News on the Air

After squabbling bitterly for almost a year over news-broadcasting, the press and the radio last week reached an armistice. Its basis was a plan suggested a month ago after Manhattan conferences between Presidents Paley of Columbia Broadcasting and Aylesworth of NBC, Roy W. Howard, Karl A. Bickel of United Press and representatives for AP and INS. Important points:

A bureau of seven representing the news agencies and the broadcasters will furnish radio stations with 30-word bulletins twice each day. In return, broadcasting companies will not release the morning bulletin before 9:30 a. m., the evening bulletin before 9 p. m. News broadcasts will be limited to five minutes each and the time will not be sold to sponsors. Radio news commentators will confine themselves to background matter, eliminate spot news. Columbia will dissolve its news service and NBC will not organize a similar bureau. Expenses of the newspapers' broadcasting bureau will be paid by broadcasters.

Delayed by a month's haggling over details, the plan will become effective March 1. Chosen as chairman of the committee to organize the radio news bureau last week was Business Manager Edwin S. Friendly of the New York Sun. For editor, the committee picked James W. Barrett, who was the last city editor of the New York World, and, until lately, city editor of the New York American.

Radio and newsmen wondered last week whether the new agreement was really a settlement of the old controversy or only one more excuse to keep it alive. The squabble between newspapers and radio began in earnest last summer when Columbia started its own news-gathering bureau. In two months Paul White, onetime United Pressman, had organized a staff of 600 correspondents. Columbia's News Service was successful but NBC, whose President Aylesworth is a bosom crony of A. P.'s Kent Cooper, had not had time to project a similar bureau before newspapers began strenuously objecting to Columbia's. Radio men know they are likely to need the support of newspapers if and when the Government tries to make radio stations pay special taxes.

Major weaknesses in last week's agreement were 1) the fact that it is not a contract but a protocol; 2) independent stations, not members of the National Association of Broadcasters, are in no way bound by the agreement.

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