NIEMAN NEMESIS

When announcement was made three years ago of Harvard's Nieman Fellowships, it was regarded by men of the trade as a possible means of giving American newspaperdom a real boost. The Nieman Foundation offered no cure-all for journalistic degeneracy wherever it might lie. It proposed to do its part toward raising the standards of journalism by taking promising young reporters and editorial writers from every corner of the nation and exposing them for a year to all known data and theory on the practices of the newspaper world. This has been the exact course followed by the Foundation, with obvious success for those "chosen few." However, it is the personal success of these men which has lent some doubt about the ultimate practically of the scheme.

What has happened is that men with the greatest talents in the field of journalism have been drawn from lesser cities to the papers and magazines of New York and similar large centers. In the first two years of the experiment, five men from the South and Middle-West have moved by way of Nieman Fellowships to positions on one or another of the New York dailies. A sixth garnered a job with Newsweek, second largest newsmagazine of the nation, and still another moved from the West to New York within the fold of the Associated Press.

All these personal elevations are fine is terms of the men themselves, and speak well for the educational efforts of the Nieman Foundation. But meanwhile, there are gaps left in the staffs of the country's smaller news-organs. Where were once splendid potentialities, there is now nothing; the metropolitan papers, with inducements of higher pay for the present and possible fame and high position for the future, have in a sense sucked the life-blood from their journalistic brethren. This is raising the standards of the profession, but doing it in a one-sided fashion. The effect of the Nieman Fellowships will never be glaringly evident, whether good or bad, but there is plenty of room to question its present value to the American press.