The Press: Experiment in Progress

Manhattan’s first new daily in 15 years, afternoon tabloid PM, was one month last week, and its Publisher Ralph Ingersoll celebrated at the Ho Plaza over a tabloid birthday cake a tabloid candle. After PM’s one-shakedown cruise, both Publisher and the press in general had a idea of what his paper was.

Circulation. After a curiosity sale of 372,000 copies on its first issue, PM’s circulation declined until last week, Publisher Ingersoll said, it was “under 200,000.” This is small compared to the tremendous mass sale of Manhattan’s established tabloids.

One circulation snag hit by PM was Manhattan’s delivery system. Morning papers are delivered by local dealers (cigar stores, confectioners), afternoon papers are usually sold on newsstands, rarely delivered. PM took subscriptions from thousands of curious New Yorkers, who then found that their local dealers were not anxious to deliver an afternoon paper. Meantime, PM’s circulation was almost equally divided among city sales (mostly newsstand), suburban sales (newsstand and delivery) and copies by mail to out-of-town subscribers.

Staff. Publisher Ingersoll planned a magazine-style staff, headed by a managing editor with about 180 editorial workers and no copy desk. By last week he not only had a copy desk but the biggest one in New York City, with five divisions for various sections of the paper and five managing editors. Because the capacity of his composing room is small, his editorial operations go on 24 hours a day and different sections of his paper take turns closing, the news sections going to press in the last six hours.

As PM published, Publisher Ingersoll apparently found that his editorial staff included too many amateurs and intellectuals, not enough trained newsmen. He continued hiring until his staff numbered 230, last week had a shakedown, got rid of about 40.

Journalism New Style. In its promotion, PM promised to be a new kind of newspaper. Of its 32 pages daily, only five to seven and a half have been devoted to straight news, including background stories. The chief novelty of these is that PM’s wire stories (United Press) are completely rewritten, and all of them are self-contained on one page. But few newsmen thought it provided adequate news coverage or stirring news writing. By the end of the first month, PM was publishing three editions a day (compared to six or seven for Manhattan’s four other afternoon papers), but generally arrived on the street with its news considerably behind that of other papers. Although spot-news pictures are scarce (especially from war-darkened Europe), PM carries as many as 14 pages of maps and pictures. Without advertising, fiction or advice to the lovelorn, PM gives some ten and a half pages a day to human-interest stories, features, statistical tables. Chief innovation: shopping and radio guides, omission of comics, columnists, nightclub gossip.

Sensational murders and scandalous divorce cases PM also avoids, but in spite of this fact, and of the group of intellectuals (Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, et. al.) who assisted at its birth. PM is no high-brow sheet. Publisher Ingersoll declares frankly that it is aimed at the masses and the low-income groups (incomes of $750 to $4,500 a year). For them he provides two pages a day devoted to labor news, union activities and unemployment, also bargains in food and clothing, cartoons by some leftist artists, drawings and photographs of garment workers, Negro scrubwomen, shirt-sleeved men and blousy women at play.

Result is that in spite of a socialite board of directors (including John Hay Whitney, Marshall Field III, Philip K. Wrigley, Lessing Rosenwald), PM has a leftist aroma. Fortnight ago, when a sheet was passed around newspaper offices, accusing various members of his staff by name of being Communists or Communist-sympathizers, Publisher Ingersoll published the charges, invited FBI to investigate PM.

Plans. Before PM’s first month was over it scrapped its Press Department and also its Business Department (which was designed to interest the masses by stories about small tradesmen, etc., rather than about industry). It also revised and improved its front page, dropping a large box that listed radio programs, in order to enlarge its headline, picture space. For another month or more, Publisher Ingersoll intends to go on experimenting.

How much money it is still losing he does not say: before publication he variously set his expected break-even point at 200,000 to 250,000 circulation—figures which he may have had to revise upwards. By September he will begin to get some notion of what percentage of his out-of-town trial subscribers will renew. Meanwhile he insists that PM will not lower its price, 5^, nor alter its policy of taking no advertising.

About Sept. 1 he plans to launch a new promotion drive. On it and the amount of new reader-appeal he can put into his paper will probably hang the fate of his experiment in journalism.