Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/459

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PERIOD OF SOCIAL READJUSTMENT
417

lished in the Middle West, which had been organized around a nucleus of The Cincinnati Post, The Cleveland Press, and The St. Louis Chronicle. Probably the reason that Scripps did not care to join the Associated Press was the fact that he thought that any papers which his company was planning to establish in other cities would be unable to secure franchises. So he started his own news-gathering organization at about the same time that the newspapers in the East, who were not members of the Associated Press, organized the Publishers' Press, with headquarters in New York. The latter organization was prepared to furnish its service to both morning and evening papers while the former limited its field to the evening dailies. A little later another organization came into existence which furnished a brief or "pony" report of the news to a string of small dailies stretching from Chicago to San Francisco. The three organizations after about ten years saw that strength was in union and organized the present United Press with John Vandercdck as president and general news manager. Upon his death, shortly after the union, Roy Howard succeeded him as manager. Whenever the Associated Press is attacked on the ground of having a monopoly of the news, it points to the claims of the United Press to show that it has a formidable rival in the field.

The United Press differs from the Associated Press in that its services are available to any newspaper which can pay the necessary charges for a leased wire, etc. There is no "power of protest" such as belongs to the Associated Press.


PAPERS OF SCRIPPS

E. W. Scripps is the Benjamin Franklin of modern journalism. Just as Franklin used to furnish an apprentice with a printing outfit and send him to a newly settled section to start a paper, so Scripps puts out a bright young journalist and furnishes him the funds with which to establish under a partnership agreement a new paper in another field. There are some thirty-odd newspapers, large and small, in his string of papers, the distinguishing characteristic of which is said to be that they address themselves primarily to the interests of the working class.