Too Many Is Not Enough

New York is a city of newspaper superlatives. Its biggest paper is the biggest in the U.S.--the Daily News (circ. 1,980,338)--and even its smallest, the Post (343,140), outranks all but 28 of the country's 1,750 dailies. It puts out more papers every day (45) in more languages (eleven) and in greater variety (there is even a daily paper for metal workers) than any other city. And even if the list is restricted to newspapers of general circulation, New York's seven big dailies still put the city in a class by itself.

Boston is second, with five dailies, and Los Angeles and Chicago share third-place honors with four each. Although daily competition has vanished in all but 61 U.S. cities, in New York it flourishes with such savage intensity that Hearst's Journal-American spent $500,000 last year on circulation contests alone.

Behind this impressive front lie some disturbing facts. In the last ten years, while daily newspaper circulation rose 6,000,000 nationally, in New York it fell 358,000, and Sunday circulation slippage was far worse: 1,819,000. In the same decade, only one New York paper, the Times, logged any significant gain, rising 220,000 to 744,763. New York's newspaper competition is not merely savage; it is mortal. Two of New York's four morning papers and all three of its evening papers are fighting for their lives.

Monopoly on Merit. "This town can't support seven newspapers," says New York Newspaper Broker Vincent J. Manno. "If you added all seven together, you wouldn't come out with a net profit of $2,000,000 a year." To Scripps-Howard's Roy Howard (World-Telegram & Sun) and William Randolph Hearst Jr. (Journal-American, Mirror), the cost of keeping their papers going is worth it just for having New York as a prestige outlet for their chains.

But Samuel I. Newhouse, a man who has spent a lifetime buying newspapers (he now has 14) and making them pay, has never seriously shopped in New York; he feels that Manhattan's field of seven will ultimately shrink to four. Times Publisher Orvil Dryfoos, agrees that the presence of seven Manhattan dailies is "freakish." Says Dryfoos, without naming those papers he thinks are doomed: "Within ten years there's bound to be a different lineup."

Paradoxically, the first casualties are likely to occur in the morning lineup, where the New York press shows greatest strength. The four morning papers not only vastly outcirculate the three evening dailies (3,933,000 to 1,459,000), but hold a monopoly on merit. The Times, the

Daily News and the Herald Tribune, all morning papers, are generally regarded as the only good newspapers in town. But the Herald Tribune is locked in a vise between the Times and the News, and the city's fourth morning paper, Hearst's tabloid Mirror, is dangerously close to death.

Dubious Goal. The Mirror's ills are basic and probably incurable. Its birth announcement in 1924 contained the astounding promise that the new tabloid would be "90% entertainment, 10% news," and for a while the Mirror floated saucily in the wake of the Daily News. It also pulled in thousands of readers with a column by Walter Winchell, the first and best of all gossipmongers. But at 64, Winchell is past his prime, and so is the Mirror--at 37. Its dubious goal of entertainment has been undermined by TV, and, despite a sizable circulation of 840,644, the paper is chronically anemic --it lost $700,000 last year alone. Unless it can reverse the trend, the Mirror may disappear, possibly by a merger with the Journal-A merican.

The Herald Tribune is also in difficulty, but of a different kind. Once a respectable second to the Times (in 1925 it had 281,672 circulation to the Times''s 350,-406), the Trib has slid steadily through the years into a kind of newspaper no man's land--a journey accelerated to some degree by four successive changes of command and a proliferation of editors. Today the Trib is out of the running. It cannot hope to match the Daily News's direct appeal to the solar plexus. Nor can it compete effectively with the Times, a paper that is constantly finding so much more news fit to print that it is now in a class all by itself.

Curiosity Value. Under a new editor, former Newsweek Managing Editor John Denson, 55, the Trib is trying to find a level of its own. What that level may be is not readily discernible. Under Denson, the Trib's tidy front page, which used to win beauty prizes, has taken on the look of a parquet floor--all overblown pictures, klaxon headlines (THE LIBERTY

BELL RINGS AGAIN IN PHILADELPHIA

YOU CAN GET A DRINK ON SUNDAY) and framed summaries of the major news.

To some observers, the new Trib seems more summary than news. Says the Times's Assistant Managing Editor Ted Bernstein wryly: "Today you can read the Trib only if you read another paper."

Denson's program is at least high in curiosity value: the paper's claimed circulation of 395,000 is up 40,000 from a year ago. Among the curious is John Hay Whitney, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, who bought the Tribune in 1958. Fortnight ago, Whitney, until recently an absentee landlord, appointed himself editor in chief and moved in for a closer look. But while Multimillionaire Whitney expresses qualified satisfaction with the paper, he has no intention of letting it become an expensive habit. "We have a five-year plan for the Tribune," says he. "If, at the end of that time, it's just not doable, it would be unfair to the paper's readers and to private enterprise to continue it on a subsidized basis."

The Trib might turn the profit corner tomorrow but for the Times, which, by refusing to hike its price from a nickel to a dime (as did New York's afternoon papers in 1957), forces its competitors to follow suit. As if anxious to crowd out the Tribune, the Times skirts economic disaster by holding the price line: last year, on a gross of $112,149,402, it cleared a profit of less than $350,000. A top Times executive once confided to friends that if the Sunday Times gained 50,000 in circulation, the increase would cost the paper some $750,000--a puzzle explained by the fact that each copy of the Sunday edition costs some 30-c- more than it takes in from ads and sales.

Indefatigable Patroller. But what really hurts the Trib--and all other New York dailies--is the Times plays ball in a journalistic major league all its own. The familiar jests about the Times's heft (it often scales 8 Ibs. on Sunday) and its inability to leave anything out of the paper are compliments to the only complete newspaper in the U.S. The Times operates on the principle that its readers want to be edified, not just amused, and that the job of serving them cannot be overdone.

No serious student of current events can get along without the Times. It patrols all newsbeats, domestic and global, with expert, indefatigable and unduplicated thoroughness, reporting the important and interesting news in every field from anthropology to politics. As an inevitable consequence, the Times's influence ranges wide: to Washington (where even the White House finds it a superb staging area for trial balloons), into the world of fashion (where women shoppers watch both the women's section and the ads for advance word on style trends), and into all varieties of leisure-devotees of Times Food Editor Craig Claiborne, who never lets a restaurant pick up the tab, have learned to trust his judgment on where and where not to dine out.

Common Deficiency. If New York's morning newspaper scene has its dark spots, the afternoon picture is unrelievedly bleak. All three evening papers--the Journal-American, the World-Telegram & Sun and the liberal Post--have yet to regain the circulation they lost by boosting their price to a dime four years ago. All three papers insist that they are now making money, but they offer no proof. Facing automatic pay increases, averaging $3 a week, for its editorial staffers next fall, the Post told the New York Newspaper Guild that it could find the money only by deficit financing. Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff, who inherited a $9,000,-ooo fortune from her banker father, has pumped more than half of it into the paper she bought in 1939.

The evening papers share a common deficiency: news. Totally dependent on newsstand sales--an estimated go%-gs% of total circulation--they sue wildly for the homebound commuter's unselective eye. At the Journal-American, which still prints Page One banners in red ink, Hearst National Editor Frank Coniff admits that the noisiest afternoon headline can mean as many as 30,000 extra sales. In content, the papers run heavily to features, prize contests, decollete pictures, columnists by the dozen, and other trivia.

Bathtubs and Singing Dogs. Last week a reader of the Post could have learned that "Sears, Roebuck Heir Bob Rose will shoot only the greater kudu, sable antelope and mayala" in Mozambique (Doris Lilly), that "climbing, running and jumping in improper or outgrown shoes can do serious damage" (Josephine Lowman's "Why Grow Old?"), that ex-Blonde English Actress Barbara Steel's dark hair is nearer to her true hair color (Sidney Skolsky), or even, in the lead of Eleanor Roosevelt's column, that "We have just celebrated the Fourth of July." The Journal-American was busy informing its readers that "Brett Halsey hasn't heard a thing from his estranged wife, Luciana Paluzzi, since she sent him a terse cable informing him that she had a baby boy in Rome" (Louella Parsons), that "when enameled bathtubs and lavatories become yellow, rub with a solution of salt and turpentine to restore the whiteness" (Bert Bacharach), and, in a quick switch to weightier matters, that the Dominican Republic under Trujillo "was the best country on earth from the standpoint of the practical well-being of the people" (Westbrook Pegler). The Telly turned its attention (for 21 column inches) to a man in Greenwich Village who had just acquired a 1936 Dodge, reported that "that was indeed Joe Wade you saw bicycling along the Montauk Highway toward Southampton the other day" (Joseph X. Dever), and assured its readers that it is indeed possible for a dog to sing along with Mitch Miller (in answer to a query to Ann Landers).

Cussed Commuter. These confections are only lightly dusted with news--a fair share of it borrowed. "The afternoon papers," says Post Columnist Murray Kempton, "are only poor morning papers delivered in the afternoon. Every afternoon paper in New York is written out of the Times and the News--though they do pick up slightly as the day goes on." Now and then, one of the evening dailies bestirs itself to launch a crusade, e.g., the World-Telegram's recent series on slum landlords and university-student cheating. But such enterprise is rare. More characteristic is the Post's current serialization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's famed igth century sermon on the evils of segregation. When Publisher Schiff proposed this Civil War Centennial treat for Post readers, Editor James Wechsler was ecstatic. "Why," said Wechsler, "Uncle Tom emerges as a prototype of Martin Luther King!"

The afternoon papers complain of invincible distribution problems (their delivery trucks must roll during rush-hour traffic), of bad time breaks at deadline, of stern suburban competition (41 afternoon suburban dailies in the New York area against only twelve morning suburbans), and of the sheer cussedness of the New York commuter. Says the World-Telegram's Managing Editor Wesley First peevishly: "If people read the morning papers going to work in the morning, why don't they all read afternoon papers on the way home?"*

Accent on News. These laments strike no nearer the heart of New York's newspaper problem than Broker Manno's statement that seven newspapers are more than New York will support. For not even seven newspapers may be enough for a city with a potential metropolitan-area readership exceeding 9,000,000. This possibility has occurred to New York Times Publisher Orvil Dryfoos. although he puts it another way. "We're successful," said he, "because of the emphasis we put on the first syllable in the word 'newspaper.' There is ample room for serious treatment regardless of the time of day--including the afternoon. Papers that don't supply news will be in difficulty." In New York, papers that don't supply news are already in difficulty.

*Elsewhere, thanks to home delivery, they read afternoon papers. In 16 of the nation's 25 largest cities, evening newspaper circulation exceeds morning circulation.

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