South's Guardian

Louisville, Ky. is a one-paper town. Barry Bingham's proud old Courier-Jour nal (with its evening edition, the Times) constitutes a virtual news monopoly in the middle Ohio Valley: it has no serious competitor nearer than Cincinnati. Both papers are healthy, with circulations (Courier-Journal, 109,361; Times, 121,854) that are still growing.

But monopolistic ease contents not Publisher Bingham nor his general manager, Mississippi-born Mark Foster Ethridge (onetime president of the National Association of Broadcasters). They have ideas and ideals, they keep on spending money for new features, now & again take a full page to render their readers an "Account of Our Stewardship."

The Courier-Journal stopped its presses for one minute on the 100th birthday of its founder, the late Colonel Henry Watterson. Of that fierce, opinionated, ex-Confederate cavalryman, who made the old Courier-Journal a fiery organ of Southern Democracy, Arthur Krock (onetime editorial manager of Marse Henry's paper) wrote in the New York Times: "Mr. Watterson was the last of the great personal editors. . . . His writings were more widely reprinted, quoted and heeded, than those of any other journalist; and his personality became a legend. . . ." For weeks the Courier-Journal had been in the throes of a mysterious upheaval, changing its makeup, trying out new editorial formulas, hiring new men (one was James Pope, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal for 15 years). Last week Bingham's Ethridge explained what they were up to: the Courier-Journal was heading back toward Colonel Watterson's editorial individualism.

Said Manager Ethridge: "We are trying to reverse the trend which has been running since personal journalism faded. In recent years, when a man got to be good enough as a reporter to get forty dollars a week, some brass hat stuck him on a desk and deprived the paper of the thing for which it had trained him. Too many good writing men have been stifled by titles. We want to get writing men back to writing, and see what happens.

"We believe that there is a place somewhere in provincial America for a newspaper that will have the intelligence and influence of the Manchester Guardian of the old days. We have no fancy notions about being a national newspaper, but we intend to dig under the spot news of what is going on. . . .

"Spot news is important enough but much less important than it was before radio came along. Every poll or survey [has] . . . shown the great unworked field of newspapers as elaborators and interpreters. . .

"For a long time daily newspapers have been magazines, running largely, though, to the light and comic type. We are going to put more weight and bulk into the Courier-Journal in the belief that America has passed her adolescence, and readers are willing now to learn the facts of life."

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