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Show National Newspaper Week In observance of National Newspaper Week which began Monday Mon-day and continues through this week, we call attention to the editorial edi-torial written by Royce Howes, associate editor of the Detroit Free Press, who won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. October 1 trough 8 has been set aside as National Newspaper week. It's purpose is to focus your attention on an institution in whose operation you have a vastly greater hand than perhaps you've ever realized. It is also an appropriate time to call your attention to an effort to deprive you of that hand. The institution is your newspaper daily, weekly or whatever. Let's begin by' dismantling that term newspaper. It means paper, which after due processing, comes to you covered with news. Paper is a self-evident, tangible thing. There is no disagreement as. to what it is. But what of news? It is far less self-evident and deceptively intangible. in-tangible. News, in fact, is all things to all men. What it is depends on who is defining it. And it is your definition, not the editor's, which matters. The paper stays in business if it does a competent job of fulfilling your definition of news. If it devotes itself just to the editor's conception of news, it soon fails. When a newspaper man speaks of his news judgment he doesn't mean his ability to determine what really counts under some mysterious myster-ious process of selection. He means, instead, his ability to surmise what you will consider news. How good he is and how successful the paper is depends on how unerringly he can make that surmise. All readers won't agree that some particular item is news, naturally, na-turally, but the editor must meet each reader's definition often enough so that every reader will feel he's getting his money's worth when it buys the paper. That is where and how you have such a very big hand in determining deter-mining what goes into it. Now as to the effort to take this function away from you. It lies in a growing effort by people, who are neither editors nor representatives rep-resentatives of the readers, to decide arbitrarily which facts shall be printed without reference to what any individual might consider news. These people are the censor-minded. They appear in government and in pressure groups. They include those who try to conduct government gov-ernment behind closed doors and in secret places. They are all those who would take away free access to information which the citizen, with his individual right to say what is news, is entitled to have. What baffles and frustrates the editor in the face of this is an attitude he not infrequently encounters among those who are being cheated of the right to decide for themselves what news is. When he talks about freedom of information he often hears that what he really means is some undefined special privilege of his own. He is complaining, complain-ing, he is told, because his vanity is hurt. What he rails against is nothing of the kind. His protests concern something he was never vain enough to do. That is, insist on deciding what news is without reference to what those who buy the news consider con-sider it to be. National Newspaper Week's purpose will be served if you, the reader, pause to contemplate the big part you play in printing news and whether you are willing to have that part taken away from you. A sure way to lose it is to reason that when freedom of information goes the editor is the only loser. You lose far, far more than any editor edi-tor possibly can. |