Test in Competition

On the witness stand a blonde prostitute listened attentively as defense counsel read smoky passages from love letters she had written to one of the two male defendants, both accused of white slavery.

She listened no more attentively than the five Minneapolis Tribune newsmen ranged along reporters' row in Minneapolis' U.S.

District Court. During the reading, the five reporters industriously scribbled notes. Then they hurried back to the paper, where each wrote his own story about the prostitute's day in court.. Next morning the Tribune carried one of the stories --but only one.

The Tribune's mass coverage of the trial of a notorious Minneapolis hoodlum, Isadore ("Kid Cann") Blumenfeld, and his henchman Monte Perkins was City Editor Robert T. Smith's experimental answer to a problem that increasingly troubles U.S. newsmen: how to keep staffers at competitive pitch on papers without opposition (about 85% of the nation's 1,750 dailies now have no opposition).

How to Do It. Able, young (34) City Editor Smith, who holds as an article of faith that reporters do their best work under the spur of competition, decided to set up his own sort of rivalry on the Tribune (circ. 223,559), which has no opposition in the Minneapolis morning field. He assigned four fledgling reporters to cover the Kid Cann trial--along with one of the Tribune's top newsmen, veteran (ten years) Edward F. Magnuson, 34. Ordered Smith: "Don't compare notes. Pretend you each are the only reporter from the Tribune at the trial." The best story would be the one the Tribune carried next morning.

The results were gratifying. "On most papers," said Smith, "any one of the stories would have been acceptable." But there were detectable differences between the stories of the youngsters and that of Veteran Magnuson. For example, a lead paragraph by one of the younger reporters had to do with the trial's dullest hours: "Eight government witnesses testified Thursday afternoon in the white slave trial of Isadore (Kid Cann) Blumenfeld and Monte Perkins as to hotel registrations of admitted prostitute Marilyn Tollefson."

How It Feels. Only Magnuson's lead explained the defense's purpose in reading the prostitute's love letters: "A blonde prostitute's testimony in the Isadore (Kid Cann) Blumenfeld white slavery case ended Thursday as the defense tried to show it was not just money that lured her across state lines." Only Magnuson's story limned in the feel of the courtroom ("its 50-foot-high walls faded and the paint peeling"); only his gave much dimension to the courtroom characters ("[Blumenfeld] crooked an elbow on the railing, leaned his head on his hand, wiped his face occasionally with a handkerchief"). And only Magnuson's story ran in the Tribune.

But even while losing, the younger reporters had gained by Editor Smith's experiment. They had had a lesson they could hardly have learned in any other way on a noncompetitive newspaper: how it feels to get beat on a story. Said one, after it was all over: "When I'm the only reporter covering a story, I'm never really sure--at least it's hard to convince myself --I've goofed. This kind of exercise saves me the painful task of convincing myself.

I can easily see--and learn--what I've done wrong."

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