The Press: Battle of Los Angeles

After a week of dry runs and sleepless nights, the Los Angeles Times this week took the wraps off its tabloid Mirror (TIME, Aug. 16), the first new metropolitan newspaper in seven years.* It turned out to be a surprise package, typographically.

The big surprise was Page One: to get attention, it was turned sideways. The result was confusing when the paper was spread out, but it was an eye-catcher. What’s more, the horizontal Page One solved the problem of Mirror display on Los Angeles’ downtown newsstands; racks available to the new afternoon daily were not designed for tabloids.

The Mirror also pulled a neat trick in the matter of price. A recent price rise to 7¢ has cut street sales of other papers. The Mirror outmaneuvered rival papers by sneaking into the field (with a modest 100,000 circulation guarantee) at a nickel.

First-day buyers got a neatly laid-out paper, a weak line of comics, Columnists Billy Rose and Tom Stokes, Edith Gwynn on Hollywood, a sport column by the New York Herald Tribune’s Red Smith—and no news to speak of.

Publisher Virgil Pinkley and his boss, Times Publisher Norman Chandler, preferred not to raid staffs of papers like the New York Daily News to get tabloid know-how for the jazzy paper they hoped to put out. Instead, they picked up local talent; for a city editor they got florid Ralph (“Casey”) Shawhan, an ex-Hearstling who knew the town well but had turned to movie pressagentry five years ago.

Newsmen wondered whether Pinkley and crew could learn the tricks of the tabloid trade fast enough to weather the rough days ahead. There were rumors that Hearst had shipped in 600 tons of extra newsprint in preparation for a ding-dong circulation war.

* The last: Marshall Field’s Chicago Sun.