"News Is What You Make It"

Why are the newspapers always full of "bad news?" The editors' stock answer: because news is (by one definition) the unusual, and until the evil day when good tidings become more unusual than bad, good news (unless it is sensationally good) will continue to be no news.

But present-day editors are no longer as sure as they (and their fathers) were that they know what news is. In the past 15 years, the outlines of the definition have both blurred and broadened.

In Manhattan last week, a new publication, Good News Bulletin (circ. 150), added its small voice to the general debate. "Have you had your daily dose of catastrophes, crises and cynicism?" it asked, and went on for eight pages to tell such news as "50,000 Arabs Live Peacefully in Israel! . . . Better Drinking Water for Pennsylvania . . . Soviets Thank Quakers . . . FAO Hunger Fighters Take to the Offensive ... Wife Joins Husband in Jail."

The mimeographed Bulletin was under no illusion that its cheerful chirping could drown out the harsh diapason from the rest of the press. Its editors were "nothing but working newspapermen who are tired of the 'Daily Wail,' the 'Unlucky Star,' the 'Scare Telegram' and the 'Terrible Times' . . . We are no journalistic ostriches and we do not deny the fact that our world today is full of misery and injustice ... All we want to do is show the other, more pleasant side of the picture."

Round-faced Robert B. Jung, 34, the founder of Good News, is a Berlin-born Czech, a veteran of the anti-Hitler underground. He is now U.S. correspondent for Zurich's daily Die Tat, the weekly Die Weltwoche, and his own European feature agency, Dukas. His helper for Vol. i, No. i, was Correspondent Hans Steinitz of the Bern daily Der Bund. They timed their maiden issue to meet Mrs. Jung on her arrival from a European trip. She had wed her husband under protest last spring, feeling that journalism was "all dissension, fear and hate," and Jung had promised to prove that it ain't necessarily so.

Last week Good News was getting heartening fan mail from people who wanted to subscribe. "It is as if you light a small fire, and people come to you to get their hands warm," beamed Editor Jung. The New York Herald Tribune, scanning his first issue with friendly skepticism, gave his criticism of news more aid & comfort than perhaps it realized: "What he is saying, of course, is that news is what you make it, and that at least some American editors are feeding too much spark into the mixture . . . His point is good, even though he happens to be criticizing the current state of the world more than the newspapers in it."

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