Best In the U. S.

This week the Christian Science Monitor, chosen from among more than 1,000 top-flight U.S. dailies, won the 13th annual Francis Wayland Ayer award for typographical excellence. Such recognition was long overdue.

One of the most influential newspapers in the world, certainly one of the ten best in the U.S., the Monitor, with 144,000 subscribers, is way down the list in circulation. Staid, clean, published by intelli gent people for intelligent people, it is not popular; it accents information, shuns sheer entertainment.

Idealistic Start. The Monitor was launched Nov. 25, 1908, a few months after the late Mary Baker Glover Eddy, Christian Science's founder, shocked at the sensational newspapers of that day, wrote her Board of Trustees: "It is my request that you start a daily newspaper.

. . . Let there be no delay. . . ." Today the Monitor is published in a block-big, sedate Boston palace that looks more like a bank than a newspaper plant.

Even its pressmen and linotypers are un-begrimed. In its cathedral-quiet newsroom, newsmen (85% of them Christian Scientists) always wear their coats, never cuss or smoke.

Caring little for profit, the Monitor annually rejects close to $1,000,000 in advertisements it does not consider whole some (coffee, tea, liquor, tobacco ads; ads for tombstones, firearms; ads containing the abbreviation "Xmas"). Despite this policy the Monitor has made money. In its best year, 1929, it netted $400,000. In the past few years, because war has cut off overseas advertisers and subscribers, the Monitor has been losing a little.

The man who runs the show is scholarly, affable, 37-year-old Erwin Dain ("Spike") Canham, one of the nation's ablest news men. A Christian Scientist and a Rhodes scholar, he worked for the Monitor over seas and in Washington before promotion to his present job three years ago.

Editor Canham writes occasional editorials but mainly keeps a hand on his paper's excellent foreign and U.S. correspondents -- men and women like Wash ington Bureau Chief Roscoe Drummond and War Correspondent Edmund Stevens.

Realistic Finish. Perhaps the toughest part of Spike Canham's job was to get out a newspaper in the face of the Monitor's old religious taboos against mention of such things as death, disease, disaster, crime. To Christian Scientists these are "error." The Monitor often had to perform journalistic acrobatics to print the news. Once, unable to say "dead," a Monitor writer referred to "passed-on mules."

Under Managing Editor Canham's guidance the Monitor's austere crust is softening. The paper ignored Film Actor Errol Flynn's rape trial but did print the verdict briefly. When 489 people died in Boston's Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, the Monitor refrained from running pictures, or horrifying descriptions of the victims' screams, but did give Page One display to the story and printed all victims' names. And the Monitor today, as it never did in World War I, covers war news straight. Mentioning casualties and cannon in its clean, unruffled prose, it realistically hides no brutal war facts from its sensitive readers' eyes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.