In Manhattan

It was convention week for the town criers. Manhattan was overrun with them—the men who keep their ears to the ground ,their eyes on public whimsy, their private thoughts to themselves—for town criers may no longer air their personal prejudices; the men who flood the land morning, noon and night with news, entertainment, instruction and the merchants' persuasions to buy, buy, buy, in bundles and bales and stacks and mountains of newspapers, which every year grow more numerous, multi-paged and hefty.

A. P. First there was a convention of the Associated Press, an organization formed a quarter-century ago by newspaper publishers, to distribute news among themselves on a nonprofit-making basis. The routine business of this gathering was to consider ways and means of expanding and expediting news distribution, to hear Secretary of State Kellogg speak on foreign relations, and to elect as officers; Frank B. Noyes (Washington Star), president; Robert R. McCormick (Chicago Tribune), first vice president; J. N. Heiskell (Little Rock, Ark., Gazette), second vice president. They reelected: Melville E. Stone (a former general manager) secretary, and Kent Cooper, able Hoosier, general manager.

The gathering had also to referee the second round of a bitter fight between powerful Publisher Hearst and spunky Publisher Frank E. Gannett of Rochester, N. Y. The latter's newspaper, the Times-Union, competes most successfully with the Hearstian Rochester Journal and Post-Express. Knowing that he could serve his readers better and compete still more successfully, Publisher Gannett sought, two years ago, to enroll his Times-Union in the Associated Press and bring into its columns the swift, unmuddied current of news that the A. P. pumps from all parts of the U. S. and the rest of the world. Publisher Hearst, whose Rochester paper, has access to that current, determined to block Publisher Gannett and did so by representing to the Associated Press that to grant another franchise would lower the prestige and money value of his own, and indirectly, of all other A. P. franchises.

Later, hearing complaints that Publisher Hearst's use of, and reciprocal contributions to, the A. P. current were not what they might be at Rochester, the A. P. directors unanimously agreed that the best interests of the A. P. would be served by inviting Publisher Gannett to accept a franchise. They sent letters to all the A. P. members urging them to vote favorably when this motion came up. Alarmed, Publisher Hearst commanded his chief scribe, Arthur Brisbane, to circularize all the A. P. members and ask them if they were going to permit their votes to be thus "forced" by the directors; if, having "scotched" this reptilian idea in 1924, they were going to sit by and permit "the right of protest" to be overridden in 1926; if they were going to permit Publisher Gannett to be "given a franchise for nothing that many other members have spent fortunes to obtain?" Scribe Brisbane, furthermore, denied that there had been any complaints against Publisher Hearst's conduct as an A. P. member at Rochester.