The Dog Days

"We're up 70,000 in Los Angeles," exulted Frank Couniff, national editor of the Hearst newspaper chain. "We're up 82,000 in Boston, 71,000 in San Francisco, 160,000 in New York. Hell, we're even up in Albany." Then he paused, considering the reason for this unpredictable circulation swell. "I'm just as sorry as the next fellow about Marilyn Monroe," he said. "I liked and admired her. But as long as she had to do it, what a break that she did it in August."

Across the U.S., even as they conducted their interminable public post mortems on the fallen star, other newspaper editors watched their sales soar--and silently endorsed the sentiments of the man from Hearst. For in the newspaper game, the dog days of August are a time of terrible drought. Circulation and advertising fall with a sickening thud; news simply evaporates under the late summer sun.

Paries & Polar Bears. In Boston, following a time-worn custom, Herald Managing Editor George Minot dispatched a platoon of newsmen to summer resorts on Cape Cod. "We just tell the reporter to drive and look," said Minot, "and whenever he sees an old lady doing nothing--talk to her." The Omaha World-Herald began a series on the city's 74 parks that could well last out the summer. The San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted an event that knows no season: HE FOUND LOVE IN ICE CREAM PARLOR. The Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman and the Topeka Daily Capital sent photographers out for polar bear pictures at the zoo.

In New York City, where seven dailies scrap for the summer reader's indifferent eye, the news dearth becomes even more crucial. The World-Telegram launched listless crusades against pigeons (they carry lice and disease) and buses (the service is lousy). Amid a welter of daily stories about the Monroe suicide, Hearst's Journal-American still found two pages on which to reproduce a dozen letters that former U.S. President Herbert Hoover got from children. One desperate day, the Herald Tribune, which has been running a daily picture of unrepaired potholes in New York streets, abruptly shifted this feature onto Page One*#151;and expanded the pothole from two columns to six.

Diets & Balloons. The summer news slump is not readily susceptible to solution. The New York Times's Assistant Managing Editor Theodore Bernstein merely ignores the annual doldrums, secure in the knowledge that the U.S.'s fattest paper always goes on a summer diet: from June to September the Times is ten columns leaner than in the cool months. (The headlines are leaner too. At week's end, the paper's major front-page news story, in column eight, had not supported more than a one-column head since July 26.) Eric Franklin, the Boston Traveler's acting news editor, encourages hot-weather prolixity in the staff: "The word is 'Look, chaps, we're wide-open-don't worry too much about tight writing.' "

Such laxness can lead to trouble. Many newspapers followed Sherri Finkbine's quest for an abortion with sickening thoroughness. The Monroe suicide, admittedly front-page news, was ballooned to ludicrous proportions: 436 column inches in a single issue of the New York Daily News, 500 the same day in the New York Post--and 799 in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. In the cool of autumn, the papers might have had better sense.

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