PICKING UP NEWS.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLVI, Issue 2646, 15 May 1923, Page 8

PICKING UP NEWS.

NEWSPAPER METHODS DEFENDED. The New York Times raps Professor Roland G. Usher, of St. Louis, sharply over the knuckles for giving fresh currency to "au old myth" about table despatches published in newspepers. In a recent address to a women's club, Dr User. who. occupies a Chair of Histroy, said that nothingwas yet really known about the French in the Ruhr beyond the fact that they had gone there. "The cable news you read," he said, " is not written on the other side except in rare instances. The cost of cabling' such lengthy accounts would be prohibitive That news is sent in skeleton dispatches of from eight to ten lines, and is expanded by the re-write men into two columns of stuff." Whereupon the Times remarks that the general manager of the Associated Press could prove from the record of his own office that this is an entire delusion. Not even by a news agency is any real use made of skeletonised or coded messages. Words like "the" or 'and*' are left out of the dispatches, but their omission is more than made up by the careful indictaions of punctuation—the wards "stop," 'unquote," and so on. The defender of the Press against Professor Usher's charge of bogus publications (says the Manchester Guardian) still further refutes him by reference to statistics drawn from the Xew York Times itself. According to the records of its auditing department the number of words that paper received from its foreign correspondents by cable and wireless during the ten days beginning 30th January was 92,274. This daily average of more than 9000 words means practically a full eight-column page of special foreign news. The dispatches as received would be recognised by anyone who read them as the same dispatches as those printed though in some cases the published form is shorter than the cabled text, owing to the fight,for space in a crowded newspaper. As to the Ruhr in particular, the Times declares that it immediately sent two correspondents into that area, one from the French and one from the German side, and had two others going from place to place on the borders. These men gathered all the news and comments that could be got on the spot and cabled thousands of words daily.