The Press: Dream of Empire

The publisher is a woman, but a businesswoman. In her penthouse office atop the 16-story New York Post building, dark-haired, blue-eyed Dorothy Schiff Hall Backer Thackrey dreams of a publishing empire. Marshall Field, with the fertilizing help of a $168,000,000 fortune, has cultivated a large journalistic garden. Publisher Thackrey hasn’t got that much fertilizer—some $15 million inherited from her late father, Banker Mortimer Schiff—but she is determined to do what she can with it. Last week, she reached all the way to Paris and added a brand-new paper to her little queendom.

Uptown & Cross-Country. The keystone of Dorothy Thackrey’s enterprises is the 144-year-old New York Post, which William Cullen Bryant once edited. The paper was a consistent money loser from 1917 to 1943.

She bought into the Post in 1939, took over as publisher in 1942. Circulationwise it has remained a weak sister in her hands, trailed among Manhattan’s afternoon dailies only by Field’s P.M. But guided by her shrewd husband, Editor Theodore Olin Thackrey, a Postman for eight years before he married his boss, she turned the paper into a tabloid, upped the price from 3¢ to 5¢, and (though she campaigned for the New Deal) made money too.

After that, Dolly Thackrey reached out. She snapped up some of the Chicago Daily News’s once famed foreign staff, expanded the Post’s foreign coverage and started a syndicate. She bought Brooklyn’s tiny radio station WLIB and the Bronx Home News, a neighborhood paper that concentrates on marriages and bingo parties. She tried and failed to buy the San Francisco Chronicle, then as a consolation prize bought two radio stations, Los Angeles’ KMTR and San Francisco’s KYA (FCC approval of the purchases is pending).

Transatlantic Piece. Last week, hot from Le Matin’s old presses, came the first 50,000-copy edition of a new four-page tabloid, the Paris Post. Directing the operations were: 1) Editor Paul Scott Mowrer, dean of the writing Mowrers (others: brother Edgar Ansel and son Richard); 2) Homburg-hatted General Manager Robert Pell, late of the State Department. Their assignment: to publish a newspaper wholly independent of the New York Post but voicing the same New Dealish views.

Editor Mowrer, a 39-year veteran of the Chicago Daily News, had performed a publishing miracle in getting out the paper. In shortage-plagued Paris, everything — typewriters, furniture, telephones — was a problem. Paper had to be wangled from a French monopoly already besieged by French publishers. Every member of the 26-man staff, ten of them Americans, had gone through hell & high water before he could get passports and transportation or release from the service.

Somehow the job was done. The New York Herald Tribune’s Paris edition was no longer alone in its field. And another little piece in Dolly Thackrey’s dream had been fitted into place.