“We print,” says the _New York Times_, “all the news that’s fit to print.” Immediately the question arises (as Elmer Davis, the historian of the _Times_ tells us that it did when the motto was first adopted) what news _is_ fit to print? By what standard is the editorial decision reached which includes one kind of news and excludes another kind? The _Times_ itself has not been, in its long and conspicuously successful career, entirely free from difficulties on this point. Thus in “The History of The _New York Times_,” Mr. Davis feels the need for justifying the extent to which that paper featured Theodore Tilton’s action against the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher for alienation of Mrs. Tilton’s affections and his conduct with her. Mr. Davis says (pages 124-125): “No doubt a good many readers of the _Times_ thought that the paper was giving an undue amount of space to this chronicle of sin and suffering. Those complaints come in often enough even in these days from readers who appreciate the paper’s general reluctance to display news of this sort, and wonder why a good general rule should occasionally be violated. But there was a reason in the Beecher case, as there has usually been a reason in similar affairs since. Dr. Beecher was one of the most prominent clergymen in the country; there was a natural curiosity as to whether he was practicing what he preached. One of the counsel at the trial declared that ‘all Christendom was hanging on its outcome.’ Full reporting of its course was not a mere pandering to vulgar curiosity, but a recognition of the value of the case as news.” The simple fact that such a slogan can exist and be accepted is for our purpose an important point. Somewhere there must be a standard to which the editors of the _Times_ can conform, as well as a large clientele of constant readers to whom that standard is satisfactory. “Fit” must be defined by the editors of the _Times_ in a way which meets with the approval of enough persons to enable the paper to maintain its reading public. As soon, however, as the definition is attempted, difficulties arise. Professor W. G. Bleyer, in an article in his book on journalism, first stresses the importance of completeness in the news columns of a paper, then goes on to say that “the only important limitations to completeness are those imposed by the commonly accepted ideas of decency embodied in the words, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ and by the rights of privacy. Carefully edited newspapers discriminate between what the public is entitled to know and what an individual has a right to keep private.” On the other hand, when Professor Bleyer attempts to define what news is fit to print and what the public is entitled to know, he discusses generalizations capable of wide and frequently inconsistent interpretation. “News,” says he, “is anything timely which is significant to newspaper readers in their relations to the community, the state and the nation.”