Pepping up the Post

"I did not agree to take the editor's job in order to liquidate the empire," said lean, bespectacled Robert Fuoss, 48.

The editorship he spoke of was that of the venerable (232 years) Saturday Evening Post, which has been fighting a relentless slump since 1951. The empire was Philadelphia's Curtis Publishing Co., which has anxiously watched the Post, its shining star, drop from first to seventh place in ad pages among U.S. magazines. The scene of Fuoss's Churchillian remark was a bait-primed meeting of 150 Curtis ad salesmen and other representatives in tiny Pocono Manor (pop. 300) in eastern Pennsylvania, where Fuoss revealed the details of a long, mysterious effort to restore the Post and Curtis. Said Fuoss: "We are battling for our corporate lives."

Before and after the Pocono meeting, Fuoss and Art Editor Kenneth Stuart worked feverishly behind closed doors to change the fusty, predictable old Post into a snappier magazine with "impact." Fuoss told the Pocono gathering that the Post had been "bankrupt in spirit and resourcefulness" when he and outgoing Editor Ben Hibbs gave it its last face lifting in 1942--and that he did not intend to let that happen again. The Post, said he, "is in trouble not because it is a poor magazine, but because we have somehow failed to adjust to the savage competitive environment in which we live." With that, Fuoss sent Post pitchmen to advertising and sales offices across the U.S. with examples of the new format and with an admonition: "This is not a battle to be won by editors alone. You salesmen bring home the bucks."

To help attract the bucks, the new Post promises to:

P: Wake up its readers with hard-hitting articles that Postmen wryly call "the Saturday Evening Punch" or simply "The Blast," and a regular piece called "Speaking Out: The Voice of Dissent," aimed at kicking up controversies.

P:Use more striking covers (the word Post will be played across the entire cover with The Saturday Evening squeezed into the o of Post), more photographs and designs showing "physical action" and aimed at stirring "emotional response." One survivor: Norman Rockwell, Post sentimental cover artist for 45 years.

P: Chuck its longtime Republican politics. "I don't think the Post ought to be identified with any party," says Fuoss, who has voted for both parties. "If I had been editor last fall, the Post would have been for John F. Kennedy. If I had been editor earlier this year, the Post would have lathered Kennedy for his sponsorship of the Cuban disaster."

P:Use men in the fields of theater, architecture and record-jacket design to create splashy, arresting spreads and search for both bigger name fiction writers and promising unknowns in the U.S. and Europe. Probable fatalities: the most cloying fiction, the boy-clinching-girl illustrations.

Next month Fuoss will send the rejuvenated Post to the newsstands, complete with a new price: 20-c- instead of 15-c-. To soften up the public, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn will soon kick off a $1,250,000 nationwide ad drive. The Post's new look and stance, said an adman who went to Philadelphia for a close look at the revamped format, "may infuriate some long-term readers, and there may be turnover in the audience. But it is good enough to bring in new readers as fast as it loses old ones." Fuoss says that he has so many ideas for the Post that "it may be the middle of 1962 before we've carried out our present plans."

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