Imitating the Imitator

They laughed in 1959 when Canadian-born Roy Thomson invaded Fleet Street, the citadel of British journalism. They scoffed in 1962 when Thomson, who cheerfully swipes anybody's idea, tacked a New World gimmick, the four-color magazine supplement, onto the anemic corpus of one of his new London properties, the Sunday Times. They gloated when Thomson's Folly, as the Times supplement soon was dubbed, lost $2,250,000 in its first 18 months. But by last week, with Thomson's Folly an established success and its creator ennobled with the title Lord Thomson of Fleet, they were imitating the imitator all over London.

More Plumage. At the Sunday Observer, a quality paper that has steadily yielded ground to Thomson's renascent Sunday Times, Editor-Owner David Astor rushed plans to add a competitive color supplement of his own this fall. The Sunday Telegraph, which has also slipped in the quality Sunday standings, informed its readers that they would shortly get a Sunday-type supplement on Friday--two full days before anyone else. Front-running Roy Thomson countered these defensive moves with new aggression. The Sunday Times, he announced, would soon sprout additional plumage, a section devoted to the world of commerce and trade.

Nearly 50 years have passed since Fleet Street was so thoroughly jolted by an immigrant from Canada. That earlier invader's name was Max Aitken, until the Crown made him Lord Beaverbrook. And long before the Beaver died at 85 (TIME, June 19), his Daily Express had come to typify the stature that a British newspaper can attain without resort to sensation. By then the island was full of sensational newspaper giants, among them Cecil Harmsworth King's Daily Mirror, the biggest daily in the free world (circ. 5,000,000), and Sir William Carr's News of the World, the biggest Sunday paper anywhere (6,600,000).

Scratch Two. Roy Thomson's impact on Fleet Street has matched the Beaver's. A man who built a publishing empire that now numbers more than 100 newspapers and nearly as many magazines, he brought to Britain the strong conviction that newspapering should be a paying proposition. Fleet Street was by no means solvent when Thomson arrived. The newspaper mortality rate was running high, and the newcomer made it higher. Of the bagful of papers he bought from the Kemsley chain, Thomson scratched two, the Sunday Empire News and the Sunday Graphic, on the grounds that they were peddling unproductive commodities: sensation and smut. "I don't want to get into that rat race," Thomson said.

Instead, he drew a bead on Britain's quality Sunday press, the tiniest sliver on Fleet Street. Outside of the Sunday Times,* with a circulation of 880,000, there was only the Sunday Observer (660,000). Thomson decided to expand his audience. He moderated the paper's traditional Tory pitch in the hope of attracting readers of other political tastes, and added the color supplement.

Soft Pedal. After its amateurish debut, the supplement has graduated into a Sunday staple for both advertisers and readers. Many photographs bear the credit line Lord Snowdon (Princess Margaret's husband) and bylines are big: Ian Fleming, Lord Attlee, etc. Circulation stands at 1,200,000; the Daily Telegraph's Sunday edition started in 1962 with a phenomenal 1,400,000 only to level off around 650,000.

The imitation of Thomson continues. Even the popular giants have taken note of the success of Thomson's appeal to the aspiring new middle class--and of the waning marketability of their own gaudy wares. The News of the World, down 2,000,000 circulation in a decade, has dropped much of its lurid crime-and-sex reporting in favor of a more serious and cultural approach. Max Aitken, Beaverbrook's son and heir, is fabricating a Thomsonlike appendage for the Sunday Express.

*No kin to the Times of London, a 179-year-old daily institution.

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