Printing Business

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31304, 25 February 1967, Page 16

Printing Business

stacked with books, the floor by glass-panelled erections, temporary offices of one sort or another, so casually set down and put up that their walls did not square with those of the containing floor. This gave me to think about the difference between the dead Victorian-Edwardian age and the emerging one. It still gives me to think . . . about Britain’s readiness to face E.E.C. for example. I am sure that, if I’d asked to see Victor Gollancz, my way round the corner of those glass hutments would have been cleared. But I was not brave enuough. « * #

Still on the subject of the printing business, I cannot help referring to Mr E. P. J. Cavendish’s comments, in “The Press,” on the present state and prospects of English newspapers. “Many of them deserve to go because they are bad papers.” A hard saying, but a just one. They are bad because they have turned aside from their prime functions, to supply news, comprehensively and in fair balance, to giving slants on the news and excessive emphasis to the silliest and most sordid sort of news. Inevitably, while this pursuit of the utmost sale among the silliest readers has gone on, the few newspapers faithful to their prime function—“ The Times,” the “Guardian,” the “Scotsman,” the “Daily Telegraph”—have languished, to the point at which “The Times” has become an appanage of Lord Thomson and the “Guardian” has an uneasy future, perhaps in reverting to its original and famous provincial status and forgetting London—though I hope London will never forget it. But the wave recedes and begins to strand the monsters it has floated. Good newspapers are made by good, well-trained professionals; and that is why I was impressed by Mr Cavendish's remark that the contemporary press, in Britain, provides or exacts “comparatively little

training” but what is gained by working on a paper, which tends to perpetuate the outmoded thinking of an inbred school. What this means, to put it shortly, is that a paper in need of slants and angles and sensations can easily breed the bright boys to provide them; but they are not the boys, by tradition or training or taste, to nourish it with news, hard won, hard sieved, hard written. In fact, what seems to be happening is exactly what a journalist nurtured in a different school—l mean, me —foresaw and hoped for. To which I shall add just this. Do most New Zealand newspaper readers realise that, whatever may be the faults and failings of their daily papers (and I am acutely, anxiously conscious of them), they have the best national newspaper service in the world? Best in comprehensiveness, international, national, and local? Best in objectivity; that is, in separating fact from comment? Best in authenticity, being derived substantially from the best attested sources? The simple fact is that, if New Zealand readers drew their news from any of the most popular sources (hitherto) in Britain, they would go short, badly; they would be misinformed, often; and they would be misguided, as often or oftener. Since it is known that I bold and have expressed some cross opinions about the New Zealand press, it is well to take this chance of saying something to the other effect. As, indeed, I have always taken care to do.

Mr E. P. Salmon, president of the Auckland Employers’ Association, was inducted as president of the New Zealand Institute of Management at the institute’s annual meeting in Christchurch. He succeeds Mr E. G. Stonestreet, of Christchurch. Mr Salmon Is the managing director of Percy Salmon Wills Grainger, Ltd., printers and publishers of Auckland.