The Press: Losing Ground

“Who needs the National Observer?” asked the National Observer in an ad that answered its own question: “Affluent and influential people” who need color television sets, cars, European vacations and a new kitchen stove.

Judging from the contents of last week’s issue, that answer is incomplete.

Presumably, the Observer is also needed by people who want a history of golf, pictures of a tame owl and a two-ton ball of twine, old Roman verse (a stanza from Lucilius), and a Page One story about Chinese cookery in London.

Unfortunately for the Observer, there do not seem to be many such readers around. Approaching its first birthday, U.S. journalism’s first serious claimant to the title of national newspaper is losing ground. From a starting 422,000, weekly circulation is down to 200,000. Newsstand sales approach the vanishing point.

Some cities have already reached it; the Observer once sold 200 copies on the streets of Omaha, now sells none. Advertisers have handsomely if unwittingly cooperated with the paper’s pledge to hold ads to 50% of available space. Last week, about 2½ pages of ads rattled around in an 18-page issue.

Even so, the anemic National Observer, which is neither national nor much of an observer, is not likely to die an early death. It has a doting parent wealthy enough to coddle it—Dow Jones & Co.’s daily bible of the national business community, the Wall Street Journal, which since 1940 has grown in circulation from 32,000 to 812,085. Nor is the Observer a particularly expensive operation. It requires an editorial staff of 34, against the Journal’s 321; it is run off on weekends on Journal presses that would otherwise stand idle. Dow Jones President Bernard Kilgore insists he is confident that the Observer can follow its parent’s footsteps to success. “We are quite satisfied,” said he. “We’re not amateurs. We know the Observer will be successful, but we don’t know what the size of the success will be.”