The Press: Thucydides’ Sunday Job

When radio’s Information Please was looking for someone to help ex-New York Timesman John Kieran edit its almanac, it picked a man from the rival Herald Tribune: City Editor Joe Herzberg. Manhattan-born Herzberg, who started on the Trib as an 18-year-old copy boy, never finished college. But he knows his city like the palm of his hand, and in his encyclopedic memory, say staffers, is “everything from baseball to Bach.” Joe Herzberg once wrote in his own book, Late City Edition: “A modern newspaper is Thucydides sweating to make a deadline.”

Last week the city desk’s Thucydides had a new job to sweat over. Tribune Publisher Helen Rogers Reid and her son, Editor Whitelaw Reid, 39, moved Herzberg over to run the slipping Sunday edition (circ. 596,775), which up to now has had no boss of its own. They want Herzberg to pep it up to closer competition with the fat, profitable Sunday Times (circ. 1,051,626), which in the past year gained 5,000 circulation while the Sunday Trib was losing 38,000. To prove that they mean business, the Reids are spending $1,000,000 on the new Sunday paper.

Biggest share of the million will go to the Trib’s Sunday magazine, its own special edition of the syndicated This Week. The Trib sold control of This Week to Joe Knapp of Crowell-Collier in 1935, but has always added its own special sections to the magazine. Herzberg is adding still more, including full-color reproductions of paintings, a two-page condensation of a bestseller, two pages of personality photographs, extra text-pieces each week by the Trib’s own staffers or free lancers. Herzberg is also revamping the news sections of the Sunday Trib, widening the scope of the news-review section to “cover situations rather than incidents,” giving the Book Review a new cover and better typography, sprucing up the entertainment section.

These sections are the biggest in the succession of changes which the Trib has undergone since “Whitey” Reid succeeded his late father, Ogden Reid, in 1947. Weekdays, the Trib has been using more pictures, has reshuffled its editions to help street sales, developed some new columnists and given a better play to such old ones as John Crosby and Red Smith. As a result, the Trib has picked up circulation (present circ. 347,093). But the Sunday Trib’s poor showing has held down the overall earnings. It will be Joe Herzberg’s job to change that. Comparing the 335-page Sunday Times this week to the 217-page Trib, Joe Herzberg knew better than anyone else that he has his work cut out.