New Hotel, Old Hatchet

Never completely happy bedfellows are William Randolph Hearst, Roy Wilson Howard and the Associated Press. In the old days they were always at one another's throats. Roy Howard, as president of that lusty upstart, the United Press, battled the powerful old AP at every turn. Publisher Hearst, with a news service of his own (International), was long viewed with grave distrust by his brother members of AP.

The Hearst hatchet was buried nine years ago at an AP annual meeting in Manhattan's old Waldorf-Astoria, and Hearst-papers now hold 15 memberships. Last year William Randolph Hearst Jr. was elected to the honorable but empty job of an AP vice president. Roy Howard, too, as head of Scripps-Howard Newspapers, made his peace with AP several years ago and now controls six memberships. Last year he visited the Orient at the same time as Kent Cooper, AP's able general manager, and the two were wined and dined together like the best of friends.

Last week AP had its annual meeting in the new Waldorf-Astoria, and out came the old hatchet. This time it was brandished over the question of news pictures. First to pick it up was Hearst's brainy general counsel, hawk-nosed John Francis Neylan of San Francisco.

No sooner had the meeting convened and the directors' report been read than Lawyer Neylan was on his feet, demanding a showdown on what had been rumored for many a day--AP's plan to send all its news pictures by telephoto. The idea originated with American Telephone & Telegraph Co. which had spent $2,800,000 on a telephoto system, only to abandon it last summer for lack of patronage. Prime reason: pictures were rarely good or important enough to warrant the expense of telephoto transmission instead of fast delivery by airmail. Secondary reasons: there were transmitting stations in only eight cities. It took an hour to prepare a picture for transmission, and the results usually were fuzzy.

Last autumn A. T. & T. approached all news picture agencies with a new scheme. It had developed equipment far surpassing any in existence. The fruit of ten years' work by the Bell Laboratories, the equipment was built on a new principle.* It could send 11 sq. in. of picture per minute, half a newspaper page in 17 min. The result was so nearly perfect that a layman could hardly distinguish between original print and telephoto. But A. T. & T. would not consider re-entering the precarious picture business by itself. Rather, it wanted one or more of the picture agencies to take the project over, leasing the $16,000 machines and A. T. & T. wires at $56 per mile per year.

Hearst's International News Photos turned it down. So did Times Wide World and Acme (a first cousin to United Press and Scripps-Howard). But AP's Kent Cooper called together his directors and his smart picture chief, Norris Huse. They visualized a nationwide network of leased wires flashing all AP pictures to AP papers 24 hours a day--pictures moving over the wires simultaneously with the news, appearing in print alongside the stories as a matter of routine. The job would cost more than a million dollars a year, $560,000 in wire tolls alone. With careful secrecy AP sent Editor Huse on the road to sound out member publishers in 25 key cities. In many cities one publisher was invited to underwrite the telephoto project for his territory, with the understanding that if AP adopted it, any other member paper could subscribe to the service and reduce the underwriter's cost. Operations could begin next autumn. When first making his rounds, Editor Huse prudently steered clear of all Hearst and Scripps-Howard papers since both owned competitive picture services.

First to underwrite the telephoto project was the Baltimore Sun, which was also the first newspaper in the U. S. to install a Morse telegraph wire and a linotype machine. Other underwriters included the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Times, Washington Star, Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland News, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Globe Democrat, Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal, Minneapolis Tribune, Des Moines Register and Tribune, Omaha World-Herald, Milwaukee Journal, Miami Daily News, Dayton News, Buffalo News, Buffalo Courier-Express, Syracuse Herald, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Dallas News and the Dallas Times-Herald. The cost ranged from $25,000 in smaller cities up to a high of $150,000 in Manhattan, underwritten for five years by the picture-paper Daily News.

That was the situation last week when Hearst Lawyer Neylan stood up in meeting and flayed the scheme as "the most unjustifiable extravagance in the history of journalism," scolded the AP management for pulling A. T. & T.'s $2,800,000 chestnut out of the fire. And shoulder to shoulder with him stood jaunty little Publisher Roy Wilson Howard.

AP's President Frank B. Noyes, publisher of the rich and flaccid Washington Star, was quick to point to the stripe of the opposition. Competitors Hearst and Scripps-Howard were always backward about cooperating with AP projects, said he, and "it is the difference of interests that is concerned here."

Boomed Lawyer Neylan: "I am very sorry that it is felt necessary to dig up old prejudices to explain this telephoto matter." He referred to rising costs of newspaper production, to the demands of labor unions and editorial guilds. Then: "My heart aches for the guilds and I think they have the best claim of anybody. But why in the name of God should the newspapers get worried about Walter Gifford [president of A. T. & T.]? Have you seen the A. T. & T. balance sheet . . .? If this plan is generally adopted none of us will have an advantage but the cost will still be there."

Snapped Publisher Howard: "Many of us will have to contribute even if we don't want it, for competitive reasons. We shortly will be met with the task of meeting the arguments of the news guilds, and they can't be laughed off. When they say we have money for everything but editorial brains, they've got to be answered."

All day the battle raged, with Publishers Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune and Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News aiding the attackers. But the defense was impregnable. Lawyer Neylan's motion to submit the question to an AP plebiscite was downed 19 to 95, and a vote of confidence in the AP management passed.

There was strong talk that Hearst and Scripps-Howard would join forces, establish a telephoto system to compete with AP's. Nothing would more delight A. T. & T., in whose pocket a rival system would put another $500,000 per year.

Observers predicted that the project would radically change the face of U. S. journalism since there will be no such thing as a stale picture. All newspapers using the service will use many more pictures than before.

One other newsworthy event marked the AP meeting the election of new directors. Until a few years ago the AP directorate was threatened with dry rot. Its members were nearly all elderly, ultraconservative, stodgy publishers who had next to nothing to do with news collection and distribution. Then comparative youngsters like Paul Patterson, 55, of the Baltimore Sun and George Longan, 54, of the Kansas City Star were elected. Last week two new directors were chosen, both of them zestful, up-&-coming newsmen. One was Editor Paul Bellamy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. New England born, Harvard bred, Paul Bellamy looks and acts younger than his 49 years. His father was Edward Bellamy, famed author of Looking Backward. Breaking in on the Springfield Union, he went to the Plain Dealer in 1907, was city editor two years later. He is stout, round-faced, conscientious, a shirt-sleeve editor. Immensely popular among newsmen, he was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (TIME, April 30).

The other new director is John Cowles, 35, who, with his father Gardner Cowles Sr., publishes the virile and hugely profitable Des Moines Register and Tribune. His younger brother Gardner Jr. ("Mike"), 31, is executive editor of the morning and afternoon editions which practice a rivalry for news rarely seen in a single shop. Their father's newspaper was already strong when John Cowles, fresh from Harvard in 1920, went to work on it. Few big city dailies run a more breathless gamut of news, pictures and features than the Register and Tribune. It prints every feature column, comic strip and type of story that is likely to interest anybody; it blankets Des Moines (pop.: 143,000) and overflows through Iowa with a circulation of 238,000. Softspoken, inquisitive John Cowles is a roving publisher who finds every excuse to travel to Manhattan and Washington, asking questions, keeping tab on the news.

*A positive print is placed on a cylinder which revolves 100 times per minute and moves horizontally one inch per minute. A tiny beam of light, trained on the picture at a 45DEG angle, is reflected to a "light valve." Inside the valve is a shutter which opens and shuts 1,200 times per second. The reflected beam sends the lights & shadows of the picture through the shutter to a conventional photo-electric cell ("electric eye"). There the image is translated into electric impulses which flash over the wires--10,000 mi., if desired--to the receiving machine. The receiver reverses the process, registering the image on a sensitized film, which is then developed and printed like any ordinary picture.

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