The Press: It's Ridiculous'

If there is anything calculated to make a good reporter's blood boil, it is that growing journalistic bugbear, the hold-for-release story. Although there is a legitimate use for the hold-for-release, as with, for example, advance copies of speeches, more often it is a device used by pressagent types anxious for simultaneous nationwide news splashes. Government agencies are prime offenders, and the automobile industry has virtually canonized the hold-for-release. But now and again, some brave journalistic spirit dares defy the restrictions—as last week did the New York Times and its Women's Page Editor Elizabeth Penrose Howkins.

Since 1943, the New York Couture Group...