Different This Week

To some 6,000,000 newspaper readers this week goes the syndicated Sunday magazine section This Week in a new format. Cut down to Collier's-size, its new make-up eliminates "jumps," or run-overs to back pages. Its editorial ingredients are 52% articles, 48% fiction, as against its onetime mixture of 80% fiction, 20% articles (serials were dropped two years ago).

This Week now will look more like a magazine, less than ever like Hearst's American Weekly. More significant difference: This Week, launched in 1935 with 4,000,000 readers, now has only 400,000 less circulation than American Weekly, about 95% as much advertising revenue.

Backer of This Week is old (77) Joseph Palmer Knapp, son of the founder of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., chief stockholder of Crowell Publishing Co., who also owns Alco-Gravure, world's biggest rotogravure printers, which makes a "modest" profit printing This Week. Its editor is Mrs. William Brown Meloney (mother of Novelist William Brown Meloney), 59, tiny, fragile, grey-haired, who now edits the magazine from her suite in the Waldorf-Astoria. In her 40-year career, "Missy" Meloney has been editor of Everybody's, Delineator, the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine, organizer of the Herald Tribune Forum, and once in three interviews with Mussolini got him to answer eleven out of 20 questions. She declares with flashing defiance: "I have been lame since 15, and had a bad lung since 17 and have done the work of three men ever since." Her salary is $40,000 a year.

More newspapers were sold in the U.S. last year than in any other year in history. Editor & Publisher calculated that daily newspaper circulation gained 2% (or about 822,632) over 1940's previous high of 41,131,611. Gains: morning papers 2.79%; afternoon papers 1.26% (but p.m. papers are still behind their all-time 1937 high: 25,541,946); Sunday papers 4.29%.

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