Newspapers: Shattered Mirror

When newspapers die, they die suddenly. The death of the New York Mirror last week was no exception. The paper passed so swiftly into oblivion that even its own staff was taken by surprise, and the last issue was trapped forever in a host of minor ironies. On page 6, a series on Frank Sinatra promised another installment; on page 31, readers were asked, as usual, to send questions to the Mirror’s “You Said It!” column and were offered the customary $10 reward. Only in a black-bordered announcement on page 2, under the heading MIRROR CEASES PUBLICATION, were readers told that the morning tabloid was no more.

The Mirror’s considerable audience must have wondered why a paper with a circulation of 835,000 daily and 1,000,000 Sunday could not have survived. After all, it was the second biggest daily in the U.S., topped only by Manhattan’s other morning tabloid, the New York Daily News (1,915,000 daily, 2,000,000 Sunday). But in that very placement—the News first, the Mirror a laggard second—lay part of the reason for the Mirror’s death. For all of its 39 years the Mirror sought to copy the front runner, an ambition it was totally unequipped to achieve.

A Plague of Yo-Yos. On June 24, 1924, the Mirror reached the Manhattan scene almost as abruptly as it was destined to fade. “Can you start a new tabloid in ten days?” asked Arthur Brisbane, who was William Randolph Hearst’s chief editorial lieutenant. “Nine,” replied Walter Howey, who was to be the Mirror’s new editor. He was nearly as good as his word. From seed, the Mirror bloomed in two weeks. It was a frank imitation of Captain Joseph Patterson’s five-year-old Daily News, the U.S.’s first successful tabloid. But hardly had one copycat arisen when there was another: Bernarr Macfadden’s Evening Graphic, a meretricious tabloid compounded of “composographs”—faked photographs, mostly of undraped women—and juicy crime.

Hearst’s Mirror hired the Graphic’s freewheeling editor, Emile Gauvreau,* to implement the pledge of “90% entertainment and 10% news.” Gauvreau accumulated circulation “by pushing into the back of my mind all that I had learned about the value of constructive news” and by studying the techniques of the News. The Mirror continued to reflect a rash of stunts calculated to hook the reader: Yo-Yo contests, picture puzzles, yards of crime coverage in an era when New York streets rang with the din of gang wars. By 1932, Mirror circulation passed 500,000. But the News passed 1,000,000.

“Paper with a Heart.” About all that kept the Mirror going was its proprietor’s reluctance to part with any of his properties. “Pop held on to some real dogs,” said William Randolph Hearst Jr. recently. The Mirror was one of those dogs, and although the Chief knew it, he did not seem to care. “Dear Arthur,” he wrote in a now-famous memo to Arthur Brisbane, who was then the Mirror’s publisher: “You are now getting out the worst newspaper in the U.S.”

Brisbane had been called in to shore up the Mirror, which was losing ground steadily in its race with the News. But he failed, and was succeeded in 1935 by Charles B. McCabe, then 36, who stayed on as publisher until the paper’s death. McCabe did all a publisher could to polish the Mirror’s public image, redesignated it “the paper with a heart,” sponsored numerous community activities. Its pages, already crowded with lively columnists—Walter Winchell and Dan Parker, got more of the same. McCabe also stitched in some new comics and features beamed at the juvenile set. That helped some, but not enough.

The death of the Chief in 1951 spelled the Mirror’s ultimate doom. Control of Hearst’s empire passed to unsentimental custodians. Tallest of these was Richard E. Berlin, president (since 1940) of the Hearst Corp. and onetime Hearst ad salesman. In 1956 Ber lin began hacking away at the Hearst chain with both hands. By sale or merger he dropped money-losing papers in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee; he also sold Hearst’s International News Service to United Press. Earlier this year, he put to death Hearst’s unprofitable Sunday supplement, the American Weekly. “Personally,” said Berlin, “I would sell anything but the wife and children if the proper price were offered.”

Fickle Readership. What probably spared the Mirror so long was that Berlin could not get the proper price. Several years ago the paper was offered to Publisher Samuel Newhouse, whose appetite for new “properties,” as he calls them, is inexhaustible. Newhouse would not even bid on a paper that was losing $2,000,000 a year. The Mirror simply had nothing to sell that others were not selling better. TV had usurped its entertainment function. And even sex, that once dependable tabloid ware, was not so marketable any more. Contemporary fiction and the new girlie magazines did the job more clinically than any newspaper could hope to. Besides, the newspaper reader had outgrown the Mirror. He wanted news.

To a fatal degree, the Mirror had become a copy that was nowhere as good as the original. Even its circulation was a dangerous overlap of the News’s. A 1961 survey, conducted by an independent Manhattan research company for the Daily News, showed that seven out of ten Mirror readers also read the News on weekdays—and nearly nine out of ten on Sunday. Such duplicate readership is fickle, as New York’s 114-day newspaper strike proved when it ended last April. Almost at once, Mirror circulation dropped by 85,000—the suspicion was that the defectors were readers who had found they could do without the other morning tabloid.* Advertisers seemed to feel the same way: the Mirror’s ad linage, chronically low, fell lower.

All but Canyon. Unable to catch up to the News, the Mirror was finally forced to sell out to it. For a reported $10 million, the News took over what the Mirror described in its own obituary as “the name, good will and other intangible and physical assets.” This boiled down to little more than the Mirror’s antiquated plants and equipment and all the Mirror’s comic strips but Steve Canyon. Along with the Mirror’s flesh-and-blood columnists—Winchell, Drew Pearson, Victor Riesel, Dear Abby, etc. —Canyon was switched to Hearst’s other New York daily, the evening Journal-American.

Other tangible assets—the Mirror’s 1,600 employees—began looking for jobs, helped along by a hastily improvised Hearst placement bureau and a pledge of $3,350,000 in severance pay and other benefits. They were not likely to find work along Hearst’s diminishing chain, down to ten papers from a high of 26. Nor did the city’s six surviving dailies, still licking their strike wounds, stand in sore need of new hands.

Up, not Down. By week’s end the Mirror had vanished with scarcely a trace. Some of the other New York dailies hustled excitedly in pursuit of the departed paper’s readership; the Journal-American, for example, rushed out with a new 7 p.m. edition designed to compete with the first editions of the morning press. It was an elusive quest. The News jumped its press run by 400,000—which turned out to be rather more than was needed to accommodate potential transfers.

As usual, the last sounds over the Mirror’s grave came from the moaners, among them former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who pronounced the death of the Mirror “a great tragedy.” White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, a former newsman himself (the San Francisco Chronicle), invited U.S. newspapers to search their souls, by the light of the Mirror’s wake, if they wanted to survive. But such lamentation overlooked an important point. The census of U.S. dailies is up, not down: from 1,749 papers at the end of World War II to 1,760 today—and the combined circulation has more than paced the nation’s growth by rising in the same period from 48 million to almost 60 million.

* Without Gauvreau the Graphic lost steam and expired in 1932. * The Mirror was not alone in suffering a post-strike decline. Other announced circulation losses: the Times, 78,000; the News, 140,000; the World-Telegram, 69,000.