The Press: New Departure in New Haven

For ten months the U.S. press has watched a forced adventure in journalism—newspapers produced by Vari-Type, without benefit of striking printers or linotype machines. Last week, in New Haven, the oldest U.S. college daily carried the experiment a step further. In its first issue of the new college year, the Yale Daily News (est. 1878) came out in a new dress that combined Vari-Type with photo-offset printing,* the first U.S. daily to do so.

The undergraduate boards that run the News had long yearned for a printing plant of their own. The cost was always too high. Since 1932, the editors have had their own Gothic quarters, the Briton Hadden Memorial Building,† but the printing has been done on contract, in a shop a mile and a half away. Now, in the “heelers’ room,” where young Yalemen compete for places on the board, the Daily News (circ. 3,000) has its own offset press and folder, with three new Vari-Typers down the hall. It can print more pictures and is boosting its tabloid size from an average eight pages daily to twelve.

The cost of the new equipment was only $22,000, well within the means of the moneymaking News, and only one-fourth the price of conventional presses. The campus daily may well prove what many newsmen suspect, that new processes have radically cut the high cost of going into the newspaper business.

*Which transfers Vari-Typed copy to a zinc plate and then to a rubber roller which prints it, thus eliminating metal type and the costlier flat-bed press which small papers ordinarily use.

† Named for the onetime board chairman of the Daily News (’19), later a co-founder of TIME.