Whittled Post

Not for years has New York's oldest newspaper, the Evening Post, made money. During the lifetime of Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis it had a fat bankroll to lean on, but since his death last June the Curtis estate has reputedly refused to subsidize the Post's losses. They have fallen on the pocketbook of Stepson-in-law John Charles Martin who owns 51% of the Post's stock. Two months ago Publisher Martin sent his Man Friday, Harry Baxter Nason Jr., to New York to see what could be done. Last week Mr. Nason assumed temporary editorship of the Post, announced a drastic change in format, began cleaning house. First to go were Editor Julian Starkweather Mason and Managing Editor Ralph Renaud. The Post will be reduced from eight columns to five, will become the second conservative tabloid in the U. S.* There was still a possibility that Publisher Martin's hustling rival, Publisher Julius David Stern of the Philadelphia Record, would buy the Post this week, try to rebuild its shrunken circulation (86,000 last March). By-Line Business

Two newspaper editors in widely separated parts of the land last week flayed the syndicate business in the official bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper

Editors. Editor Tom Wallace of the Louisville Times scoffed : "We city slickers used to laugh at the patent outsides and insides. Much of the material ... is deemed necessary to good business on the theory that our readers demand fiddle-faddle about Broadway after dark, Hollywood before daylight, Paris after absinthe, and Washington from the backstairs." The other writer was the Society of Newspaper Editors' second vice president, Managing Editor Marvin H. Creager of the Milwaukee Journal. What irritated him most was not Washington from the back stairs but Washington from the official front steps: "Another member of President Roosevelt's 'brain trust' [Rexford Guy Tugwell] has entered the journalistic field and is offering, through a syndicate, to inform and instruct the public on governmental matters at so much per article. . . . But what can he say? Certainly nothing that would in any way embarrass the Administration. His colleagues' articles in the Press have been eminently innocuous and, but for the attractive byline, would hold few readers.

"The fact is that the writers in question are officials of the U. S. Government and, as such, are being paid by the public. What they write, if it is to have real value as a newspaper feature, contains material that they acquire by virtue of their official positions. The inference from syndicate announcements is that here is an opportunity to buy inside facts. No public official is justified in selling governmental facts at any time, much less while he is still in public service."

*The other: Scripps-Howard's Washington News.

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