What's Wrong?

What's wrong with the U.S. press? With circulation and ad revenue at a peak, few editors and publishers seem to be in any mood for selfcriticism. But last week, in the Saturday Review, Editor Louis B. Seltzer of Cleveland's afternoon Press (circ. 309,685), one of the country's top journalists, found plenty wrong with newspapers.

Seltzer noted a switch in the roles of the newspapers, "once primarily concerned with fact and opinion," and the magazines, which once dealt mainly in fiction and features. "The magazines gradually became the instruments of original reporting, crusading, investigative reporting. The newspapers . . . gradually took on the former coloration of the magazines, with their fiction, features, crossword puzzles, panels, columnists, comics and other entertainments . . . Newspapers, many of them built to greatness on the tradition of fearless reporting, are only going through the motions of covering beats or waiting for the news releases to be thrown through the transom . . . It's much easier to hire wire services than to gather, write and print local news . . . You don't get into arguments with your readers over it.''

Police in the Refrigerator. Newspapers are weakest in coverage, said Editor Seltzer, just where they should be strongest--in their own communities, "overwhelmed as they are by tremendous change, industrial expansion, educational inadequacies, housing shortages, racial frictions . . . Local situations are the conversation pieces for nine-tenths of the talk among newspaper readers. Most papers, however, give nine-tenths of Page One to news from remoter and less controversial areas. They then check with the New York Times to see if their judgments are upheld.

"It's easy to cover the annual meeting of the Welfare Federation, but it's tough to tell about the veteran probate judge who is stealing from estates in his trust. It's easy to reprint the police chief's report on how crime has declined each year, but rugged when you set out to document how policemen are mooching from the refrigerators of brothels. It's easy to talk about desegregation far away, but not right at home."

Color in Papers? U.S. papers have deteriorated in appearance as well as content, says Seltzer. Too many meet the problem of higher newsprint costs by "cutting out white space, narrowing column rules, shortening lines of type, crowding another column to a page, [resorting to] one or more of a dozen devices to make the paper look worse, which in turn make it harder to read and make the reader mad enough to turn his attention to television or a typographically attractive magazine . . . Nine out of ten papers are crowded, lack eye-appeal, crowd too much in too little . . . What is the business doing about color, or is it going to abandon that great area of popular appeal entirely to the magazines and television?

"Once the reader came to the newspaper because he had few other places to go; now it must go to him. He can't any longer be offered a product in a 'take-it-or-leave-it' spirit. He's got to be coaxed, sold. The newspapers must be part of his family. He's got to feel the editor is his friend and not just a big corporation trying to take his money."

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