Leaning Post

Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis' New York Evening Post has long been anything but robust. In the past year its circulation slipped from 102,632 (smallest in Manhattan) to 100,833. Down went its advertising lineage until only Macfadden's tabloid pornographic ranked below it.* The men at the Post have worked valiantly to keep up with their lusty competitors, the Sun and World-Telegram. (Hearst's Journal, "America's Greatest Evening Newspaper," is for a different class of reader.) They advertised heavily the able writings on Russia of Correspondent Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker. They reproduced facsimilies of their front pages in morning newspapers, in an effort to show that late editions of an evening paper has all the important news that appears in the next morning's paper. Recently they bought big advertising space in other papers to boast of their letters-to-the-editor department which is conducted personally by Editor Julian Starkweather Mason. Proudly they cited the "spicy," "frank," "virile," "nonchalant," headlines which Editor Mason prints over letters with which he does not agree. Samples: "Rot!", "We Think the Precise Opposite," "Another County Heard From," "What Can This Impertinent Fellow Mean?"

Last week, however, the Post took a more overt step than any of its expensive promotion, to bolster falling circulation. It cut the price of its 5-c- Saturday rotogravure edition to 3-c-.

* Last year the Post's lineage loss from 1929 was 25%. For the first ten months of this year compared to the same period of 1930 its loss was 22%, poorest showing of all Manhattan papers.

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