NO NEWS BOUNDARIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 829, 25 November 1929, Page 11

NO NEWS BOUNDARIES

CONFERENCE OF PRESS LEADERS WIDER CIRCULATION RUGBY, Sunday. A conference will be held at Geneva on Monday under the chairmanship of Viscount Burnham, former president of the Empire Press Union, to discuss methods of developing the circulation of newspapers and periodicals between the various countries of Europe. The meeting was fixed by the Press Conference held under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1927. One of the resolutions adopted by that conference was that international understanding and the promotion of peace could best be encouraged by the widest possible dissemination of news as public opinion is now more interested in the life of other nations than ever before. Among the suggestions put forward are the following:—That duties and taxes should be abolished, or at any rate unified and reduced to a minimum; that customs formalities should be simplified, and that if possible some system should be established by which newspapers could be sent direct from the country of origin to the country of destination. At present transit agents have to be employed to discharge customs formalities at each frontier and to reforward newspaper parcels. This leads to considerable expense and delay. The suggestion is that the fastest expresses should be available for the transport of newspapers and that air liners should be used in connection with those trains. Aircraft pilots should be allowed to drop parcels of newspapers and periodicals at specified places instead of having to waste time in landing. Censorship, where it exists, should be simple and speedy.