Battle by the Bay

In his tenth-floor office in the old San Francisco Examiner Building, Randolph Apperson Hearst, president of Hearst Consolidated Publications, brooded last week over a set of nagging dilemmas. In the past six years Hearst's Examiner has boosted circulation 25% to 300,127, but it might just as well have stood still; in the same span, the rival Chronicle increased its sales 75%. to a pace-setting 315,180. Last year the Examiner was several million advertising lines ahead of the Chronicle, but the Hearst operation in San Francisco, which includes the struggling News Call Bulletin, is still losing money. Toothbrush Wife. Part of the answer lies in the dog-eat-dog nature of San Francisco newspapering--a situation that Randy's father, the late William Randolph Hearst, helped to create at the turn of the century when he made the Examiner his showcase and it clobbered all comers with its sensationalism. Since 1960. when the Chronicle overtook the Examiner for the first time, Hearst executives have ladled out a small fortune in a stern effort to regain the top spot in the town where the chief got his journalistic start. The job will take some doing. Behind the austere facade of the Chronicle Building at Fifth and Mission, flamboyant Executive Editor Scott Newhall, 49, operates one of the wackiest circuses in modern U.S. journalism. Newhall boasts that the Chronicle subscribes to nearly every news service available, yet there is rarely much room for the sober cerebrations served up by the London Times or the Manchester Guardian. Top priority goes to gamier stuff--the case of the "Toothbrush Wife" who tried to fry her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, a campaign to clothe naked animals, a scare-headline crime wave based on some scattered muggings and holdups. It is a wonder that Newhall has room even for that sort of news. At last count, the Chronicle was carrying no fewer than 53 columnists, ranging downward from Walter Lippmann to Count Marco, a no-count native of Pittsburgh whose real name is Marco Spinelli. In "Beauty and the Beast," Marco offers advice to females, mostly matrons interested in getting their husbands interested again, and once recommended: "Take a bath with your husband. . . . Step daintily into the bubble-filled tub. Mon Dieu, this is no time to bend over." Newest addition to the growing throng is Society Columnist Frances Moffatt, who after eleven years as chief chitchatterer for the Examiner, gave the paper notice one Monday and flounced off to a champagne reception at the Chronicle only three days later. Boob Audience. Standout among the Chronicle's columnists is Veteran Herb Caen, 47, whose pieces in praise of his beloved "Baghdad by the Bay" are credited by Newhall with drawing 35,000 extra readers. Caen defected in 1950, when the Examiner offered to double his $15,000 salary, but he returned to the Chronicle eight years later for $38,000. In the last 25 years more than a score of rivals have tried, and failed, to match his drawing power. The newest man to make the effort is Glasgow-born Bill Hall, 42, the Examiner's glib former Sunday editor, who unintentionally fast-talked himself into the job by complaining that the paper could not overtake the Chronicle without someone to rival Caen. "It's just like the Army," mused Hall afterward. "You complain about the food, so they make you mess officer." So far, Hall has failed to produce anything quite as tempting as Herb's tripes a la mode de Caen. Despite the steady drain of funds caused by the San Francisco operation, Hearst accountants seem wary of swinging their well-honed axes on the late chief's favorite daily. But rumors periodically crop up that the News Call Bulletin, created in 1959 by a merger between the Hearst and Scripps-Howard afternoon papers, may be scheduled for demolition. If that happens, the Examiner will probably switch to afternoon publication. Hearst executives deny the rumors, but since William Randolph Hearst's death in 1951, they have never hesitated to lop off deadwood, so far have killed seven of the chain's 19 newspapers.* In the meantime, the Examiner faces the prospect of chasing the fast-stepping Chronicle. "We shouldn't be fighting against the Chronicle," says Columnist Hall. "Sensationalism is not the answer. We don't have a boob audience, but we have lost the intellectuals. The other readers only want entertainment." So Much Swill. The Chronicle gives them just that in great gobs, and if the paper is distressingly short on news, Editor Newhall can point to the rising graphs on circulation and advertising charts by way of self-justification. "We kid around a lot," says he, "and that drives a lot of intellectuals crazy. But we have to appeal to a wider group." Such as everybody who drinks coffee. To launch a recent five-part crusade aimed at coffee drinkers, the Chronicle splashed this double-decked, eight-column screamline, the kind normally reserved for declarations of war, across Page One:

THE TERRIBLE COFFEE IN S.F.'S RESTAURANTS

When somebody suggested that the whole series was so much swill, Newhall replied with a question: "Is coffee more important than Berlin?" He answered himself: "It is. Fifteen years from now, people will have forgotten what happened in Berlin on such and such a day, but they sure as hell won't have forgotten about coffee."

* Next on the chopping block: the American Weekly, oldest of U.S. Sunday supplements, which once boasted a circulation of 10 million. The Weekly will bow out of its last nine out lets Sept. i, and John Hay Whitney's Parade will replace it in four of them.

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