The Press: Ink v. Air (Cont'd)

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To the U. S. Press, Radio is a chronic plague, and news broadcasting its most annoying symptom. Last week painful pangs were felt in Pittsburgh, and the Press once more wondered where to look for a cure.

Until a year ago, when the Press undertook to control news broadcasting, all three Pittsburgh newspapers put news on the air. The Press (Scripps-Howard) worked through famed KDKA, first broadcasting station in the world; the Post-Gazette through WWSW; and Hearst's Sun-Telegraph through Hearst's WCAE. Then came the Press-Radio "truce" which forbade radio networks to give more than a smattering of news each day (TIME, Feb. 12). The Pittsburgh newspapers and their stations fell obediently into line.

Into that scene last autumn buzzed a gadfly named Transradio Press Service, an upstart newsgathering organization in the business of serving independent radio stations which preferred not to be bound by the truce (TIME, Oct. 29). In Pittsburgh Transradio found such a station in WJAS, which is locally owned but hooked into the Columbia network. WJAS found a potent sponsor in Kaufmann's department store, biggest, most progressive retail business in Pittsburgh. On New Year's Day, WJAS inaugurated two daily 15-min. news broadcasts, supplied by Transradio and paid for, $1,000 a week, by Kaufmann's.

Pittsburgh publishers were furious. They stormed that Kaufmann's had no more business giving away news than the newspapers would have giving away shirts as circulation gifts. Yet they were in no position to declare war on Kaufmann's since the store was a bountiful advertiser and had made no move to reduce its newspaper budget because of radio expense. Instead the publishers fired protests at the Press-Radio committee which restrained them from broadcasting news themselves. Hearst's Sun-Telegraph was reported to have filed formal notice with the other publishers that, beginning Feb. 1, it would consider itself free to broadcast as much news as it cared to.