The Press: Noble Experiment

Was the story of the 20th Century too vast and confusing for the men who were trying to report it? Earnest, grey-haired Sevellon Brown thought the answer was an emphatic Yes. Like many a publisher with a conscience, he had an uneasy feeling that the press was falling down on its job. The daily montages of headlines, in his Providence Journal and Bulletin and elsewhere, were nagging proof that the times demanded better papers, bigger and broader newsmen—on penalty of chaos.

He was not content just to worry about it. Once, on a visit to Columbia University, Publisher Brown had been stirred by a brilliant lecture on editorial writing, had wished that other editors could have heard it too. In Providence he had tried an experiment. To expose his key staffers (and indirectly his readers) to new ideas, he haled visiting bigwigs into his editorial conferences. The brain-picking bees brought no spectacular changes in his papers, but they goaded his staff into taking thought. A year ago, he got a bigger idea.

Last week, at Columbia University, Sevellon Brown helped open the first seminar of the American Press Institute. Thirty-eight publishers had thought enough of his idea to chip in $170,000 to finance a two-year trial run. Aim: through marathon bull sessions, to add a cubit to the stature of the U.S. press. Plan: for two to four weeks each, groups of 25 working newspapermen (average age of the first 25 students, 44; average newspaper experience, 22 years) would face a tougher grind than any undergraduate class. They would live, study and argue together, from eight to twelve hours a day.

To keep their trains of thought from being derailed, the Institute picked as discussion leaders such editors as the New York Times’s Turner Catledge, the Cleveland Press’s Louis B. Seltzer, the Louisville Courier-Journal’s James Pope. Among scheduled guest lecturers: the C.I.O.’s black-haired James B. Carey and opinion samplers George Gallup and Elmo Roper.

How much good the seminars would do, if any, nobody knew. But last week Founder Brown warned the maiden class that journalism somehow must jack itself up above the level of novelty, shock and violence. “Unless we brilliantly improve our skills and techniques,” he said, “we face … a crisis of meaninglessness. Innumerable brief reports, presented without perspective or background, can only drive the reader into a mental fog. . . . We must lift our sights. . . .”