"Flash News"

Any successful Hearst city editor, inventing a newspaper game in which players use pictures of people, would surely include a flattering photo of Miss Marion Davies. In the instructions would be warnings on the law of libel. And in the game, news items would stress crime, sensationalism.

Last week Amster Spiro, 43, since 1927 city editor of Hearst's largest newspaper, the New York Journal which claims the largest evening newspaper circulation in the U. S. (650,000), launched "Flash News," just such a game with just such features. Two to six persons may play. Each is given a cardboard newspaper front page dummy. Players roll dice in rotation, take from compartments numbered two to twelve, according to the total of their dice, an item, headline, picture or special instruction card. Object of the game is to complete the make-up of the newspaper front page so as to gain greatest possible circulation credit. Top story on the printed rating list, which is consulted when all players have "gone to press," is the abdication of Edward VIII: 1,000,000 credits. Bottom story is Hitler's farewell to Prince Bernhard ("Benno") zu Lippe-Biesterfeld departing from Germany to marry Holland's Crown Princess : 0 credits. Penalties are exacted for using libelous material; "rewrites" of "scoops" in papers already gone to press; pressagent commercial blurbs. Posing publicly as players of the game to help its sale when presented last week at $2.34 by Manhattan's R. H. Macy store, were William Randolph Hearst Jr., publisher of the New York American, and Mayor and Mrs. LaGuardia. Other newspaper celebrities who helped launch Editor Spiro's game included Cartoonist Otto Soglow, Columnists Arthur ("Bugs") Baer, Heywood Broun and Stanley Walker, famed onetime city editor of the New York Herald Tribune.

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