The Press: At the Waldorf

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David Lawrence was lauded for the steady growth of his complete, factual United States Daily of Washington, D. C.

Albert M. ("Lucky") Snook, Vandyke-bearded publisher of the Aurora, Ill., Beacon-Journal, smiled when stupid photographers asked him to spell his name over again. He had distinguished himself at the Associated Press convention in 1924 by emitting a strange & enthusiastic cry on the appearance of President Calvin Coolidge. His wife, at home in Aurora, heard the cry over the radio, said: "When I recognized Mr. Snook's holler, I knew he was all right." Mr. Snook achieved the epithet of "Lucky" when he won The Chess Game, a painting by John Singer

Sargent, at a lottery in 1924 for the benefit of lay patrons of the Painters' and Sculptors' Gallery Association in Manhattan.*

Zell Hart Deming of the Warren, Ohio, Tribune-Chronicle was the only publisher present who does her own fruit canning.

Laymen. Publishers also heard fine words from the mouths of Rev. Samuel Parkes Cadman, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America; Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., president of General Motors Corp.; Count Hermann Keyserling, philosopher; Mayor James J. Walker of New York City; M. H. Aylesworth, president of the National Broadcasting Corp. The only backslapper at the convention was a onetime blackface comedian named Frank Colton who was hired to parade through corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria as Maj. Amos Hoople, comic strip character syndicated by N. E. A.

Associated Press. Two resolutions were adopted: 1) to extend special voting rights and protest rights to the entire A. P. membership of 1,200 newspapers; 2) to float a new bond issue of $500,000, of which no member can buy more than $1,000 worth.

A. N. P. A. The American Newspaper Publishers' Association adopted a resolution urging Congress to lower postal rates for newspapers (these rates now range from 50% to 900% higher than before the War). A committee on Freedom of the Press was appointed to investigate the doings of outside censors.

In Washington, D. C., a fortnight ago, two of the 217 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors debated what a reputable newspaper should do with the following hypothetical story: A prominent businessman, large advertiser, social leader, philanthropist, is in an automobile accident with a woman who is not his wife; a reporter finds out that the two had been in a roadhouse together and had been drinking before the accident; but the police are willing to hush up the whole affair.

The assembled editors unanimously decided it was a newspaper's duty to its public to publish the story, straight-f orwardly, without bias, without playing up its sensational angle.

Satisfied with their doings, the editors adjourned after electing Walter M. Harrison, managing editor of the Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City, to the presidency of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.