Nelson Evening Mail FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1930 THE EMPIRE’S PRESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 30 May 1930, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1930 THE EMPIRE’S PRESS

THE fourth Imperial Press Conference will meet in London in June, and will continue sitting till the end of that month. The first of these gatherings of pressmen from all over the Empire was held in Great Britain in the year 1909, the second was held in Canada in 1920, the third in Australia in 1925. The Conference is convened by the Empire Press Union, a committee of which body will be responsible for making all arrangements for the success of the Conference. It is expected that approximately one hundred owners of newspapers, editors and directors of journals and periodicals, published in the Empire, will attend the Conference, and these representatives of tho Fourth Estate will be the guests of

"The proprietors of tho newspaper and periodical Press of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . . . during their passages to and from England and during the programme in the British Isles.”

The agenda of the Conference will be in two parts, the first dealing with

technical subjects of great importance to the Press of the Empire, such as the

improvement of inter-Empire means of communication by wireless telegraphy, cables, and aircraft, besides improvements in the means by which newspapers are produced. The second part of the agenda covers matters of nioro general interest, and tlioso will be dealt with, not only by members of the Conference, but by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the President of the British Board of Trade, Mr Stanley Baldwin, and Mr Lloyd George; for it is recognised that, though the Press of the Empire is a privately-owned institution and is therefore,, and must continuo to be, independent of the great political, commercial, and industrial combinations, groups, and interests in the Empire, nevertheless the Press, being one of the Empire’s great institutions, is responsible to a largo extent for promoting the political, economic, and social welfare ot the Empire as a whole, and of the 101 countries, protectorates, dependencies, and islands of which if is composed. We have often stressed the importance of annihilating the distance which separated' the component parts of the widely-scattered British Empire, by improving and cheapening their means of intercommunication. This applies particularly to the Press of the Empire, whose usefulness is measured by the facilities of such intercommunication. The more perfect and the cheaper those facilities are, the more news the Press can give to its myriad readers. The news of the world is practically limitless, but the power of the Press to publish it to its readers is limited by the means of intercommunication at its disposal and their cost. It therefore follows that the more perfect and the cheaper the means of inter-Empire communication are, the better it is for the Press and the people. That, we take it, will be one of the most important matters which will be discussed at the forthcoming Conference, and it is to be hoped that the discussion will bear fruit in the direction indicated.

We are not carping at the existing means of intercommunication : they were much poorer thirty years ago, and were positively feeble when this journal was first published, over sixty years, ago. But it is realised that, with the arrival of wireless and aircraft, there are placed in the hands of the nations of the Empire means which may .greatly facilitate communication between them, and that there is much to he done in that direction. The cable-services have been admirable, hut supplemented by wireless, and assisted by aerial mail-services, it should he possible to provide the Press with facilities for collecting and disseminating news which, compared with those of to-day, should be as great ?n improvement as the existing facilities are superior to those which were available sixty years ago. If the Imperial Press Conference succeeds in speeding up this good work, it will deserve well of the pressmen and people of the Empire.