PM for Post Mortem

For 170 PM staffers, the bad news came in little white envelopes last week: ". . . your employment with PM will terminate . .. March 26, 1948." After months of rumors, few felt surprised when Marshall Field's experiment in Manhattan journalism came to an end.

PM had set out in 1940 as a paper that was "against people who push other people around." But PM was never quite sure what it was for. It made no consistent attempt to cover the news. Instead, it rode off on so many crusades that it often seemed to forget what the crusading was about. From shrill liberalism it had wandered into the pro-Russian camp--then had scurried out again and, recently, raised a horrified voice against Russia and also against its erstwhile hero, Henry Wallace. It had paid its way for only one year (1944-45). It had snooted advertising for six years, then found few advertisers wanted to come in when it opened its columns to them. Its circulation, which hit a peak of 164,686 in 1946, was down to 140,834 last week.

Said Field, who had lost around $5,000,000 on PM: "I am through with New York newspaper publishing, but I am going to stick with the paper [the Sun & Times] in Chicago." He would be at less of a disadvantage in a one-front war.

There was a chance that PM would go on, in drastically different form, under diminutive Clinton D. McKinnon, a shrewd newsman who pyramided a string of Southern California throwaway shopping papers into the million-dollar San Diego Journal (which he recently sold). He offered to take over from Field if the C.I.O. American Newspaper Guild unit would abandon its tough PM contract and meet his tough terms, including the right to hire & fire at will for three months. The reported price tag: $300,000 for plant & equipment.

McKinnon was full of big plans, but newsmen doubted that he could afford to run PM unless he could erase its losses (up to $15,000 a week) in the first few months of operation. "I'll be editor & publisher," explained McKinnon, "but Field will still have a minority interest, which I'll have an option to buy. The staff is so overloaded it's pathetic. The whole thing lacks coordination and spark. I will strive to present the news as it is, not as we wish it were. PM will continue to be a liberal paper, but will not be a left-wing paper."

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