In Manhattan

It was convention week for the town criers. Manhattan was overrun with them--the men who keep their ears to the ground ,their eyes on public whimsy, their private thoughts to themselves--for town criers may no longer air their personal prejudices; the men who flood the land morning, noon and night with news, entertainment, instruction and the merchants' persuasions to buy, buy, buy, in bundles and bales and stacks and mountains of newspapers, which every year grow more numerous, multi-paged and hefty.

A. P. First there was a convention of the Associated Press, an organization formed a quarter-century ago by newspaper publishers, to distribute news among themselves on a nonprofit-making basis. The routine business of this gathering was to consider ways and means of expanding and expediting news distribution, to hear Secretary of State Kellogg speak on foreign relations, and to elect as officers; Frank B. Noyes (Washington Star), president; Robert R. McCormick (Chicago Tribune), first vice president; J. N. Heiskell (Little Rock, Ark., Gazette), second vice president. They reelected: Melville E. Stone (a former general manager) secretary, and Kent Cooper, able Hoosier, general manager.

The gathering had also to referee the second round of a bitter fight between powerful Publisher Hearst and spunky Publisher Frank E. Gannett of Rochester, N. Y. The latter's newspaper, the Times-Union, competes most successfully with the Hearstian Rochester Journal and Post-Express. Knowing that he could serve his readers better and compete still more successfully, Publisher Gannett sought, two years ago, to enroll his Times-Union in the Associated Press and bring into its columns the swift, unmuddied current of news that the A. P. pumps from all parts of the U. S. and the rest of the world. Publisher Hearst, whose Rochester paper, has access to that current, determined to block Publisher Gannett and did so by representing to the Associated Press that to grant another franchise would lower the prestige and money value of his own, and indirectly, of all other A. P. franchises.

Later, hearing complaints that Publisher Hearst's use of, and reciprocal contributions to, the A. P. current were not what they might be at Rochester, the A. P. directors unanimously agreed that the best interests of the A. P. would be served by inviting Publisher Gannett to accept a franchise. They sent letters to all the A. P. members urging them to vote favorably when this motion came up. Alarmed, Publisher Hearst commanded his chief scribe, Arthur Brisbane, to circularize all the A. P. members and ask them if they were going to permit their votes to be thus "forced" by the directors; if, having "scotched" this reptilian idea in 1924, they were going to sit by and permit "the right of protest" to be overridden in 1926; if they were going to permit Publisher Gannett to be "given a franchise for nothing that many other members have spent fortunes to obtain?" Scribe Brisbane, furthermore, denied that there had been any complaints against Publisher Hearst's conduct as an A. P. member at Rochester.

The Brisbane eloquence, like the Darrow, is irresistible. The A. P. members again voted for Hearst, against Gannett. Rochester, N. Y., will continue to get no A. P. news save that which is larded in amid Hearst news and decorated with Hearst headlines.

Publishers. The biggest, the central town criers' gathering, was that of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association. They met in the big Waldorf ballroom and reporters stood at the door jotting down, together with the great names of U. S. newspaperdom, other publishing names variously distinguished: J. W. Green of the Buffalo Express, who claimed he had attended more A. N. P. A. conventions than any other man alive (the reporter failed to note the record number); Zell Hart Deming of the Warren, Ohio, Tribune-Chronicle, "only publisher in the U. S. who does her own fruitcanning"; the ample Frank Rostock, who gripped in his hand, to help him fight down a craving for chocolate creams, a medal presented him by Albert of Belgium as thanks for taking a strong Allied stand in the Cincinnati Post in defiance of his many pro-German readers; John B. Perkins, whose Journal has nine editions daily in one of the country's largest butter-and-egg centres, Sioux City, la.; E. B. Stahlman, owner of the Nashville, Tenn., Banner, who had lived 83 years and seen his grandson become his managing director.

The keynote of the A. N. P. A. business sessions was--like all current U. S. keynotes--expansion of facilities, extension of functions. To expand, to extend, to go on making money, the publishers felt that they must get certain matters adjusted. They protested loudly, as usual, that postal rates were extortionate. They hinted that advertising rates were too low. They declared that the public must be aroused to the pulpwood shortage with which they, the publishers, might soon be faced.

Officers. To succeed S. E. Thomason (Chicago Tribune) as their president, the publishers elected John Stewart Bryan (Richmond News-Leader). Edward H. Butler (Buffalo Evening News), George M. Rogers (Cleveland Plain Dealer) and Howard Davis (New York Herald Tribune) were other new officers--vice president, secretary and treasurer, respectively.