The Press: Pinch

To its own sports staff and later to all members' editors, A.P. last week dispatched a grave memo:

". . . There should be a ban on flowery, overenthusiastic lyrical sports writing for the duration. . . . Remembering the exploits of military heroes, it does not seem appropriate to overdo the use of such words as 'courageous,' 'gallant,' 'fighting'. ... It doesn't take much 'courage' to overcome a two-run lead in the ninth. . . ."

Other more important signs of war's pinch in the press:

> Comics are rapidly shrinking from five to four columns, with many a comic and Sunday magazine section due to go tabloid.

> Many sports sections are being cut in size. (Example: The New York Herald Tribune is down about three columns from a year ago.)

> Though newsprint (pegged at $50 a ton) is still plentiful, newspapers, take nothing for granted. Warnings have got round that the pinch will likely come in the fall, when new Canadian aluminum and chemical plants may need the electric power formerly used in newsprint manufacture.

Biggest newspaper problem of the moment, however, is ODT's order, effective June 1, that newspapers limit local deliveries to one a day, in order to save rubber and gasoline. In big cities, where newsstands account for a majority of circulation, publishers have complained that one edition a day would ruin them. They suggest pooling trucks, abolishing "returns," printing fewer editions but more than one. They claim their plan would' save more mileage than the Government's.

Triumphantly the New York Daily News made capital of curtailment on deliveries. In nearly two pages of text and pictures it gloated over newly acquired horses and wagons ("seventy oat-burners and their equipage, rubberless and gasless from nose to tail-board"). The News has frequently growsed about the ineptitudes of rubber and gas rationing. But last week the horse-&-buggy News was almost good humored. Said Driver John Pisano: "A newspaper delivery horse learns the turns and stops, and the driver just pitches the bundles off."