Press: Herex Tabbed

When hardworking, hardheaded young Joseph Vincent Connolly became general manager of the Hearst Newspapers nearly two months ago, Hearstlings throughout the country held on to their chairs and waited for the big blow. The Hearst realm, no longer ruled by its fabulous founder, was now in the hands of men who knew how to save money as well as spend it— and “Smiling Joe” Connolly was one of them. The Hearstian era of prodigality had definitely ended last year when the aging chief consented to the dissolution of his beloved but money-losing New York American (TIME, July 5, 1937). With the New York situation thus temporarily solved, General Manager Connolly’s first concern became Chicago, where the profitless morning Herald & Examiner was stumped by the sprawling domination of Robert Rutherford McCormick’s Tribune, and the evening American was suffering from the sprightly competition of onetime Tribuneman Samuel Emory Thomason’s tabloid Times.

First step came last month when Connolly split the joint management of the two dailies, appointed Hearstling Merrill C. Meigs publisher of the American, Advertising Executive Harry A. Koehler publisher of the Herex. To infuse life into the moribund Herex, Connolly performed a major operation. This week, aided by red flares and sound trucks, red-capped newsboys hawked the first issue of the Herex as a tabloid. To give the tabloid zip, Connolly turned it over to onetime Herex Managing Editor Walter Howey, immortalized as the prototype of all man-eating managing editors by Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in The Front Page. Lately on Hearst’s executive staff, Howey had supervised the tabloid New York Mirror and the Boston Record. There are now 54 tabloids, of varying degrees of importance, on sale daily in the U.S.

To brighten the evening American, General Manager Connolly announced he would use two brand-new Hearstlings: Inez Callaway Robb, weaned away from Joseph Medill Patterson’s New York Daily News where she wrote a lively society column under the Newsname “Nancy Randolph,” and Francis J. Powers, former sportswriter for the New York Sun.