The First Half-Century

In bars and press clubs around the world, United Press staffers gathered this week to celebrate an event that was uniquely of their own making: the United Press Associations' 50th anniversary. If the U.P. men bragged more and drank more than most newsmen at play, they could be said merely to be obeying the deep competitive urge that has made their hardfisted, bustling wire service second in size only to the 109-year-old Associated Press--and often ahead of it in covering the news.

Unlike the staid A.P., a nonprofit cooperative owned by its member newspapers, the United Press for half a century has aggressively sold its product to all comers. Thus, it has never wavered from Founder E. W. ("Damned Ol Crank") Scripps's belligerent belief that only a profitable news service can achieve editorial impartiality. The first major U.S. news service to prosper as a commercial undertaking, the U.P. today is the world's most enterprising wire-news merchant, an international giant serving 1,560 U.S. newspapers and 3,270 other clients in the U.S. and 71 foreign countries (estimated 1957 gross: $28.8 million).*

Milkmen & Candelabra. The U.P. has almost no physical assets. The giant's muscles are the 4,000 U.P. staffers who keep its hundreds of news printers thumping out 60 words a minute, in 45 languages, around the clock. Their copy must be crisply written to escape the editor's spike. It must be simple enough to be understood by "the milkman in Omaha,"* as an old dictum from New York once put it; at the same time, as former U.President Hugh Baillie once demanded, it is supposed to "flame like a candelabra on a dark and muddy battlefield." Between the milkman and the candelabra, and the

SPEED SPEED SPEED that governs the lives of all wire-service men, U.P. duty has called forth a lean and hungry breed of newsmen who swear they are the world's finest. And some of them are.

United Press service also demands a philosophical disposition, for its low pay scale and tightwad expense accounts are legendary. During a national political convention in Chicago, longtime Bureaus Supervisor L. B. ("Save a Nickel") Mickel cut down on expense accounts so sharply that General News Manager Earl Johnson told his men to retaliate by signing all their hotel meal checks with Mickel's name; Mickel was barely able to leave town. A sardonic example of U.P. tightfistedness was an exchange one day between Atlanta, the U.P.'s southern division relay point, and Raleigh, N.C., where a staffer was simultaneously punching copy on two teleprinters. When Atlanta complained that the copy was moving too slowly, Raleigh replied: HE ONLY HAS TWO HANDS. Came Atlanta's message: FIRE THE CRIPPLED BASTARD. (The U.P. has also a generous side to staffers, but compassion--as most editors and newspaper readers agree--makes dull anecdotes.)

Lest it somehow be dimmed by unexpected reform, the U.P.'s reputation for pinching the penny is affectionately kept alive by an ever-expanding organization of U.P. alumni called The Downhold Club --an echo of the constant warnings to "downhold" expenses that emanate from U.P.'s headquarters in the New York Daily News building.

Farther, Faster. Though overworked and underpaid, Unipressers respond to duty with drive and misty-eyed devotion. Says U.P. (and A.P.) Veteran Bob Gibson: "You can work for the A.P. But you can only belong to the U.P." One reason for U.P.'s rah-rah esprit de corps is that it is built, as one city-room sage has observed, "on the legs of its young men." The U.P. not only prizes youthful, inexpensive energy, but will move an ambitious youngster faster and farther up the ladder than any other news organization. When he was only 26, W. H. Lawrence, now the New York Times's top political reporter, covered Wendell Willkie's presidential campaign singlehanded against a battery of A.P. men.

"The U.P. is the greatest farm system in the newspaper business," said one of the U.P.'s core of old pros last week. "It works on the same principle Branch Rickey used when he developed the Cardinals. You buy up kids for nothing, keep them lean and hungry, and they work like hell to get traded." As a result, the top ranks of U.S. journalism are thickly populated with ex-U.P. men.

All U.P. executives are onetime newsmen, and most of them seem somehow able to live in the higher atmosphere without becoming brassbound. Genial, San Francisco-born President Frank Bartholomew has handled such top assignments as the Panmunjom truce talks and the A-bomb drop at Bikini, and has been known to trot off briskly on cub's errands when all hands were tied up on a story. U.P. men even have the dubious solace of knowing that the mightiest blooper in wire-service history--U.P.'s World War I report that the Armistice had been signed four days ahead of the event--was perpetrated by the then U.President Roy Howard, now chairman of the Scripps-Howard chain.

The distortion of it has become one of the prime legends of U.S. journalism. Truth was, Roy Howard had ferreted out the central fact--the war was indeed over except for a small amount of shouting (and killing)--and in the economy of words he deemed necessary for clarity, Howard was too clear. If pinpricked too often about it, U.P. men are quick to point out that in more recent years it was "the opposition"--the A.P.--that flashed the wrong verdict in the Hauptmann kidnaping trial (U.P. had it first and right) and the Supreme Court's gold decision of 1935, broke an ironclad agreement to observe the official release date for announcing victory in Europe, reported the end of the Japanese war a few days too early, had the U.S. Marines occupying Seoul 48 hours before the city fell.

Second-String Skimping. Though outmanned and out-budgeted on most big stories, and in many areas, especially the Far East, U.P. men learn early in their careers that there are ways of outfoxing A.P. For all its eager-beaver ways. U.P. coverage of run-of-the-mine news is severely hobbled by its low-budget policies, and by the fact that the A.P. has the first chance at the news developed by its 1.750 member newspapers and thus, in effect, draws on a vast pool of news that no wire service could produce independently. The U.P. has no such re-use agreement with client newspapers in the U.S., and as a result often ignores or skimps many solid, second-string stories; in covering state governments, for example, or long-drawn stories such as murder trials, the U.P. is often badly outclassed by A.P. On most fast-breaking local stories, on the other hand, U.P. tends to hunt down the news more aggressively than slower-moving A.P., and is often ahead on the wire by minutes that are precious to newspapers about to go to press.

Speed Replaces Depth. Though often short on facts, the U.P. historically has compensated with brighter writing; its crisp, concise style has forced the A.P. in recent years to valiant efforts to refurbish its often stodgy copy. Style has become increasingly important as the technical speedup in communications sytems has all but eliminated the old-fashioned beat. At the same time, speed has increasingly displaced depth or even accuracy, as writing and checking time dwindle. The A.P., with more manpower, is widely accepted by editors as more accurate than the U.P. Day by day the A.P. also files more interpretive background stories on world affairs than the U.P., and in some capitals it notoriously outperforms U.P. Today none of the wire services boasts men with the global flair of the U.P.'s late WTebb Miller or the personal following of its late Raymond Clapper, but the U.P. has a sizable share of the standout American correspondents abroad and in Washington.

Some newspapermen think that the staid A.P. is becoming bolder while the brash U.P. grows more conservative. Still, the differences in their handling of the major news are sufficiently marked as to demand a story-by-story selection by conscientious editors. The fact that such a choice exists is the best measure of the U.P.'s contribution to a free press. The Associated Press in 1907 was a well-entrenched monopoly whose foreign news came from cartels, such as Britain's Reuters and France's Agence Havas; subsidized or directly influenced by their governments, they divided the world into noncompetitive preserves. After the U.P.' challenged the cartels, the A.P. eventually followed suit. Testy Titan Scripps thus had some reason for his pride when he said: "I regard my life's greatest service to the people of this country to be the creation of the United Press."

* The A.P. has 1,750 member newspapers in the U.S. and provides news service to subscribers in 74 foreign countries; Hearst's International News Service serves the is-paper Hearst chain and 617 other U.S. newspapers, has clients in more than 40 foreign countries. * Buttonholed by a diligent TIME correspondent last week, an Omaha milkman named Roger Stiles, 30, was unable to differentiate between the U.P. and its competitors. Said he: "Some of their stories, particularly political ones, I just don't understand."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.