Monday, May. 06, 1935
Items Forward
Endowed Nation. To make sure The Nation would survive him, aging Publisher Oswald Garrison Villard last week sold it to The Nation Fund, Inc., a non-profit corporation headed by Banker Maurice Wertheim, wealthy liberal.
Screen & Radio. In 1932 the Detroit Free Press won the Pulitzer Prize for a news story written by five men, of whom one was Douglas D. Martin, Sunday editor. Last year Douglas Martin went to his boss, Editor Malcolm Bingay, with an idea: Let the Free Press publish a weekly tabloid supplement in full color dealing with cinema and radio. Let it be edited (by Douglas Martin) intelligently enough to interest adult-minded readers, with no salacious gossip and a bare minimum of pressagent claptrap. The Free Press agreed to try the venture, got the Des Moines Register & Tribune Syndicate to sell it to 20 other newspapers. Last week Screen & Radio Weekly celebrated its first birthday with the extraordinary circulation of 1,700,000 weekly--more than any two other fan magazines combined.
Little Magazines. Blue Pencil, Hinterland, Kosmos, Dubuque Dial, Latin Quarterly, Manuscript, Medallion, Poetry World, Smoke, Space, Spinners, The Magazine, The Rocking Horse, Commonwealth College Fortnightly, The Social Frontier are names of magazines published more or less regularly in the U. S. Most of them are "experimental" literary efforts whose editors consider that they "carry the lifeblood of American literature and art." Practically all are poverty stricken. Last month they banded together in an organization called Associated Little Magazines. Prime purpose: to try to interest advertisers in the 22,000 combined circulation of the group. The association set up headquarters at Commonwealth (Labor) College, Mena, Ark. because it cost little to keep a secretary there and because the secretary is working his way through school.
Success Story. In 1914 the crack reporter of the Philadelphia Record was a modest, energetic youngster named John Vincent Heffernan. He declined the job of Washington correspondent, and the huge salary of $50 a week; took his wife, his savings and his typewriter to Wilkes- Barre, Pa. where he believed there was a field for a new sort of weekly newspaper. No ordinary smalltown sheet, this Sunday paper must have such merit that it would be remembered all week throughout the surrounding Wyoming Valley.
Despite doctors' warnings about his weak eyesight, Editor Heffernan slaved for his new Sunday Independent as only a struggling editor-publisher can slave. At the end of the second week, the printer had the last of his savings. He made daily rounds of the Wyoming Valley towns, attended meetings, hawked news, wrote copy, read proof, sold advertising, wrote the advertisements, kept the books with his patient wife's help and collected the bills. He weathered a trolley strike, three anthracite strikes, vanquished two new rivals, gradually beat down the prejudice of devout coal mine workers against any Sunday enterprise.
Last week, after 21 years of labor, Editor Heffernan opened to the folk of Wyoming Valley a newly-equipped newspaper plant worth $200,000. From a new press rolled 24,000 copies of the Sunday Independent, whose issues range from 50 to 70 pages, complete with world news and metropolitan features. Editor Heffernan beamed proudly through thicklensed spectacles. Within five years, say specialists, not even glasses will enable him to work at his trade.
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