Havas in the U. S.

On the sixth floor of No. 383 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, is the whirring headquarters of Associated Press. Down the hall is the office of Agence Havas, leading news service of France. The Manhattan offices of the world's two biggest news agencies are not side by side for nothing. For 50 years they have had a working agreement whereby AP's news reports from all over the U. S. were made accessible to Havas, for rewriting and transmission to Paris. But last week there was special activity in the Havas office: instead of just sending news to France, a staff of five translators and rewritemen was receiving a running fire of despatches from Havas' great new radio station in Paris. Those despatches, decoded, translated, rewritten and edited were neatly filed away. The whole performance was a dress rehearsal for what Havas hopes soon to do: to sell its news to North American clients.

The old agreement between Havas and AP was two-edged. It provided for exchange of information in Paris and Manhattan; it also provided that AP would not sell its service in Europe and Havas would stay out of North America. The agreement worked well for AP and Havas, but it worked even better for United Press and Hearst's International News which, unbound by contract, marched through Europe signing up customers right & left. (UP's European clients: 266; INS's: 40.) In 1932 AP asked to have the treaty scrapped. Havas, friendly as ever, agreed.

Although privileged to invade Europe. AP has thus far revealed no plans. Havas, however, sent a smart young man named Camille Lemercier, longtime Paris correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, to organize a distributing agency in Manhattan. Meanwhile Havas completed the second and more powerful of two short wave radio stations at Pontoise. outside Paris. According to M. Lemercier, it can cover the world, saves 80% of former cable costs. In rehearsal since Feb. 18, the Manhattan office has been receiving 10,000 to 12,000 words a day of world news by radio.

In spite of such elaborate preparations, M. Lemercier was not ready to say last week who would buy the Havas service in North America, except that there will be a hook-up with Canadian Press. For the U. S.. observers guessed Havas might make a new distributing arrangement with AP, or it might try to sell directly to individual newspapers, or both.

Before getting any U. S. newspaper to sign a contract, Havas must dispel a firm-fixed U. S. belief that it is the subsidized mouthpiece of the French Government. Stoutly it denies that it is, but the belief persists. Oldest news service in the world, Agence Havas was founded in 1836 by Charles Havas who some 30 years earlier had been authorized by Napoleon to deliver news from Army headquarters to Paris newspapers. In 1856 Agence Havas got into the advertising agency business, in which it is still dominant in France. It limited itself to Europe until 1860, when it spread to South America. Today its news goes directly or by exchange services to more than 2,000 newspapers everywhere on earth. Havas is a corporation, capitalized at 105,000,000 francs. Its stock on the Bourse is currently quoted at 895 francs. A consistent moneymaker. Havas earned 20,000,000 francs in 1928, 12,000,000 francs in 1932. What part of the French Government's 33,000,000 franc special budget appropriation for foreign propaganda goes to Havas, Havas will not say. But it does say this: the French Foreign Office is a good customer of Havas, buying its news as does any other Havas client. The Foreign Office uses that news in a daily bulletin for Government employes and for transmission to remote French colonies whose local Press cannot afford to buy a news service.

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