Doily

Last week University of Minnesota's Minnesota Daily celebrated its 40th birthday by putting out an anniversary issue, throwing a party in its elegant new offices, burning a battered, initial-scarred copy desk in front of its old quarters.

Daily editors were almost as proud of their new home in the Journalism building as they were of their 16,500 readers.*

They occupy an air-conditioned basement wing with soundproof ceilings, glass brick partitions, a dark room, library, reception room with a co-ed receptionist.

The new building cost $275,000. The Daily itself contributed $25,000, the rest came from a $350,000 bequest (now grown to $660,000) from late, great Minnesotan William James Murphy of the Minneapolis Tribune.

The Daily has won many a campaign. Back in the '20s the Daily demanded fire escapes for students' rooming houses, got what it wanted when a house converted into a dormitory burned up. A recent series of indignant stories provoked a faculty investigation of all housing conditions. Currently the Daily is trying to get trolley fares between St. Paul and Minneapolis reduced for students.

The paper's expenditures last year came to about $42,000, income was approximately $42,900. Salaries range downward from the editor's $75 a month to $12 a month for the women's editor, less for salesmen, clerks, stenographers.

Editor Charles Wesley Roberts is a thin, angular senior with a shrewd, Yankee face, a native of Evanston, Ill. After one term at the University of Illinois he transferred to Minnesota so that he could study such nontechnical journalistic subjects as Press & Public Opinion, Contemporary Affairs.

When last fall the Daily published two editions simultaneously for a fortnight, one standard size, one tabloid, Editor Roberts was almost the sole member of his staff who liked the tabloid. Groaned diehard foes of tabloid journalism: "To hell with the doily--we want our Daily back!" But Minnesota's students voted 4,231 to 2,941 to have a tabloid--and got it.

Wrote Editor Roberts, in words that many a worried publisher might echo: "We have learned a lesson. . . . The Daily staff was very nearly complacent in the belief that it was getting out the best newspaper it could. Now we know that there was and is room for improvement. . . ."

*Unlike such a paper as The Dartmouth (which serves the town of Hanover, N. H.), Minnesota's Daily is exclusively a campus journal.

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