This Week's Spirit

To 21 U.S. newspapers last week went formal notification that their streamlined, syndicated Sunday magazine section This Week has had its first change of editors. Out goes fragile, ailing Mrs. William Brown Meloney, 60, a dominating organizer who has been described as "fine lace made of cable wire." In comes her hand-picked successor, genteel William Ichabod Nichols, 37, ex-publicity man for Harvard, ex-newspaperman (A.P. correspondent at Oxford University), utilities executive (Insull), TVA promotion official.

The switch may not be noticed by the 18,000,000-odd readers (6,000,000 combined circulation) of This Week. Their magazine is a boiler-plate assemblage of Grade-B fiction, short articles of the type known as "punchy," home economics and familiar homilies. This Week avoids all controversial issues. The result is pallid fare. But This Week, now eight years old, is a very profitable venture. Last year its advertising revenue reached $7,000,000, and member papers shared profits greatly exceeding the price they paid (as little as $7.50 per 1,000 copies) for carrying the magazine. Backer of This Week is old (79) Joseph Palmer Knapp, chief stockholder of Crowell Publishing Co. (Collier's, etc.), who also own Alco-Gravure, world's biggest rotogravure printers, which prints This Week.

"Missy" Meloney, onetime editor of Woman's Magazine, Delineator and the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine, organizer of the Herald Tribune Forum, got Nichols four years ago from Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, a home-&-fire-side publication. As managing editor of This Week, Nichols, scion of New England clerics, was so awed by his boss that he observed: "You can see her beautiful spirit shining right through her."

"Missy" is not through yet. Her spirit will continue shining through as the magazine's editorial director.

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