Shift for Collier'3

Reporters were called in last week by the Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. (Collier's, American, Woman's Home Companion) for an "important announcement." The news: beginning with the Aug. 7 issue, the company's 65-year-old weekly Collier's will become a fortnightly. The news was no surprise to newsmen, who have known for weeks that Crowell-Collier's was ready to try a drastic cure for its ailing weekly. At its peak in 1946, Collier's was a fat magazine that brought handsome profits to Crowell-Collier. But it began to sicken. It tried to jack up circulation with such thin stunts as "an expose a week," and shook up its staff over & over again. None of the changes worked.

The company's net earnings after taxes dropped from a high of $6.5 million in 1946 to only $76,400 last year, and Collier's was largely to blame. As ads dropped off sharply (20% less linage this year than 1952), Cottier's averaged only 72 pages an issue, half the average size of its chief competitor, the Saturday Evening Post. As advertisers pulled out, Cottier's had to cut down space for editorial matter, making the magazine even less inviting to the advertisers who remained.

By going biweekly, Cottier's will cut down on costs, and President Clarence E. Stouch hopes the magazine will fatten up and break the "vicious circle." The biweekly Collier's will run at least 112 pages, initially guarantee advertisers a circulation of 3,500,000, an increase of 400,000 over the fourth quarter of 1952. President Stouch blamed Collier's decline on competition from television, even though other magazine men pointed out that such weeklies as the Satevepost and LIFE have not suffered from TV. Collier's expects to run more fiction, more serials and more articles that appeal to women, thus "be a better buy for Collier's readers and a better buy for Collier's advertisers."

Amidst the news of its big change, Collier's more quietly attended to a small one. Editor Roger Dakin, who recently fired Associate Fiction Editor Bucklin Moon after Collier's had received unsupported charges that Moon once belonged to Communist-front organizations (TIME, April 27), last week fired Fiction Editor MacLennan Farrell, 30. Farrell, who had been Moon's boss, had refused to fire Moon himself and had also signed a protest from Collier's entire fiction staff against the discharge. Editor Dakin insisted that Farrell's firing had nothing to do with his argument with Farrell over Moon, but "fitted in with changes we are going to make in the fiction department to give it a stronger woman's appeal." Farrell thought otherwise. Said he: "I think the motives of Collier's management are transparently punitive."

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