Ever on Sunday

On U.S. journalism's vast landscape dwells a strange colossus--part newspaper, part showman--that has its keepers buzzing with puzzlement and concern. Like churchgoing and weekend barbecues, the Sunday newspaper is a national institution. It is big, boisterous and, for the most part, glowing with financial health. But for all that, it presents a growing problem not only for the men who put it together but for the readers who scatter it across the living-room floor each Sunday. How is the Sunday newspaper changing--and why? What do its editors want it to be? Is it aimed at a readership that no longer exists?

The Sunday newspaper penetrates seven of every ten U.S. households, where it reaches a phenomenal--if not always attentive--readership of 120 million. It comes in all sizes, weights and shapes, from the Juneau, Alaska Empire (circ. 3,050, an average 14 pages) to journalism's undisputed heavyweight champion, the Sunday New York Times, which often runs to 600 pages and tips the scales at 6 Ibs. In the massive Sunday barrage of newsprint, there is something for almost everyone: reprises of old murders, comics, crossword puzzles, fiction, verse, quotations from Scripture, galleries of young ladies recently betrothed, advice on how to pot begonias--and a little bit of news.

Many newspaper publishers question whether such sheer bulk has carried the U.S. Sunday newspaper several compass points off journalism's true course. While the typical metropolitan Sunday paper has grown from 111 to 243 pages in the last 20 years, its news content has shrunk from 11.6% to 6.5%. Unlike its slender--and more single-minded--daily brethren, which are deeply embedded in the work week, the Sunday paper must snare that most elusive of all readers: the American at play. Two-day weekends, new leisure pursuits, and the emergence of television's mesmeric eye all have conspired to pry loose the Sunday paper's once sturdy grip on the nation's off-time mood. "The Sunday newspaper, I'm afraid, is no longer the center of the American Sunday morning," says Scott Newhall, executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "We give our readers 150 reasons why they should do something on Sunday other than read our paper. The Sunday paper has become a guide to other things to do rather than something to do itself."

Facelift for Mammon. The Sunday paper was originally conceived as only a seventh edition of the daily press. Fiercely attacked by clergymen in its formative years--they considered it a Mammon-like rival of the pulpit--it did not succeed in establishing itself until the Civil War generated a ravenous public appetite for news and gave it permanent root. But not until Joseph Pulitzer, already the successful publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, arrived in New York in 1883 did the Sunday paper begin sprouting into the giant it is today. With sensational features, comic strips, four-color illustrations and special-interest supplements, Pulitzer's Sunday World face-lifted Sunday journalism. In this, it had considerable help from William Randolph Hearst, who pitted his New York Journal against the World and trumped Pulitzer's every Sunday trick.

What Pulitzer and Hearst began, today's Sunday proprietors have enlarged and refined. Gone are many of the more sensational--and frequently hoked up--accounts of sin and sordidness. But the role of the Sunday funnies has been fattened from bit player to featured star. Most Sunday papers come gift-wrapped in the four-color exploits of Dick Tracy--because Tracy still sells more Sunday papers than the news.

The wrapping corsets an almost obscene girth, swollen by reams of editorial pap as carefully subdivided as any real estate development. The subdivisions usually include a home-grown or syndicated magazine supplement and separate departments on real estate, sports, society, entertainment, books, want ads, travel, cooking, gardening and hobbies. Most papers have also launched a TV supplement containing scheduled programs for the coming week. Readers seem to demand it: after the Detroit News added a TV supplement in 1959, Sunday circulation rose by 40,000 immediately, 96,000 in a year.

In this Sunday labyrinth of newsprint, the reader frequently loses his way. After the Houston Chronicle launched a feature in which readers were invited to phone in questions, the paper got angry inquiries: Why had the Sunday edition stopped listing the top ten records of the week? In some embarrassment, the Chronicle explained that it had done no such thing: the callers had merely mislaid the listing somewhere in the Sabbath maze. In Denver last week, a reader who plowed resolutely through the city's two Sunday newspapers would have had to spend 8 1/2 hours--at the rate of just one minute per page. Anyone with the temerity to digest the full contents of the Sunday New York Times would need a minimum of 30 hours (see cut).

Crime & Accidents. Despite the rich and varied menu, Sunday newspaper sales are leveling off. While daily circulation has gone from 52 million to 60 million since 1948, Sunday circulation has risen only 3,000,000, to 49 million. In New York, which fields more Sunday papers (five) than any other U.S. city, Sunday circulation has dropped 1,700,000 in ten years. Elsewhere in the U.S., eight metropolitan Sunday papers have departed the scene since 1951.

Apologists for the Sunday paper's heavy emphasis on entertainment at the expense of news plead pure necessity. "Changes in the living habits of the American people," says Richard H. Amberg, publisher of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, "have pretty well outmoded the Sunday paper that claims to rely on its hard news for its sales." And news is admittedly scarce. "From the spot news standpoint," says William Townes, managing editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, "Saturday limits you mainly to crime and traffic accidents."

But comics and cooking are not necessarily the solution to the Sunday paper's waning sense of identity. The disturbing indications that Americans at play are using the Sunday paper mainly as a road map to Disneyland have encouraged many Sunday publishers to re-examine their mission. "The Sunday paper is catching up with this affluent society of ours," says Washington Post Managing Editor Alfred Friendly. "Our readership grows increasingly educated and cultured. I'm delighted with the number of letters we get demanding more and more on art and music. People keep wanting us to be a bigger and better department store."

In Ferment. In increasing numbers, the Sunday press is providing a more intelligent re-examination of what happened in the previous week. Since May 1960, the New York Sunday News has devoted two pages to a retrospective look at the week entitled "What in the World!" The Houston Chronicle has added a collection of second thoughts on the news called "Outlook--A Page to Help You Think."

Such fresh onslaughts on the serious reader's attention are signs that the Sunday paper is in ferment, still unsure of its role in a changing world but willing to search it out with fresh ideas and experiments. Out of the ferment may come a rededication to solid news values. It is not by chance but design that the bulkiest Sunday newspaper of them all, the New York Times, is by no means devoted to fluff; the Times Sunday news sections generally outweigh the total contents of many of its competitors. "The trend on Sunday as well as daily," says Lester Markel, 67, Times Sunday editor for 38 years, "must be toward what I would call emphasis on the news rather than entertainment. Newspapers can't compete with television for entertainment." More and more Sunday papers are beginning to wonder whether they should even try.

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