Fuddy-Duddy Defuddied

Eleven months ago the down-at-heels Boston Transcript was pushed into bankruptcy by its creditors. Trustee Elias Field found a trouble-shooter in a lank, stoop-shouldered Harvardman named Richard Newhall Johnson, who looks like Jimmy Roosevelt (and hates it) and who had devoted himself since graduation to reorganizing broken down companies and putting them on their feet. Trouble-shooter Johnson had a survey made, from which he found that the most frequent word used by advertisers to describe the paper was "fuddy-duddy." He also found that the Transcript's 30,000 readers were astonishingly loyal. By last March he had got the Transcript's creditors to take one-third of a new stock issue, at 20-c- on the dollar, in payment for their claims, raised $200,000 from 23 new stockholders, of whom he himself was the largest. By last April Trouble-shooter Johnson was in control of the Transcript.

Last week Publisher Johnson gave a banquet for 300 businessmen at The Copley-Plaza, followed by such a promotion campaign as Boston newspaperdom has never known. Subway posters, newspaper advertisements, sound trucks, radio speakers and an airplane sign-trailer all shouted the news of the Transcript's "Newscope Edition." Two days later, when the Newscope Edition appeared, Beacon Street saw, instead of the Transcript's dowdy old front page, a bold, five-column layout, of which nearly two columns were pictures. The text frankly aped TIME'S news treatment.

So many other U. S. newspapers, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the San Francisco Chronicle and many a lesser sheet, have borrowed from TIME that the Transcript's new format was scarcely news. But news it is that Publisher Johnson has upped national advertising revenue by 50%, roped 24 new advertisers into long-term contracts.

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