Handouts by Wire

One day last week, a teleprinter in the Los Angeles Mirror-News chattered excitedly with a strange bit of copy. "The following," began a story punched out 6 miles west, "is released by Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, 4614 Sunset Boulevard. Attention city desks. Advance release. 'Mistletoe is for kissing, not for eating.' " Thereafter followed 200 words, drafted by Childrens Hospital, to the effect that mistletoe is poisonous when taken internally. What was remarkable about the story was not the toxicity of mistletoe but the transmission. One of the publicity man's newer gimmicks in his tireless assault on news space is the teleprinter, which delivers handouts to the city desk looking just like copy hot off the A.P. or U.P.I, machine.

This ingenious approach was first tried five years ago in New York by a onetime publicity man named Herbert Muschel. With less than $10,000 in capital, Muschel launched PR News Association in Manhattan, a publicity wholesaler that took copy from commerce and industry and moved it--for an annual membership fee of $25, plus a daily charge of $15 for transmissions--over printers installed free in newspaper offices, broadcasting stations and other communications outlets that permitted the installation. Today Muschel has more than 700 paying customers--among them General Foods Corp., Kaiser Industries Corp. and the American Heart Association Inc.--whose copy is moved daily to 17 nonpaying subscribers, e.g., the New York Times, five other big Manhattan dailies and the U.S. Information Service.

Muschel's success inevitably attracted imitators. In 1958 Chicago's City News Bureau, a journalistic cooperative financed by all four Chicago dailies, launched the PR News Service, a private publicity system patterned after Muschel's brainchild and equally successful. And this year in Los Angeles, two pressagents, incorporated as Transmit, Inc., offered the same service to Southern California newspapers and radio and television stations.

Some newspaper editors like the idea. "I think it's an intelligent device for distributing news releases and handouts from commercial concerns," said the Los Angeles Mirror-News' managing editor, Ed Murray. "A machine like this doesn't commit you to use the stuff, and I think one's judgment of the news value is likely to be better if it comes in by a machine. And it helps cut down on all that opening of letters."

But not all editors share Murray's view. Said Taylor Trumbo, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times: "Our main objection to such a service is that it would cut down on the personal planting of news releases. We are visited by any number of planters, and we get to know those we think are reliable and those we might have to check further on." On that principle, the Times refused to let Transmit install its machine.

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