Word: shoptalking
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Wherever newspapermen gather, yarns are swapped. Some are true, some apocryphal. Some are good enough to become part of the shoptalk folklore of the press. From Peking last week came this story...
...deal by which a death notice placed in one Philadelphia paper is automatically placed in the other three, about half of the average $10 charge going to the paper which secures the original insertion. "Death Notice" Burns gets 80% of all original insertions because each morning he makes a shoptalk round of funeral parlors, calls morticians by their first names, after lunch goes to his Record desk where undertakers telephone a steady stream of death notices. Each evening he carefully follows every notice into the printed page, then trollies home at 1:15 a.m., sits up half-an-hour with...
...testimonial for Gruen watches in the Satevepost. He is reputed one of the ablest news executives in the land, although he will be only 36 this week. Last week he established himself as a prophet of his profession with a new book. City Editor.* City Editor is salty, rambling shoptalk and third-highball-philosophy of what the author calls "the greatest business on earth.'' Says he: "The business . . . calls for the best. Sometimes it mistreats its best, starves them, and then throws them into the ashcan. More often it deals with infinite justice and consideration...
...into the families, and spread the high-power selling racket." Editor Witman's solution: Let the funeral director carry a sideline of urns at a modest price and "sell" a bigger funeral. As in most trade magazines, there is a page in the Mortuary Digest reserved for informal shoptalk. It is headed "The Back Room." Advertisements in the funeral press are quite different from the subtle "institutional" advertisements of casket makers, cemeteries and crematories which appear in popular magazines. Some are outspoken : "This casket will be a wonderful seller. . . ." "The casket of the month- Rustless Zinc." . . . "Nature-Glo-Rivals...
Show Girl in Hollywood (First National). The adventures of Joseph Patrick McEvoy's laboriously vivacious heroine are continued in a sequel to Show Girl which is rather duller than its predecessor. Alice White's saucy face and impish dancing tide over long sequences of shoptalk garnished with heavy-handed wit. Best role: Blanche Sweet as a fading beauty of the screen who sings a song to the effect that "there is a tear for every smile in Hollywood...