provision of great amounts of cheap power for industrial and agricultural growth. Quick expansion of Alaskan power through an "Alaska Authority" would provide strong roots in the Territory for both the newsprint industry and diversified economic expansion.

Special interest and jealous concern with prerogative must be forgotten. The Departments of the Interior, the Forest Service, and other divisions in the Department of Agriculture, the military services (which have an important stake in the security of the Territory) should welcome immediate action to establish an Alaska authority. Local autonomy should be as broad as possible. The long years of delay indicate that only such an agency can do the job. A newsprint industry with its considerable power needs and the very favorable prospects for profitable operation, represents a significant take-off point. The Eightieth Congress should enact legislation creating a regional Alaska Authority modeled after the TVA.

The trade press reports that a group of 30 west coast publishers headed by Norman Chandler, president and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, are considering a plan for an Alaska mill. They expect to subscribe 5 percent of the $28,000,000 cost of building a mill with an annual output of 120,000 tons. They will also contract to buy the output of the mill at prevailing market price for 15 years. Surplus production, which these 30 publishers may not want, will be sold to others, but they are frank to say that they do not expect there will be any surplus.

The development of a pulp industry for Alaska will be welcomed by all who are interested in the future of the Territory, or in the future of newspapers. It is to be hoped that the development will be rapid. But the needs of small papers must also be considered. Five percent of $28,000,000 is $1,400,000. Divided by 30 that would be an investment of $46,000 per paper, if each paper is putting in the same amount. Such a figure is far beyond the great bulk of smallest dailies, small weeklies, etc. Yet it is the small papers which are most in need of new and secure sources of newsprint at reasonable prices. Some arrangement might be made for really broad-based financing of one of the mills by small papers, and papers with no alternative sources of supply. Each individual publisher's contribution might be very low, since the small amount of newsprint each will need would permit the inclusion of many small papers.

If the public forest treasures of Alaska are to be used for newsprint, the product should be made available first to those who are most in need of it. In this way, the pressure of some of the myriad small consumers might be removed from the spot newsprint market.

COMPETITION AND FAIR ALLOCATION

It is almost 30 years since the Federal Trade Commission moved newsprint industry leaders to sign the consent decree. Yet, the trade practices in the industry are obviously not competitive. Perhaps antitrust action would be effective if our laws applied to the Canadian mills. But they do not. As a matter of fact, there is no subtlety about the efforts of Canadian newsprint manufacturers who do business in the United States to stay outside the jurisdiction of the antitrust division. Contracts with buyers on our side of the border specify that the contract shall be subject to the laws in the seller's country.

NEWSPRINT IS WORLD PROBLEM

In any long view, newsprint must be seen as a world problem; production and allocation among nations may have to be regularized in United Nations agreements before long. So far as the North American newsprint industry goes, we have two alternatives. We might try again to widen the areas of competition, or invigorate the marketplace so that market situation buyer-seller relationships could be maintained. But it would be fruitless to try to do this without the active collaboration between this Government and the Government of Canada. The other alternative would be some sort of bilateral recognition that newsprint is a vital industry to both countries, that it is incurably monopolistic, and therefore must be regulated with special reference to just sharing of available supplies and the maintenance of reasonable prices.

At the moment it is a matter squarely in the hands of the large newsprint mills, the various publishers' associations, and the giant daily papers. A situation in which large papers are permitted to grow apace and small ones are denied enough paper to take care of available business cannot be countenanced. The responsibilities of the industry's large units and their trade spokesmen goes beyond the bland statement, "We will let no paper die." Rather they should actively say, "We will see that all papers, large and small, have an equal opportunity to grow by sharing in increased supplies in proportion to their wartime consumption. We will see that new papers have a chance to become established by guaranteeing responsible new ventures a minimal amount of paper. We will include weeklies and specialized papers in our program of sharing since we recognize their importance to our mutual freedom and survival."

The goal of wartime control of newsprint was to come through a period of short rations without losing a newspaper because of inability to get newsprint. The goal of this period, in which the fate of small business generally is tied to that of its small newspaper advertising media, should at least be to keep small papers afloat, and should preferably be to give them every chance to keep abreast of large ones. The alternatives to self-regulation in this situation are widespread small paper deaths or a return to Government controls.

SYNDICATED FEATURES

One of the raw materials important to small newspapers, particularly those that fall within the circulation area of large metropolitan dailies, are the features distributed by the great syndicates. "It's the features that make the paper," is many an editor's byword. Political discussion, comics, sports, household and personal aids, editorial cartoons, cross-word puzzles-it is the "name" features appearing day after day which many readers seek. Many of them represent large investments over long periods of years, by both the syndicates and the papers. Readerships are built up for them by carrying them in the same place all the time, and sometimes making special promotional efforts.

Several of the major feature syndicates have ties to newspaper chains or to press services. AP Newsfeatures is, of course, part of the Associated Press service. King Features is a Hearst enterprise

along with the International News Service. United Features and NEA Service, Inc. are tied to Scripps-Howard and the United Press. Each of these syndicates sells dozens of features to hundreds of papers.

In the letter which was sent to small publishers to check on their difficulties, no mention was made of their relations with feature syndicates. Few of them mentioned them. Two letters, however, were received from the publishers of daily papers which suggest the possibility of violations of the Antitrust law.

The first was a brief note to Mr. J. P. Huskins, general manager of the Statesville (N. C.) Daily Record, from Mr. M. J. Wing, general editor of AP Illustrated Newsfeatures. The note; dated October 29, 1946, was brief:

DEAR MR. HUSKINS: Your interest in AP color comics is appreciated. This service is available, however, only to those newspapers taking an Associated Press news report.

Sincerely yours,

(Signed) M. J. WING.

As forwarded to us, the note had this comment by Mr. Huskins: This is what the AP insists is not a monopoly. You have to be a member of the "club" and taking the most expensive service in order to get what you really

want.

J. P. H.

The other letter was from Mr. Stanley Calkins, publisher of the Uniontown (Pa.) Morning Herald and Evening Standard, the Aliquippa (Pa.) Evening Times, and the Beaver Valley (Pa.) Times. Mr. Calkins, a past president of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote:

The inability of small dailies to buy first-class features is placing them at a distinct disadvantage, particularly if they are published in communities adjacent to metropolitan centers.

About 15 years ago a group of newspapers within a radius of 50 miles of Pittsburgh had their contracts canceled by NEA. NEA is a feature service directed and owned by the Scripps-Howard organization, which owns and controls the Pittsburgh Press. United Features, another Scripps-Howard organization, uses the same rules in the same territory.

Last year King Features Syndicate, a Hearst-owned organization, notified the small dailies within a radius of 100 miles of Pittsburgh that their contracts would not be renewed at their expiration. This action was taken with the intent of bolstering the competitive situation of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, a Hearstowned paper.

The Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate is not directly interested financially in the Pittsburgh papers and has a somewhat more lenient policy in the matter of features. But in Beaver and Aliquippa, towns in Beaver County, Pa., 21 and 28 miles, respectively, from Pittsburgh, all features from NEA, United Features, King Features, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, McNaught and Publishers Syndicates-all restrict the use of their features in suburban area towns where a larger newspaper has been sold on them.

The policy of Scripps-Howard, which controls United Press, and the Hearst organization which controls International News Service, is to sell the news services wherever possible. This is (because papers which subscribe also contribute local news) the cheapest and most efficient medium of adequate news coverage in all cities, large and small. Without the small newspapers, many bright news stories would not find their way to the metropolitan press at anywhere near the present cost. The policy immediately changes when a feature they believe to have special interest is wanted by some small daily.

Smaller newspapers which are remote from large cities buy the features of these various syndicates at a cost that helps to make possible their use in the larger cities, which would, no doubt, find many of them prohibitive if their use were restricted to only a few large metropolitan centers.

To indicate the seriousness of these problems to the small daily publisher, the following lists of the features carried by four mentioned above have been taken from the most recent (1946) Editor and Publisher directory of syndicates:

AP NEWSFEATURES

KING FEATURES SYNDICATE