Monday, Apr. 17, 1972

Short Takes

-- Women's Wear Daily, the brash and breezy tabloid trade paper, last week acquired a new standard-newspaper-size sibling called W, a fortnightly that Publisher John Fairchild says is aimed at "an audience of intellectually affluent women in the U.S. and abroad." Priced at 50-c-, or $7.50 a year, W contains lavish color illustrations and a collage of fashion and gossip dedicated to what the beautiful people of both sexes are saying, wearing and doing. The first issue, well seeded with ads, went to 70,000 charter subscribers, and Editor Michael Coady sees circulation rising to 250,000 as "we start to fill the gap between fashion magazines and daily newspaper coverage of clothes." Although some original material may be added later, W now is a repackaging of WWD, minus the Seventh Avenue trade news but including WWD jargon (certain men show a "studly attraction") and initial codes (BP for beautiful people, CP for the jetsetters that WWD dubs the "cat pack").

-- Craig Claiborne, who retired last year after 14 years as gastronomic guru of the New York Times, is back in print with an excellent but expensive ($36 a year) biweekly newsletter on the joys of eating well. A sort of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sauce Bearnaise But Were Afraid to Ask, the eight-page Craig Claiborne Journal promises a complete course for the conscientious gourmet: recipes for lentil soup as well as filets mignons Grimod de la Reyniere, a serialized Dictionary of Gastronomy and reviews of restaurants at home and abroad that Claiborne hopes will ultimately reach from Peoria to Peking. "We mean to amuse and advise," wrote Claiborne in Vol. 1, No. 1. He promises "never to use the words gourmet, gourmand and epicure except in cases of extreme necessity."

-- On the seventh day, Long Island's Newsday always rested, secure in the knowledge that on the other six, its 450,000 circulation covered two out of every three homes on the island. No more. Last weekend Newsday begat Sunday Newsday, complete with separate sections for commentary, entertainment, sports, comics and a slick local four-color magazine titled L.I. The management expects to sell 500,000 Sunday copies, mostly at the expense of three competitors that previously carved up the Long Island Sunday field among them: the New York Daily News, Long Island Press and New York Times. One year in the planning, and manned by a separate staff of 200, Sunday Newsday is seen by Assistant to the Editor William Sexton as a logical service for Newsday's regular readers: "Why should they have to buy an out-of-town paper on Sunday?"

-- The Good News Paper died last week, from advertising atrophy rather than any dearth of happy tidings. Launched 16 months ago by Sacramento Businessman William Bailey "with a lot of optimism and $100," GNP built a fortnightly circulation of 11,000 by listing only stocks that went up, banning ads for cigarettes and sex movies, and contriving such upbeat leads as: "In the U.S. last year, 196,459,483 citizens did not commit a crime." But the paper fell $45,000 into debt. To the end, Bailey never printed the sad account of his failure in the Good News Paper.

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