There are only three such American news agencies, Associated Press, United Press and International News Service. Associated Press is a professedly “cooperative” membership association embracing some 1,300 of America’s 1,744 English-language dailies. United Press, controlled by Roy Howard, is based on his newspaper chain. I.N.S. rests on the Hearst chain. Major newspapers try to have as many of these services as they can get. The Howard-owned papers, for instance, are by no means content with their own U.P. service, but seek also the A.P. “report.” The Hearst papers never operate with I.N.S. alone; almost all have A.P. franchises and several boast that they alone, in their respective areas, have all three services. For a variety of reasons, however, A.P. is the decisive agency. It is rather hopeless to try to compete with a major paper on the basis of U.P. or I.N.S. service. Field could not get A.P. The by-laws of the “cooperative” permitted the _Chicago Tribune_ to blackball his application for membership. He could not get I.N.S. because it is available only to the Hearst paper in Chicago, the _Herald-American_. He had no choice but to publish on the basis of United Press service only. That cost him $110,000 in 1942 against an estimated $50,000 he would have paid for the superior A.P. report. Regimentation News agency coverage was only the beginning of the problem. Look at your daily newspaper, wherever you live. It is the same paper as the one I read. There is, in effect, only one American newspaper, or let us say three or four papers which are parts of one pattern. Your paper and mine print exactly the same news, the same pictures, the same columnists, the same features ranging from comics through recipes, and often the same canned editorials supplied by the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Moreover, these canned features, together with new mechanical inventions, make for standardized typography and appearance. Even grammatical style, width of column, size of type, must be uniform. The standardization reaches its ridiculous peak in the Hearst papers where “The Chief,” octogenarian William Randolph Hearst, dictates by teletype the manner and form in which his “publishers” must display many important items. There is no escaping this regimentation. If you want readers, you must meet the competition. Field had to have features, pictures and so on. He struggled to create his own comics and after three years felt he had achieved some readable ones, though by no means as successful as those controlled by the rival press. But news pictures can’t be invented. Without photographs, successful newspaper publication is impossible. Pictures, however, are as tightly controlled as news services. Even the Communist _Daily Worker_, the outstanding labor daily newspaper in the country, has to buy from the syndicates as they are. Field couldn’t buy any!