Guest Speaker

In Minneapolis last week American Newspaper Guild members, gathered for the annual memorial lecture of the Twin Cities chapter, sat back to listen to their guest speaker, once a Guildsman himself. But perhaps the most memorable thing they heard from portly, grey-haired Louis M. Lyons, 62, curator of Harvard University's Nieman Fellowship program and longtime Boston Globe reporter, was a remarkably blunt criticism of the Guild and the job it has done.

"The Guild, I am sure," said Lyons, "has brought more pay to the newsroom. Unhappily, this has had a leveling effect which has brought the star reporter's pay closer to the office boy's and has left less margin to recognize exceptional talent, and consequently has let it leak away at a debilitating rate. It has increased the difficulty of weeding out those who proved to be misfits, and has maintained staffs with too many members unqualified for newspaper work.

"It was further unfortunate that the Guild, created in the days of vertical union development, grouped reporters and copy editors with a miscellany of workers whose only relation to the profession of journalism is that they worked in the same building. It has had the effect of making reporters liable for cooperation with the people who tie the bundles and drive the trucks.

"The simple fact is that we do not have American journalists joined in a common bond of professional association, independent alike of management and union. The potential of such association, it seems to me, is very great, and its absence a serious vacuum."

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