The Press: The Best Bridge

Arkansas is a south central state of the United States, officially designated by its general assembly as the "Land of Opportunity."

—Encyclopaedia Britannica

It is quite a way from Arkansas, and particularly from long-embattled Little Rock, to the scholarly Chicago offices of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But Pulitzer Prizewinner Harry Scott Ashmore, 44, is about to make the trip.

As executive editor of Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette, Ashmore won fame for courage and reason during the city's 1957 segregationist riots. Two years later Ashmore went to work for the Fund for the Republic, was commissioned by the Ford Foundation to study how to make the press more self-responsible. Last week he took the $50,000-a-year job as editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As EB's 19th-editor, Ashmore replaces Walter Yust, who died last February after 22 years on the job.

Ashmore. who takes over this week, is submitting some recommendations based on his year's Fund for the Republic study of the press. He proposes that U.S. newspapers endow, in perpetuity, a commission to sit in continuous examination of the press's strengths and weaknesses. As a man who has long believed that "journalism should serve as a two-way bridge between the world of ideas and the world of men," Harry Ashmore will probably find many bridge-building opportunities on the Encyclopaedia Britannica.