DWINDLING PRESS

Evening Star, Issue 23525, 14 March 1940, Page 2

DWINDLING PRESS

SEQUEL TO COSTS INCREASE Mr Hearsfc’s salvage crew buried the ‘ Chicago Herald and Examiner ’ a ' while back. The staff. I presume, held a wake (writes Forrest Davis). There is a pattern, known only to the craft, for ink-stained carousals when a newspaper breathes its last. A-choked sentimentalist opens a fifth of Scotch, claps it on a city room desk; work-halts as the news tickers die, the lads give tongue to satirical dirges and the rugged rites are on, to end only when a likkored legman inadvertently insults a vestal from the women’s page, and the last copy reader staggers homeward to break the news. The'bereaved journalists. mourning the,demise of their meal ticket, are likewise _ lamenting the decline of daily journalism in these States. At about the time of the Chicago ceremonial.- 'similar- .wakes took place for the ‘ Buffalo Times ’ and the 1 Minneapolis Journal,’ these _ morbid circumstances being also typical and symptomatic. Within the last two years, 72 daily newspapers, have expired .—one every 10 days, on the average. Since the late .Frank- A. Munsey evolved a ghoulish pastime out-of the eradication of newspapers; the mortality rate has steadily, advanced.. .The ranks of the dailies have,been grimly decimated. It is, of course,: too early to foresee whether the daily _ paper in its - present form faces the : eventual fate of the bison. A protracted war might intervene, but wars are costly ; to newspapers as well as nations. We do perceive that newspapering is a contracting industry, like railroading and digging coal. The ‘ Herald and Examiner’s ’ shade entered a tomb already littered with the mastheads of 17 ancestors; 17 newspapers which had been absorbed or otherwise extinguished. Only one morning paper, the thunderous ‘ Tribune,’ was left in the country’s second city.

Fifteen years ago New York had five standard-sized morning gazettes—now there are two. plus two tabloids.• During the World War, first phase, Chicago had four morning newspapers. The reader could express a choice ranging from . Mr Hearst’s chromatic ‘ Examiner ’ to the hardshell 1 InterOcean.’ . A State street merchant, who fell out with the ' Tribune ’ might take space in the ‘ Record-Herald.’ Even the humble reader had a tiny franchise, putting, in his two cents’ worth for or against an editorial policy. In Chicago you now read the * Tribune ’ in the morning or rely on the radio for news. I do not plead that patriotism, civic virtue, or the common good were served better by the old multiplicity than by the monopolistic ‘Tribune’; I merely call attention to the change. Nor is Chicago the only seat of monopoly conditions. In many good-sized cities all the papers are under _ one ownership. For example, Des Moines, Memphis, and Toledo; the former monopolised, journalistically, by the energetic Cowles clan,, the second by ScrippsrHoward, and Toledo by Mr Paul slo'ck. The whole concept of the free Press may have, to he re-examined in the light of this development, but, at the moment, we are, concerned,with causes, not effects. Why do newspapers, .many of-them trusted and venerable, increasingly wither otf the vine? I have yet to hear a satisfactory explanation. .. . Newspaper ‘ publishers themselves blame ’ radio competition , and rising costs in paper, payroll, and taxes. Parenthetically the : effusively headlong coverage by the radio chains_ of the Polish invasion caused alarm in newspaper business offices, which radio’s quickly demonstrated, if perhaps temporary, journalistic ineptitude allayed. War still sells newspapers, although not always at a profit, and the radio’s qualification as . a news medium seems confined pretty much to reporting crises, hall games, fights, and elections. Not so good for the long news haul, radio does, however, take : a larger cut of the advertiser’s dollar year ,by year, being more bothersome there than on the news side. MOUNTING COSTS. Costs have mounted. Canadian spruce is less accessible and the Newspaper Guild, Heywood Broun’s leftwing union, is expensive. By way of illustration, the ‘New York WorldTelegram,’ a fairly generous employer, found that the guild wage scale carved an extra 1,500d0l weekly out of the budget. Nor have revenues kept pace. I’m nob so sure the publishers are not responsible here. More prodigal than their British cousins, they have encouraged 32, 48, and 60-pago newspapers when a great deal less would have sufficed. The London newspaper proprietors; sprinkling ; their product over the British Isles with the density of the dew, have kept their papers within moderate bounds through high advertising rates. Our publishers have lacked either the common sense or the ruthlessness to make the advertiser pay a-lot for a little. Hence a corner of this continent has been ravished of its wood pulp, to no discernibly good purpose. - ■ . . The cost accountants explain m part why the Press dwindles. But X wonder if equally cogent reasons- do not elude their statistics. I refer to the matter of the readability, hence the vendibility of the current Press. I submit that until Hitler’s rashness engulfed them the country’s newspapers ivith exceptions that can be ticked off the fingers of both hands—were tending to be dull. They lacked pulse, immediacy, and. guts. Parts of the periodical Press, even the movies; and I almost said the radio, communicated a livelier sense of what ,was going on. This stodginess I attribute to the rise of the essayist—i.e., the columnist. A large section of the Press, emphasising views rather than news, had gone highbrow on us. Instead of standing eagerly on the sidelines, vigilant to snare a hunk of life in the raw against

the nest edition, editors shovelled in a quire of preachments ranging from the women’s page sages to the Olympian Walter Lippmann, the hortatory Dorothy Thompson, the elemental Westbrook Peglor, the callitbumpian Hugh Johnson, as well as the assorted wisdom of Washington, Broadway, sports, and Hollywood commentators. Such space as the editor had left, after allotting their due to ads., box scores, recipes, social' items, and market tables, he grudgingly yielded to the news. This news readied him from one or more of the three great services, which indiscriminately, spear, the event of the moment, scarcely tarrying to give it body, background, or dimension—ami from tint corps of neglected workers known . as reporters. The reporter, nice the essential man of journalism, ain’t what he used ‘to be Ami it ain't his fault. Almost a.; ornery and competent as Hollywood once imagined him to be, the reporter rides the back elevator these days. The essayists have put his nose out of joint. He is no longer the No. 1 boy on the papers. Reporters. in truth, are becoming as scarce in many city rooms as they are on the Hollywood lots. 1 refer, of course, to the old-fashioned star reporter, if ho hasn’t cozened the boss into giving him a cushy, sedentary job as columnist, he probably is writing sappy serials for the radio, broadcasting news comment, dwelling in Hollywood’s spangled obscurity - or starving on a chicken farm—and ‘ longing piteously for a chance to work on a good story. " Walter Winchell relegated the reporter. Time was when Richard Harding Davis set the pace for the country’s bloods, tourists asked to have Frank Ward O’Malley pointed out to them in the Knickerbocker bar. and Herbert Bayard Swope fanned New York like a giant breeze. In fact, the stirring tradition adorned by Henry M. Stanley. Walter Wellman, Dick Davis, O’Malley, Swope, Floyd Gibbons, , and Frazier Hunt went out of . the window. soon after Winchell quit hoofing, for journalism. A sound tradition, based on a respect for the actualities, its discipline ‘ conditioned Winchell himself for several years. He began his journalistic/career as a reporter _of a primitive kind by hustling local items for the paper. As others have pointed out, ’ Winchell introduced count 17 journalism -to the big time. More pertinent, Winchell showed the> publishers they could make money by syndicating columnists. You can’t syndicate a reporter. Tbo afflatus communicated by the “ think ” columnists, such as Broun, Thompson, Lippmann, Mark Sullivan, Frank Kent, Pegler et alia, soon swept Walter into the depths of ratiocination. Discovering the Bill of Rights, he found’ the temptation irresistible to report Winchell’s patriotic aspirations and forebodings ahead of .the impertinent observations on behaviour which had lengthened his fame and purse. As Winchell declined into prophecy, his contemporaries likewise relaxed. Other Broadway columnists began sniffing at Wall street, listening at political keyholes, misunderstanding most of what they overheard. Ed. Sullivan, a Hollywood gossip, struck the homiletical note, rehearsing Ins kid readers in copybook maxims. Only Lucius Beebe remained true to the The newspaper began as a pamphlet circulating the opinions of an umbrageous printer—or a. self-serving group. News was incidental, being used chiefly as a peg on which to hang a political moral. In maturing, the newspaper, branched, affray, from opinion, holding an objective mirror before, th© worlds w© live in. Seldom a pretty reflection, it wa», r,eal, recognisable, often heroic and as noble' as it was pretty. The essence of news, as pf life, is conflict; man against man for money or women, man against his ehvironment. the- State, the stars. _ Before the Press went fancy, it rejoiced in conflict; creating,as well as recounting it. The Press, in short, was combative, vulgar—and vital. The elder Bennett, Pulitzer, and Hearst kept journalism’s feet- on the ground—or in the mire, as you like. Pulitzer hired no columnists to think for his readers, haranguing them only on the editorial page. With Pulitzer it was first the deed, then the word. Upon Pulitzer’s death, his successors and assigns loaded the world with phrase-makers. Reporters edged into literature, forsaking life, and before long the surrogate was carting the cadaver of a great newspaper over to a converted car bom where Roy Howard published a hopeful, rather frail small town paper that_ had stumbled on the, formula of printing news the reader couldn’t find anywhere else. The Hearst newspaper empire sagged when Mr Hearst. musing beside the Pacific, began stuffing his papers with opinion—his own mostly. Don’t misunderstand me. The newspapers still print news on page 1. often trailing it around the inside columns also. But their attitude, in contrast to the old time, is passive.' Jn the words of a parlour joke current in ray youth, they accept uews with “ dignified acquiescence.”