Rural Press Lord

Florida editors told each other a disturbing story. A country publisher had sold out, and this was the way it happened:

"How much do you want for your paper?" an agent asked him.

"More than it's worth," he said.

"Well, how much more?"

"A hell of a lot. . . . Oh, $10,000."

"We're prepared to give you $8,000 more than it's worth."

"Mister," said the editor, "you've bought a weekly."

Whatever the truth of the story, Floridians woke up to the fact that the cream of their state's 140 weeklies had been quietly bought up by one man. The owner of the lengthening chain, whose southern links now include 14 weeklies, seven dailies and four radio stations, is a little-known U.S. press lord named John Holliday Perry. His Western Newspaper Union is now the world's biggest newspaper syndicate. He is also the man most responsible for the creeping, canned mediocrity that is overtaking a good many of the nation's rural papers.

In Manhattan, W.N.U. executives said that the Florida weeklies would be guinea pigs in an experiment designed 1) to test reader reaction to W.N.U.'s 100-odd canned features (comics, news pictures, fiction, Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, patterns, editorials, etc.); 2) to show U.S. country editors how to put out better, more profitable papers. But expansive John H. Perry said he had even bigger plans: a nationwide system of state newspaper chains.

Springboard. Perry is a 65-year-old Kentuckian who got into the newspaper business as a lawyer, once owned a piece of the Seattle Star. By 1918 he had saved enough money to buy control of American Press Association, a firm that annually places $3,000,000 worth of national ads in weekly papers.

In 1938 Perry won a long battle for control of W.N.U., which has been syndicating boilerplate for weekly papers since 1875. Ever since, he has been buying up its securities, today boasts that "W.N.U. and I are practically one & the same thing." His 20-odd other corporations include newspapers, paper companies, trade magazines (American Press, Publishers' Auxiliary), realty firms, printing-machinery plants, radio stations.

Few of the nation's 9,000 country editors, virtually all of whom do business with him, realize the extent of his infiltration into the rural press. W.N.U.'s 29 plants supply "ready-print" pages (complete with Lydia Pinkham ads) to 2,500 papers, which buy their stock with W.N.U. canned features on one side, put their local news on the blank side. Hundreds go in debt to W.N.U. whenever they buy equipment--another way of holding them.

Many editors are aware of W.N.U. chiefly as a Chicago editorial office whose boss, Farnham Dudgeon, helps them fill their papers. Dudgeon steers his writers away from controversy, into innocuous, bland writing that will offend neither Republican nor Democratic editors. For papers which get their W.N.U. service ready-printed, and thus have no advance editorial control over its content, he takes special pains to handle religion, politics, etc. so that nothing positive is said. The most popular feature is the "improved" Sunday-school lesson written by a Moody Institute man.

For editors who can't be bothered writing their own editorials, W.N.U. supplies ready-made columns, taking safe stands on Petrillo, famine and Big Cities Must Go. The W.N.U. dress-pattern service draws 30,000 orders a month.

Shock Troops. To help him run W.N.U. and his barnyard of other corporations, President Perry has a staff of executives in Chicago, New York, Florida and other key points. His two handsome sons, John Jr., 29, and Farwell, 25, went to Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the A.A.F., came home to be vice presidents. Next month John Jr. will take over the Florida chain, running it from an office in Ocala. "Whenever we take over a new paper," say the Perrys, "we'll just send in some shock troops and show them how to run things. Weekly editors are set in their ways. Up to now we've had to give them what they want. But in our own papers, we'll give them what we want." John H. Perry Sr. says he has no ambition to use his vast power of the press for anything more sinister than civic beautification. But he likes to speak grandly of "my representatives" in the Florida Legislature, the "four or five governors I've put in."

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