The Press: Mechanical Brain Trouble

The U.S. Army decided to follow the German example, and send its own professional correspondents to the fighting fronts. Having thus decided, the Army made an awkward discovery.

There are 7,000 ex-newspaper employes in the armed services, including over 1,500 reporters and editors-Editor & Publisher obligingly published the figures-but the Army does not know where they are. The Army knows where lots of other professionals are: with its punched index cards, all the Army has to do is to pour cards into a machine and push a button: out comes a list of ex-cooks, ex-taxi drivers, or ex-engineers, as required. But not newsmen. Their talents had not seemed useful enough for separate classification. The thousands of them already in uniform were, so far as the Army was concerned, lost.