The Press: Fading Star

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Editor Don R. Mellett of the now defunct Canton, Ohio News was a newsman of the Front Page stripe: a tough and incorruptible crusader, he uncovered an unholy alliance between racketeers and the Canton city government, was gunned down by his enemies in 1926 and became one of U.S. journalism's martyrs. Last week in Norman, Okla., at the thirty-first annual Don R. Mellett Memorial Lecture, Lee Hills, executive editor of the Knight newspaper chain, used' the occasion to measure the gulf between the journalism of Mellett's time and today. Said Hills: "For many years journalism in the big city newsrooms was based on the star system. When a big story broke—a jail break, a sensational murder, some hanky-panky at city hall—the city editor called for the star and plastered his colorful prose all over the front page. This was nice work. But the oldtime star needed no special knowledge in any field, little formal education, and often no real command of the language.

"We have gone far beyond that era.

The star system is outmoded. Newspapers have a far greater responsibility than to expose crime, as they have done so brilliantly in the past.

"This time of specialists, of reporters schooled in political science, the mysteries of utility rate structures, philosophies of education, the physical sciences, high finance, health and medicine, aviation, and other areas where to be ignorant journalistically is to invoke the scorn of our better-informed readers. Never before have people so hankered for the fact, spun out plainly and at length. We need to tell the story of our age in simple, living language with precise meanings. We will not only inform but we will educate a generation."