The Press: Plain English at French Lick

Possibly because the line of journalistic duty runs through so many dreary assembled prides of Lions, lumber dealers, plumbers and Jaycees. newsmen usually make indifferent conventioners. Faced with a gathering of their own clan, they either ignore it or show up reluctantly, prepared to sit out the interminable sessions in bored and unresponsive silence. Last week’s silver anniversary convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association at French Lick, Ind. was no exception, but before the session was over, the editors got down to some plain talk about themselves. Items: ¶Nieman Curator Louis M. Lyons, onetime Boston Globe reporter, flatly charged that daily journalism has degenerated into a “holding operation, and not holding everywhere [in an] era of broadcasting.” ¶ The problem of the metropolitan press is not television, argued J. Edward Murray, managing editor of the afternoon Los Angeles Mirror News, but a rising competition for both readership and advertising from the suburban press. ¶ From a surprising source—Jack Patterson, circulation manager of the Washington Post and Times Herald—came an indictment of editorial vulnerability to pressure from advertisers. He cited the case of “one of the nation’s largest newspapers” whose publisher, fielding an advertiser’s request that a certain story be dropped, killed the story promptly. “If this happened on the Post,” said Patterson, “the story would probably have been moved from an obscure location to the front page.” To which Los Angeles’ Murray retorted: “That would be just as wrong as killing the story.” ¶ Circulation Manager Patterson also warned that the growth of the daily press is not pacing the growth of the country. Since 1950, he said, morning papers have registered a 10% circulation increase, afternoon papers 8%, against an increase of 15% in the number of U.S. households. ¶ Foreign news reporting, said Ed Stone of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “is dull and sterile for the most part. We’re not reporting on the people out where the people are . . . Hard news has come to mean hard to digest, hard to read and hard to get anybody to understand. I submit that foreign news is becoming local news, and unless we wake up to that fact, we’re living in a dream world of the past.”