The Press: So Big

Are U.S. newspapers too big? Readers who think so had a weighty argument last week in the New York Times. It published a 60-page edition that contained 180 columns of news and 300 columns of ads. The 13½ oz. of paper were quite a bargain (for 3¢ readers got 4.2¢ worth of paper). But the 194,000 words of news would take the ordinary reader six to eight hours to plow through if he read every word.

Few Times readers would prefer Britain’s flyweight four-page dailies. But some of them—and some readers of other bulky U.S. papers—would certainly like the Times’s air edition for U.N. delegates at Paris. It managed (by sharp editing and leaving out ads) to get all the news that’s fit to print into 12 to 16 pages a day.