Public's Press?

Two years ago the striking printers of Hearst's Albany Times-Union and Frank Ernest Gannett's Knickerbocker Press began publishing their own daily newspaper, the Albany Citizen. But when they tried to purchase wire services and features they met with outright refusals or demands for prices far out of their reach. The venture failed; but the Albany Typographical Union vowed vengeance. Fortnight ago it had introduced into the New York Legislature a bill to place all press services, news bureaus and feature services under jurisdiction of the Public Service Commission as public utilities.

The proposed bill provides for rate-regulation, examination and hearings of complaints by the Public Service Commission, much as the law that deals with steam corporations. Of greatest interest to newsmen was a clause requiring agencies to extend their services to any customer willing to pay the fixed rates. Gone would be the regional "exclusiveness" so jealously guarded by the Associated Press and the feature syndicates.

Despite talk that the proposed law might even be carried to Congress, the news services did not take it very seriously. They knew this battleground of old. Prior to 1900 laws were passed in Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas to define the press services as "common carriers" obliged to give service where requested. Momentous test case was that of the Chicago Inter-Ocean which, suspended from the A. P. for infraction of a rule, sued in 1898 to compel reinstatement. The Illinois court ruled that the A. P., then an Illinois corporation, had "granted to the public such an interest in its use that it must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good. . . . The sole purpose for which news was gathered was that the same should be sold, and all newspaper publishers desiring to purchase such news for publication are entitled to purchase the same without discrimination against them."

About the same time the St. Louis Star sued for admission to the A. P., which had made an exclusive contract with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In that case the A. P. won on the decision: "Everyone is at liberty to gather news; and the fact that one has greater facilities ... or that mere incorporation has been granted a company for the purpose of gathering news, does not . . . give the state the right to regulate what before incorporation was but a natural right."

The score was even, but the A. P. had enough of Illinois. It was hastily reorganized in New York as a non-profit membership association, not a business corporation, under the laws which regulate agricultural societies, fishing clubs, etc.

United Press has accepted the status of common carrier, but has thus far avoided any costly dispute over its implied obligation, to do business with each & every applicant.

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