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TALK-TALK-TALK & WRITE-WRITE-WRITE

Uncle Joe Cannon is credited with having once said that the National Press Club was the largest exclusive club in the world.

It is an anthill, where scurrying ants put their feelers together as they pause and say "What do you know?" It's a bee hive with lots of buzzing. It's a hang-out, a drop-in, with overstuffed chairs for lazy bones. It's a restaurant, a bar. It's an auditorium where big shots make their speeches and lesser fry make their contacts.

But, more than anything else, it is a place where men meet and talk, talk, talk. They talk mainly about the news of the day or the week. They roll it around, punch it and pat it, and sometimes twist it a bit for shape.

Now newsmen know almost everything, of course, but there's one thing they never quite get through their heads. It is that talk, or word of mouth, is the principal means of communication, and that the written word is merely the trigger. People all over the world think what they think because they've heard it talked or gossiped in bull sessions of one sort or another. The talk is the influencing factor. The written word is merely the provider of the raw material.

In the same way, what newsmen talk among themselves is often the chief influence in what they write, for they are influenced by each other in their ways and styles of presentation, even though they like to say they are hardy and independent souls. Thus the point of most significance about the National Press Club is that it is the largest single talking-place of men who convey the news to the people. It's the biggest single tent, with the greatest number of news performers under it.

In the world at large, the Club is known as the place where you may get invited to make a luncheon speech, if you've already had a lot of publicity and if you are currently controversial. An invitation is a command.

If you represent some trade association or special interest in Washington, you try to get associate membership in the Club, and if you try hard enough and long enough, you may get it. In this way you can get your side of the story before newsmen personally, in a chair-to-chair talk.

If you are 50 or 60 years old and are still a newsman, but have risen in life a bit, you belong to some other club in town, such as the Metropolitan or Cosmos, where there is more dignity, less buzz, and terrapin soup on the lunch menu (or else graham crackers with half & half). If you go oftener to the more elegant club than to the Press Club, it means, according to Press Club talk, that you have "ascended."

The Club isn't just a place, or a set of rooms. These are merely the shell. It isn't just a group, for the members of the group are always coming and going, shifting and changing. The ideas and the state of mind which form the nucleus of the Club also shift and change.

Through the years the shift has been toward the better, and this is perfectly obvious to anyone who has lived, worked and mingled with three generations of newsmen. The professional progress is still far from finished as every good journalist knows. Many advances are still to be made. The whole craft or profession has grown in stature, and has a lot more growing to do. The National Press Club, as a representative group of working journalists, is on its way.

- W. M. Kiplinger

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