rejected by the papers, were a sign of the underlying loss of consciousness of the traditional functions of the press.