Jubilant Tradepaper

A fat, rectangular envelope weighing over two pounds plunked down upon the desks of 10,000 news and admen throughout the land last week. Out of it came the current issue of Editor & Publisher. It was no 50-page regular weekly issue of the Press's No. 1 tradepaper but a glittering, gilt-coated volume of 320 pages. The legend on the cover told the story: GOLDEN JUBILEE NUMBER-1884-1934. Backward through a series of competitors which it had absorbed during half a century, Editor & Publisher traced its origin to a 12-page sheetlet called The Journalist.

The first issue of The Journalist reported newspaper doings in a manner which would make the white hair of Editor & Publisher's present owner stand on end. Excerpts:

P: "Judge Albion W. Tourgee, publisher of the New York Continent ... is a presumptuous ass." P: "Mr. Edward T. Flynn, managing editor of the Herald, will probably enjoy a good vacation. . . . Lily Langtry's attentions to the handsome Mr. Flynn continue to be as marked as ever." P: "Mr. James Gordon Bennett . . . goes through life having 'as good a time as he can, according to his own ideas. . . . There are worse men in every dozen we meet."

In 1912 James Wright Brown bought Editor & Publisher. He had some stiff competition from the terse, reactionary Fourth Estate until he gathered in that tradepaper in 1927.

In 1924, Mr. Brown acquired a new editor for Editor & Publisher, quick-tempered, idealistic Marlen Edwin Pew. At 56, with a thoroughgoing newshawk's career behind him, Marlen Pew speaks of his experience as "the most wonderful, glamorous, satisfying adventure that any man could desire." He helped organize the United Press, edited the Philadelphia News-Post and proudly went to jail for criminal libel because of a political expose. His last newspaper position was as general manager of Hearst's International News Service.

Under Publisher Brown and Editor Pew, Editor & Publisher has been a consistent moneymaker. Its most creditable features are thoroughness and speed. Thousands of words of copy, received by wire in Manhattan on Thursday, are read by subscribers on Friday afternoon. But rarely if ever does Editor & Publisher tread upon a toe within the industry. Perennial targets on its editorial page are Radio, press agentry, censorship, Freedom of the Press, persons who think advertising rates should be lowered or telegraph rates upped. A newsboy at 7, Editor Pew lately plumped for the 14-year limit for newsboys, against the publishers' lobby. He detests most gossip columnists, calls Walter Winchell a "journalistic gangster."

The Golden Jubilee Number produced last week by Editor Pew & staff will doubtless be made required reading in most schools of journalism. As a quick panorama of 50 years of U. S. journalism it is a prodigious work.

Big Stories were covered by a questionnaire to editors who were asked to name the most important news break of the 50 years, barring the War and Armistice. First choice: Lindbergh's flight. Most fruitful news personality and figure: Theodore Roosevelt. Best U. S. editor-publisher: Joseph Pulitzer. Best single "news stunt": New York World's fight against the Ku Klux Klan (1921).

Advertising 50 years ago was described by Earnest Elmo Calkins, who related how agencies bought space in newspapers as cheaply as possible, then scurried around for advertisers to whom to sell it as high as possible. J. Walter Thompson scored a coup by cornering so much newspaper space that other agents had to buy from him.

Syndicates. In the year of Editor & Publisher's birth Samuel Sidney ("S. S.") McClure, 27, quit Century Co. with the idea of buying original fiction from good authors, selling it to newspapers in different cities. He had no money for printed stationery. His young wife had often to choose between meat for dinner and postage stamps for the sales letters. She always chose stamps. That year and the next S. S. McClure sold stories by Kipling, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, etc., to a dozen papers. The newspaper syndicate business in the U. S. was started. Teller of the tale in last week's Editor &Publisher: S. S. McClure, 77.

Yarns about newshawks made the most readable matter in the Jubilee Number. Recalled was the enterprise of Dick Spillane who swam and rowed through the Galveston flood of 1900 (7,000 dead) to find a working telegraph wire, dictate a four-hour story to the New York Herald. "Cosey" Noble, Sunday editor of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, turned down several of Rudyard Kipling's now famed stories, presented in person, because "they were not up to the high literary standard of the Examiner." "Jim" Crown, city editor of the New Orleans States, locked all the doors of a church meeting which turned into a brawl and refused to admit even the police until he had noted the name of every person present. Henry Justin Smith, managing editor of the Chicago Daily News, told how a diver, grateful for a courtesy extended by the paper years before, telephoned from the bottom of Lake Michigan to the News desk, introduced himself, gave an eye-witness account of an underwater construction accident which had just killed 14 men.

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