Mr. Gannett's Discovery

Frank Ernest Gannett, 62, has discovered Washington. As a newspaperman for over 40 years, 37 of them as publisher (newspapers: New York, 18; Connecticut, 1; New Jersey, 1; Illinois, 1), he had often railed and ranted at Washington as the seat of radical forces. But he had closed his eyes to the fact that the U.S. capital is also the news capital.

This week the Gannett Washington bureau opened with a good, hardworking, conservative newspaperman as its head. Chunky, balding, cigar-smoking Cecil Bunyan Dickson is 44, a onetime cowboy, soda jerk, Marine, A.P.man, I.N.S.man and, until he took his new job, chief reporter of the Chicago Sun's Washington bureau. He is a Texas-minded John Garner man, a great friend of Speaker Sam Rayburn, and the tough, independent kind of reporter who never trades news.

News Bureau or Else. Washington newsmen wondered how stubborn Frank Gannett came to hire deceptively cherubic Cecil Dickson. The facts: at their first meeting Dickson, mindful of the arch-Republican Gannett slant, growled: "If you want to make a political bureau out of a news bureau, you had just as well not open it, and you had better look for another bureau manager. I'm not a Republican. I'm a real Jeffersonian Democrat. But I'm a newsman, nothing else . . . and if I take over any news bureau, it's going to be a news bureau."

The publisher wondered where he could find his old pal Lord Beaverbrook, then in the U.S. Dickson picked up a phone and had the answer in two minutes, from White House sources. Gannett was impressed. Dickson looked like his man.

What Is News? The publisher and his new employe have one thing in common: they think the New Deal is a mess. Gannett says he wants this mess intimately interpreted. That is fine with Dickson, who has covered Washington news for 16 years, has little sympathy with the way press associations handle it. Says Dickson:

"... An average man can't plow through all the mass of headlines and text and have time left to sit down and think what the news really means to him. He gets a whole lot of pictures, like a series of disjoined subjects thrown on a screen. When it's all over, he doesn't know what the hell it means to him. He wants to know what it means to his pocketbook, to his-belly ... his living habits, his clothes, his home. That's the way we are going to try to write the news. ..."

If all goes well, Dickson will have three years to accomplish his aim. He has a contract (at better than $10,000 annual salary), three reporters to start with. He will also write a column three or four times a week. (Gannett editors have already rejected its proposed title: Horizons Unlimited. Too literary.)

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