The Press: Tabloid in Exile

On a Sunday stroll in Rome’s weedy Villa Borghese, three Stars and Stripes staffers compared ambitions, found that they didn’t pine to go home after all.

The G.I.s had limited funds, unlimited nerve, and a hopeful hunch that a daily paper (American plan) might be made to pay in postwar Italy. They remembered how many a U.S. newsman, stranded abroad after World War I, had spent carefree years working on the Paris edition of the New York Herald, and had never been the same since. Pooling their assets, the three G.I.s took a deep breath and plunged into business as the Rome Daily American.

Hefty Louis Cortese, 31, had worked for Hearst and for Stage magazine. Dark-haired Jack Begon, 35, had run a shortlived Cosmopolis (Wash.) weekly, had done make-up on the San Francisco Chronicle. Lean, Groucho-mustached Bill de Meza, 28, had reported for the Plainfield (NJ.) Courier News.

This week their eight-page, English-language tabloid was eight months old and growing fast. Its founders (who almost lost their shirts and their $36,000 capital in the first 90 days) had 23,000 circulation in Italy, were flying 500 copies a day to Athens, lining up outlets all the way from Switzerland to Egypt. For their plant on the busy Corso Umberto, they had bought (for 7,000,000 lire, or $31,000) a modern rotary press.

Two things had helped the American survive its colicky infancy. When Stars and Stripes suspended in the Mediterranean, thousands of G.I.s switched to the civilian daily. And last summer tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who got a whiff of printers’ ink in Italy as a part-time I.N.S. correspondent, bought a minority block of stock.

When in Rome. Among Rome’s 26 postwar dailies, most of them shrill, partisan organs, the American is the least opinionated. As guests in Italy’s house, its publishers steer clear of politics. Their editorials are not their own, but strings of carefully culled quotes from leading U.S. or British papers.

The American’s only English-language competition is the Paris Herald Tribune, which arrives with two-day-old news, and the British Army’s stodgy Union Jack. To expatriate Americans the American is a daily breath of home, but to Italian readers, reared on Fascist journalism, it is sometimes baffling. Once it ran a letter from a U.S. reader suggesting that the Colosseum be razed and a children’s play center put up in its place. Next day Italian tempers exploded in the press and radio. An American editor had to go on the air and explain that his paper did not endorse every idea that showed up in its letters column.