Hearst Strikeout

Last week Scripps-Howard's vigorous New York World-Telegram surprised its readers and other Manhattan newspaper publishers by giving only two days' notice that it would forthwith begin publishing a six section, 5-c- Saturday edition, with six pages of colored rotogravure, eight pages of comics. The Journal, afternoon Hearst-paper which has hitherto had New York's 5-c- Saturday field to itself, refused to touch a full-page World-Telegram advertisement of the new edition. But $4,100 looked good to Publisher Edmond David Coblentz of Hearst's morning American. Fifteen hundred copies of the American containing the World-Telegram advertisement were on the streets when a command came straight from Publisher Hearst to stop the presses, strike it out. Meantime the Journal's panicky editors were ordered on about twelve hours' notice to add a new eight-page section to their Saturday edition, solved the problem by concocting an amusement section with cuts blown up to enormous size.

Also last week, Publisher Hearst ordered Hearstpapers to throw out all advertisements and news of Mae West's new cinema Klondike Annie (see p. 44), start an editorial campaign against it. Editorial excerpts: "It is an IMMORAL and INDECENT film. . . . The story, scenes and dialog are basically libidinous and sensual. . . . Decent people will protest against . . . showing a white woman in the role, even inferred, of consort to a Chinese vice lord."

Readers of Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner found a tiny Paramount advertisement saying: "Important feature. For information call VA-2041 [the theatre]." In the same issue they found a large advertisement of a Negro burlesque show, displaying two nude Negro women with the caption: "It's a hot, sizzling performance of black & brown skin revues! Daring, intimate, greatest array of beautiful brown-skin models, with 89 teasing beauties on the stage!"

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