The Press: Davis to Denver

Denver is an evening paper city and its evening paper is the Post which shrieked its way to the top under rough, tough old Fred Bonfils. Denver is also a city in which Scripps-Howard has had some of the hardest going in its career. Last week the Scripps-Howard high command picked a new proconsul for its Rocky Mountain News, prayed for a change in its journalistic luck.

The Denver free-for-all between Publishers Bonfils and Roy Wilson Howard came to a nominal end in 1928 when the Post discontinued a morning edition and the News withdrew from the evening field. Yet the struggle for prestige and profits was still as keen as ever. That Denverites, for all Scripps-Howard might do, continue to like their blatant, cocksure Post is evidenced by the fact that that sheet with its red headlines and its frank sensationalism has more than four times the weekday circulation of the News, nearly seven times its Sunday circulation. Scripps-Howard editors came & went with dismal regularity on the News without materially changing this situation. Last year it was Charles B. McCabe. Last month, it was Charles E. Lounsbury,a Denverite, who was given an indefinite leave of absence. Last week it was Forrest Davis, crack Scripps-Howard reporter, who found himself behind the editor’s desk of the News.

In his 20-odd years of newspapering Forrest Davis had never before held down an executive job. Born in Indiana, this son of a Presbyterian minister gravitated to Manhattan, became the ace newshawk of the World-Telegram. Equally good at straight reporting or feature writing, he was given a roving commission for the Scripps-Howard chain last year. He had just finished a Midwest tour “to find out what America is really thinking about,” when the Denver editorship came his way.

Denverites liked his looks, which suggest Cinemactor Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan. Quick with compliments, Editor Davis got off on the right foot by saluting Denver as “the civilized capital of a glamorous, robust Rocky Mountain Empire with a culture of its own which I hope to understand and enter into.”