Offset in Opelousas

Newsmen have long been looking for a way to cut towering newspaper costs.

Lately they have eyed offset printing, a lithographic process used mostly for reproducing pictures. Offset is cheap because it does away with engraving, form makeup, stereotyping--all standard processes on a daily paper. The printer simply photographs a page of copy pasted up on ruled boards, transfers the negative to a zinc plate, prints from an inked rubber roller.

Offset might save some papers as much as 50% in capital investment, 25% in operating costs. But there was a hitch in it: it needed a composing typewriter that could turn out lines of copy as clear and even as cast type. Such a typewriter has been invented but is not yet in production.

Last week two ambitious young newsmen, eager to try offset, had decided not to wait for a composing typewriter. One was 29-year-old Bice Clemow, one-time news editor of Editor & Publisher, who had over $65,000 in his pocket, planned to start an offset daily this month in Hartford, Conn. The other was 31-year-old James Regis Fitzgibbon, a Pittsburgh boy who worked for a while on the Miami Herald. His daily was already on the stands in the little Louisiana town (pop. 6,299) of Opelousas.

Opelousas' Daily World is not the first offset daily, nor James Fitzgibbon's first attempt. Year ago, in Texas, he started the offset Monahan's Express. Taken ill a few months later, he turned the Express into a weekly. Last November he sold out, packed up and moved to Opelousas.

There he got backing from a 21-year-old graduate of Tulane University's school of journalism, John Thistlethwaite, scion of an old Opelousas family, and Vincent Moseley, who last fortnight ran fifth in Louisiana's five-man gubernatorial primary (TIME, Jan. 29). Day before Christmas, with young Thistlethwaite as publisher, young Fitzgibbon as managing editor, the Opelousas Daily World brought out its first (Sunday) edition.

An eight-page, tabloid-size picture paper, the World is at present the only offset daily in the U. S. With a small bi-weekly as his sole competitor, Editor Fitzgibbon at the end of his first month had a paid circulation of 1,300, plenty of advertising. Using a linotype to set up his copy, he could compete with many a metropolitan newspaper in neatness and variety of makeup. When the World wanted to print an election extra with a special head, Fitzgibbon went around the corner to a department store, made his paste-up head with a stencil, printed from that.

From U. S. publishers great and small, Editor Fitzgibbon last week had received some 500 letters asking him how offset worked. His answer: operating costs with linotype and offset presses (laboriously sheet-fed) are not more than 10% lower. But initial costs are cut too, may bring the total saving to 15%. So pleased with offset is James Fitzgibbon that he plans to look around for some more small towns without newspapers, try to develop a chain of offset dailies.

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