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    Publishing Information

    Next—The Radio Newspaper

    By Ruth Brindze

    The Nation
    February 5, 1938
    Vol. 146, No. 6, p. 154

  1. There is no longer anything speculative about printing newspapers in the home by radio. Merely by adding a facsimile attachment you can convert an ordinary radio into a printing-press capable of picking news and pictures from the air and setting them down in black and white. Orders are already pouring into the factory and within the next few months these facsimile machines, potentially the most socially significant invention since the development of the printing-press, will be operating in homes throughout the country.

  2. Several machines which have been developed to a point where they can now be placed in service are described in the current report of the Federal Communications Commission. The Radio Corporation of America, which controls many of the fundamental radio patents, of course, has one. But the Finch machine, the invention of a former engineer of the Communications Commission, so far dominates the field. In appearance these machines are deceptively simple. To broadcast printed material, the type and pictures must be converted into electrical impulses. In the Finch transmitting machine this is accomplished by means of a tiny bulb, or "scanning light," which moves across the page reflecting back to a photoelectric cell the light and dark values of each line. The electric cell, in turn, converts these light and dark qualities into the electrical impulses which can be transmitted by the radio station through its regular broadcasting equipment. The facsimile receiving set, a neat little box approximately the size of a table radio, picks up these signals and by means of a stylus moving across a roll of carbon-backed paper reconverts them into the light and dark lines which form letters and pictures. It is printing without ink and without type. No one makes any pretense that the machines have been fully perfected. But they work more efficiently than did the first radio receiving sets of the early 1920's, and their full technical development will not take long. The Finch machines now produce only a three-column paper, but they can easily be made to print a tabloid of five columns. The present rate of printing is also comparatively slow, only one linear inch a minute, but this also can be speeded up.

  3. The technical problems are far simpler than the social and economic ones, for if the development of facsimile broadcasting continues, as there is every reason to believe that it will, city folks as well as those who live on the farms can be supplied with newspapers and other reading material by radio. The Radio Corporation's facsimile receiver is already equipped with a blade for cutting the printed rolls of paper into convenient page sizes. With the addition of a simple binding device, books and magazines may be produced by the little radio printing machine. The possibilities are unlimited. As events take place, as history is made, the facsimile machines will produce directly in the home a contemporaneous printed record. No newspapers will be able to compete. Facsimile will be faster, more convenient, cheaper. At the trivial cost of the rolls of paper and the electric current, the audience will be supplied with more printed matter than it can read. Every day's paper may be as bulky as the Sunday Times; magazines and books achieve a circulation of a hundred million.

  4. Even now, before large-scale production has been begun, it is estimated that a facsimile receiving machine can be profitably sold for less than forty dollars. Eventually, Finch prophesies, a visual recording device will be included in the same cabinet with the apparatus for receiving oral broadcasts. And everyone will have one, for perhaps the only way of getting a newspaper and other printed matter will be by radio. Television has not yet been perfected; the audience must await the solution of technical problems before movies can be produced in the home. But facsimile is ready today.

  5. Both Finch and the Federal Communications Commission are fully awake to the potentialities of the machine but avoid a discussion of the broader problems by suggesting a limited use. Radio newspapers, Finch says, will supplement, not supplant, the press as we have it today. Facsimile will lead to the development of a new style of writing, reports will be terse, in bulletin form, and for further details the audience will still have to buy a newspaper. The publishers comforted themselves with this theory several years ago when radio began to compete with the press in the distribution of news, but soon had to abandon it, and they have undoubtedly learned from past experience that the way to overcome competition is to operate the facsimile machines themselves. Of course the ultimate control of facsimile will remain with the public, just as the power to regulate oral broadcasting has been left in its hands. If you don't like the program, you flip the switch; and if the editorial selection of Station Y and Z is as distasteful as that of Station X, you can shut off the machine entirely. For the reader who is hard to please there will always be the books printed before inventive genius developed printing by radio.

  6. The present policy of the Federal Communications Commission on facsimile broadcasting is one of cautious planlessness. Licenses are being issued for experimental purposes and on a temporary basis. This relieves the commission of the necessity of determining immediately who shall control the machines so that their operation will be "in the public interest." But temporary privileges have a way of achieving permanency in the radio world. Eight licenses have already been issued—to Stations WGN, Chicago; WSM, Nashville; KSD, St. Louis; WOR, Newark; WHO, Des Moines; WGH, Newport News; KFBK, Sacramento; and KMJ, Fresno; and a raft of other applications have been filed. Stations which have been willing to spend a modest fortune on facsimile experiments will have a strong argument for being permitted to continue visual broadcasting when the service proves successful.

  7. Facsimile offers interesting possibilities of profit to the radio stations. It can be transmitted on the regular wave lengths and by means of existing broadcasting equipment. Moreover, instead of remaining idle for six or more hours out of every twenty-four, the machines can be kept busy transmitting printed news and paid advertising. The licenses so far issued permit the stations to use their wave lengths for visual service only between midnight and six in the morning, but eventually visual as well as oral broadcasts way be permitted at any hour.

  8. To obtain a temporary license, a station must agree to place facsimile receiving sets in fifty or more homes within the area it serves. The method of selecting this trial audience is not specified, but if the unnamed guinea pigs like the service, their favorable reaction will be accepted as an expression of public approval, and facsimile broadcasting will be made available to all.

  9. The commission declares in its report that it is chiefly interested in discovering what the public reaction will be and whether the cost of maintaining this new service will be prohibitive. But there are a number of other questions that must be answered. Should the control of facsimile be granted to the present operators of radio stations, giving them a monopoly of the printed as well as of the spoken word? Should facsimile be viewed merely as an adjunct of the press and the grants be made only to publishers? Will the constitutional guaranty of a free press be destroyed when facsimile newspapers are published by licensees of the government? Unless satisfactory answers are found to these and related problems facsimile machines may become new Frankenstein monsters in the homes of the people.