PLANTER'S PUNCH

For the third year Harvard has selected its annual batch of fifteen Nieman Fellows, newspapermen from all over the country who will come to feast at its intellectual table. From the Martinis to the desert, the plan has in three years proved highly successful. Not only have many newspapermen been able to take back to their work a wider knowledge of the things they write about, but several have received better jobs as a result of their study. But aside from this, Harvard itself has learned, through these journalists' eyes, a lot about national problems that it either didn't know or didn't think much about until the Nieman plan was created.

Reporters from the South have been conspicuous among the Nieman Fellows. By their very presence, they have called attention to a significant fact: that journalism in South is a far different thing from its counterpart in the North. Below the Mason and Dixon Line nearly every town of any size has at least one independent newspaper, working through its editorial policy for the good of the community it serves. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which at long last got the goods on the Long machine in Louisiana, is only an outstanding example among many others of the same type. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the North, where many large cities harbor only a couple of chain newspapers, with little or no local responsibility. In the North the editorial page is a waning influence, but in the South it is alive and kicking. So it was to be expected that there would be a large number of outstanding Nieman Fellows from the South.

The Nieman Fellows, engaged in such a profession as they are, cannot but be interested in social, political, and economic problems. It is these problems that they analyze in their everyday work. To Harvard's attempt to see these issues from as wide a viewpoint as possible, the Fellows from the South have contributed a great deal. President Roosevelt has called the South "the nation's No. 1 economic problem," but Harvard has learned from its Southern guests that many of the South's problems are also the nation's, and that it does not help matters to blame all evils in the South on the South. In this way the Nieman Foundation has proved an unexpected contributor to President Conant's plan to make Harvard a national institution.