Hot Shots

When the Associated Press proposed two years ago to set up a $1,000,000 Wirephoto service for transmitting news pictures over telephone wires, AP Subscribers William Randolph Hearst and Roy Wilson Howard fought the plan as an "unjustifiable extravagance." First picture transmitted when Wirephoto got going last year was news: an airplane wreck in upper New York State. Other first-day photographs seemed to justify the Hearst-Howard complaints (TIME, Jan. 14, 1935).

Perhaps because there has been no great U. S. picture news in the past year, newsreaders in general have not shown much appreciation of the fact that they were experiencing a journalistic revolution, that news pictures were being served to them almost as hot as the news itself. But, having scooped their competitors with shots of the Rogers-Post crash, Minneapolis labor riots, the Florida hurricane, the S. S. Dixie's, grounding and lesser events, Wirephoto subscribers are well satisfied with their experiment. That pictures-by-telephone have established themselves to stay was proven last week when, on the heels of similar news from the New York Times's Wide World picture service, International News Photos and Acme News-pictures both announced that they would shortly begin operating wire picture services of their own.

AP capped these revelations by announcing that portable transmitters would soon add 25 cities to the 26 already on the Wirephoto circuit.

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