Press: Brisbane to Mirror

When called upon to justify tawdriness in his newspapers, William Randolph Hearst likes to reply: “If you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror….Blame the public that makes such a newspaper necessary.”

Lately Publisher Hearst has been looking into his tabloid New York Mirror. He did not like what he saw but, instead of blaming the public, he blamed the Mirror’s publisher and nominal owner, Albert John Kobler. Last week Mr. Kobler journeyed west to the Hearst castle at San Simeon, Calif, to learn his fate. Same day, into the Mirror office strode Hearst’s oldest and ablest editor, a man whom he gladly pays $1,000,000 every four years—Arthur Brisbane. He dictated a brief announcement:

“I have undertaken editorial direction and management of the New York Daily Mirror, and hope to contribute something to a newspaper that already has a great circulation, more than half a million daily, more than a million Sunday….Published within reach of 20,000,000 population [it] hopes to include among its readers a fair share of that population.”

Ten years ago Arthur Brisbane telephoned Walter Howey, Hearst’s crack managing editor in Chicago: “Can you start a tabloid newspaper in ten days?”

Howey: Nine days will be plenty.

Brisbane: Then come on to New York; but don’t move your furniture.

Within a fortnight, on the first day the Democratic National Convention sat in old Madison Square Garden, the Mirror burst upon Manhattan. Its promise: “Daily Mirror’s program will be 90% entertainment, 10% information.” In fulfillment, Convention news was allotted a half column on page 2. Otherwise, the Mirror was a slavish imitation of Joseph Medill Patterson’s Daily News which, five years its senior, already had 753,000 readers.

So far as the public knew, the publisher of the Mirror was a 25-year-old playboy named Barclay Harding (“Buzz”) Warburton Jr., grandson of the late John Wanamaker. Actually the Mirror was Hearst’s effort to frighten Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. and Bernarr Macfadden out of the New York tabloid field, and thereby protect Hearst’s American from further competition. Timorous young Vanderbilt was successfully scared off but not Macfadden who soon thereafter started his Graphic.

Largely because Arthur Brisbane had a genuine enthusiasm for the picture-paper idea, the Mirror was kept alive on its own dubious merits. Publisher Hearst usually went through the motions of disguising his ownership of the paper. He “sold” it to the late Alexander Pollock Moore, one-time U. S. Ambassador to Spain, who in turn “sold” it to Mr. Kobler. who had previously made a fortune from Hearst’s American Weekly. But whoever held the stock, it was Mr. Hearst who held the notes.

With Gossip-Columnist Walter Winchell as its prime circulation-puller, the Mirror was read chiefly for its features, was shunned by advertisers. Yet it pinched pennies tight enough to show a little profit.

Such was the publishing problem taken over last week by Arthur Brisbane. It did not frighten the man who will celebrate his 70th birthday next month; who as a youth knocked down English Prizefighter Charley Mitchell with one blow of his fist; who still rides horseback and chops trees; who after 51 years in the newspaper business is as alert and energetic as ever; who sometimes proves, between Brisbanalities in his “Today” column, that in straightaway news reporting he can outdig and outwrite the best of a younger generation.

First thing Editor Brisbane did at the Mirror last week was to have a cubby-hole office partitioned off in the corner of the dingy city-room on the second floor. (Publisher Kobler used to closet himself in quiet elegance on the fourth floor.) He began by taking a hand with the Mirror’s editorial column. True to form was an illustrated editorial on Sir Oswald Mosley, with a dotted line drawn across that British Blackshirt’s cranium to show that he “has too much face, too little head.”

His Mirror duties do not interfere with Brisbane’s “Today” column, which he can, and frequently does, whip out in 20 minutes.