Newspapers Want College Graduates With Varied Training, Edstrom Declares

"Newspapermen are the best half-educated people in the world; they know a little about everything, and all about nothing." With this frank admission about his profession, Edward E. Edstrom, assistant Sunday editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal on leave here as a Nieman fellow, urges prospective journalists to spend their college careers "taking as broad a program as possible."

"When you get out of college," he advises further, "get as many experiences as you can on as many papers as you can." The point of the diversified experience is, he explains, "to learn the right questions to ask."

College Graduates to Have Advantage

According to Edstrom, increased concentration is taking place in the newspaper business. With fewer papers, he predicts, will come fewer but better job opportunities, and "newspapers are going to be more and more choosy about whom they hire, with college graduates having a definite advantage."

The genial Kentuckian has largely practiced what he preaches about a varied background. Interested in newspaper work from the start, Edstrom began work on a small weekly "throw-away" journal while still at Wayne University in Detroit. He attracted the attention of the metropolitan dailies, moved up to the Detroit Free Press, and after several years, shifted to the Toledo News Beam.

Courier-Journal Has Liberal Stand

Edstrom takes greatest pride, however, in the Courier-Journal, the largest liberal paper in the South. A long line of progressive owners and editors has made possible its uniquely independent plank, proving, Edstrom believes, that "honest publishers make honest newspapers, and honest journalism pays in the long run."

Believing that the newspaper should contribute to the well-being of the community, Edstrom is hopeful that they can do a "great deal" towards racial tolerance, and, more specifically, to help stamp out discrimination against the Negro.

"But the Southern newspaper should not do a lot of lip service about equality for Negroes, and then not do anything about it," he emphasizes. "The course of a liberal newspaper is to get first things done first, namely, achieve for them political and economic equality."

"You only hurt the cause of the Southern Negro," according to Edstrom, "if you holler about social equality. That," he explains, "is a thing you can't legislate. I'm afraid that if we don't approach the problems in the right way," he warns, "we're going to have conflict, bloody conflict." The Courier-Journal has consistently campaigned for equal political and economic opportunities for Negroes, supporting several of their candidates in state and local elections.

Edstrom grants that "the Negro is still not a one hundred percent American citizen, although he has a lot of advantages which he never had before. His whole course has been upward and outward," he adds, however, "and no other race can show comparable progress."

Although he has thrived on the newspaper diet over since his college days, he finds himself regretting that he must return to that work in July. "You know," he admits with a chuckle, "when I first walked through the Yard last fall, I know I should have come to Harvard 15 years ago."