(The CRIMSON invites all men in the University to submit signed communications of timely interest. It assumes no responsibility, however, for sentiments expressed under this head and reserves the right to exclude any whose publication would be palpably inappropriate.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

I note in your paper a defense of the newspaper business by the manager of The Associated Press for the benefit of seniors interested in that business. As the advisory season is now on, I write to say that it should have been an apology. Those interested should by all means before committing themselves glance at the other side of the picture as exhibited in Upton Sinclair's "Brass Check". Sinclair's picture is just as exaggerated as the A. P. man's, but I know from experience that it's just as true.

Newspaper reporting and editing are so incredibly easy that most of the staffs are mainly recruited from ex-street car men, unfrocked clergymen, broke brokers, countermen, steer bulldoggers et also. The pay is incredibly poor. Rather than work for a newspaper for $15 per week, it would be better to get a job as a board-boy in Wall Street for $20. You'd go much farther. No matter how well you do your work a publisher will let you go before he'll raise your salary, knowing that some confidence man in tough lines can be picked up to take your job.

You will also note that whenever a publisher has a decent job to offer he never gives it to a newspaperman. Observe that when the New York Evening Post wanted good men it sent for Dean Gay of Harvard and Prof. Canby of Yale; that the Times employed Commissioner Finley rather than some man who had worked on the staff for 25 years; and that the Tribune sent for Stuart P. Sherman. You can count on your fingers the regular newspapermen in New York who are getting $100 per week, a mere pittance in that terrible town.

Then you will learn that a man of intelligence will have trouble getting that bourgeois yet apocalyptic tone affected by all newspapers. Cheerfulness will keep breaking through on you, and you'll get sick of the chronique scandalous of the news columns and the common scolding of the editorials.

Did anyone over note the resemblance of the nose for news to the buzzard's beak?

However, if you do go into the business a few hints might be valuable. Don't try to put anything over on any other newspaperman, and don't volunteer any extra work, don't do any espionage, and don't get excited. If some bruiser of a night city editor sends you at one o'clock in the morning to ask John D. Rockefeller what he thinks of the oil situation in Mosul just go home and about two hours later telephone the bruiser that Mr. Rockefeller is inaccessible at that hour.

If as happened to me once you are sent to New Jersey to hunt a man-eating shark just go to the Amsterdam Roof Gar- den and after about four hours telephone that the shark was last seen fluking his tall well outside the three-mile limit. If you are sent to burglarize some woman's flat for pictures say that the fire escape was blocked by parked babies. You'll have to match cynicism with cynicism.

Once on my day off while standing at the window of my room in a hotel I looked down just in time to see an accident in which several people were killed. I seized my hat and got away from that place as fast as I could. When I returned to the hotel I found that there had been about 20 telephone calls for me from the office. Not for $25 per week do I do extra work to keep the pocket book of W. R. Hearst watered. I've worked for all sorts of outfits and found them about the same.

Because I never took myself or anybody else very seriously I'm quitting the business with few scars and no regrets. Don't work for newspapers. Don't even read them.  DUPONT WRIGHT '19