Newsmen's News

"Home" paper though it is, the Chicago Daily News nevertheless upholds a brilliant reputation for foreign coverage. Conservative in outlook, it has fought many a liberal battle against political chicanery. The personal property of Colonel Frank Knox (Republican candidate for Vice President in 1936), it is still regarded as a newsman's newspaper.

Each year the News publishes a special edition for employes, edited by Newsmen, with an analysis of the treasurer's report and anything else that might interest Colonel Knox's boys. Last week, 1939's annual edition came off the press. Editor John Mirt told of increased earnings ($767,266 in 1939), bigger circulation (438,951), a rise in advertising linage (up 4 1/2% while Chicago papers as a whole were losing over 5 1/2%).

But what interested employes most was the account that Newsmen gave of their work at home and abroad. Main exploit on the home front last year was a News investigation of Moe Annenberg that led to his indictment and the cutting off of his wire service to bookmakers (TIME, Nov. 13).

Newsmen generally agree that Daily News correspondents abroad have so far done the best job of reporting Europe's war. Leland Stowe's report from the battlefield of Tolvajaervi, reprinted in newspapers, books, the Congressional Record, already ranks as a major war classic.

Proof of the News's record for foreign coverage could be found in the fact that last year ten U. S. and Canadian papers contracted to buy its dispatches from abroad. Last week, too late for Editor Mirt's annual edition, the London Daily Telegraph (4,000 miles closer to the front than is the News) signed up for the same service.

Featured on page 1 of the News annual was a story by ponderous Correspondent Robert Joseph Casey, a Newsman from the ground up, who has been all over the world, covered murder stories in Manhattan, Washington politics, scientific voyages to the South Seas, everything a reporter could crowd into a lifetime.

One of a handful of correspondents who also covered World War I, Bob Casey hugely enjoyed covering World War II last week, because he thought it might be the last war he would ever see. Writing from the same hotel in France where he slept 21 years ago while Germans bombed the town, Veteran Casey told the News: "You get the impression that you have seen all this before, and will be looking at it a long time before you see anything else."

Headline-of-the-Week

From the Denver Post: ROOSEVELT WANTS TO DICTATE PEACE AND BECOME PRESIDENT OF WORLD.

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