From Alan Barth, Washington Post editorial writer, speaking Dec. 5, 1952, at the Sixth Annual Newspaper Guild Memorial Lecture, at the University of Minnesota:

"In the good old days before Heywood Broun propounded his radical notion of a decent wage scale, the newspaper game (as we all loved to call it then) employed a distressingly high proportion of beaten-down hacks or juvenile romantics. The movies gave currency to a not altogether unwarranted caricature of the American journalist as a happy-go-lucky, carefree daredevil, boozily indifferent to the deficiencies of his weekly paycheck.

“The American Newspaper Guild, by virtue of some pretty stern and stubborn effort, has managed to improve that weekly paycheck to a point at which men could begin to think of newspaper work as a career rather than as an escape from reality. Hollywood’s loss was journalism’s gain.”