Newspapers: Mercy Killing

A newspaper does not die suddenly. It is slowly consumed by disease that spreads throughout the structure. First it loses a vivid editor, then its best reporters, then its power to lure talent and youth. It dies because advertising shrinks and economies prune live branches with the dead wood; it dies because unions want more money and it has none to give. Yet it dies hard, lingering on until even the stubbornest owners realize that the only answer is a mercy killing.

Last week the New York Herald Tribune was mercifully killed after a 20-year illness for which there was no longer any cure. Cursed by a second 114-day strike in three years, the Trib’s owners examined its future. The pre-strike circulation of 303,000 seemed likely to slip to 200,000, half their break-even point. Advertising would certainly decline; editorial staffers had already deserted in droves. There was little of tangible value left, except the paper’s past great reputation.

Marx & Livingstone. The Herald Tribune was only 42 years old, but it traced its ancestry back more than 130 years to the founding in 1835 of the New York Herald by James Gordon Bennett Sr. and the founding in 1841 of the New York Tribune by Horace Greeley. Bennett’s Herald was a lively penny paper that taught U.S. journalism to hunger for fresh news. The Herald sent boatloads of reporters to meet arriving ships at sea; by the time a ship landed they had already interviewed the passengers for European news. And it was the Herald that sent Stanley after Livingstone. Greeley’s Tribune, on the other hand, was urbane, circumspect, and an influential voice in the infant Republican Party—though not so Republican that it could not find room from 1851 to 1861 for a London correspondent named Karl Marx.

When Greeley died in 1872, Whitelaw Reid, an ace Civil War reporter, took over as owner and editor of the Tribune. His son, Ogden, succeeded him in 1912, and twelve years later bought the Herald. Almost immediately, the new Herald Tribune glowed with a circulation that nearly surpassed the combined total of its two predecessors. Without stopping to start, the Trib had reached the top: a great paper serving a great city—and the world.

Never a Cipher. In the halcyon 1930s, Geoffrey Parsons was the city’s most influential editorial writer; Stanley Woodward ran the best sports page in the business. The city editor was that celebrated Texan Stanley Walker, whom many consider the alltime champion in that trade. Walker issued just two ukases: “Do not betray a confidence, and do not knife a comrade.” But he could make some pointed suggestions. A correspondent whose copy lacked enough punctuation once received a full typed page of commas. And in his book, City Editor, Walker wrote, “Pick adjectives as you would pick a diamond or a mistress.” Some argue that Walker was outdone by his successor, the Trib’s other celebrated Texan, Lessing Engelking, whose yen for accuracy was such that he once ordered a reporter to spend all night in Brooklyn searching for someone’s middle initial. Another Trib veteran recalls: “I wrote a story about a woman having ‘a breast’ amputated. Mr. Engelking told me that every woman had two breasts, a left one and a right one.”

In the great days, Trib staffers included Robert Benchley, Alva Johnston, John Lardner, St. Clair McKelway, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and, briefly, John O’Hara. The reporters were so good that rival newsmen carried the Trib in their hip pockets and consulted it for research; the rewrite bank dropped literary gems into the most routine stories. One ex-Tribman who had gone over to the New York Times was so imbued with the excitement of his alma mater that he mistakenly cabled a big news beat to his old paper. Walter Arm, now city editor of New York’s WCBS-TV, remembers, “They didn’t treat you as a cipher. They reacted to every story you wrote. Young reporters were glad to work there for $18 a week, just to have the experience.”

Match Game & Ogden’s Wife. Part of that experience was the drinking, bulling and gambling that one and all practiced to perfection at the Artists and Writers Restaurant, a dimly lighted, paneled eatery known by the name of its owner, Jack Bleeck (pronounced Blake). There Old Man Reid could be found happily trading rounds with any staffer who appeared. Foppish Lucius Beebe debonairly played the eternal match game with his own gold matchsticks. And Woodward (“the Coach”) was usually in a booth exchanging shin kicks with a stalwart colleague while both belted booze to dull the pain. Woodward once ripped out a $600 section of the bar when he was refused a drink too many. And there was plenty of noise in the office, too, where Engelking tore out telephones in anger or let out rare rebel yells over a particularly good story.

For all the good stories, the paper still needed ads, and getting them increasingly became the domain of Helen Rogers Reid. A Barnard graduate from Appleton, Wis., she had been social secretary to Ogden’s parents. But as Ogden’s wife she turned her attentions to the paper, was named advertising director, lent the Trib added prestige by establishing her annual New York Herald Tribune Forum on Current Problems.

She became one of the leading ladies of New York City, a crusader for liberal, internationalist Republicanism, and the recipient of countless honorary degrees. After Ogden’s death in 1947, Helen Reid assumed direction of the whole paper. She faced financial troubles because the Reid estate, once sizable, had diminished.

Mrs. Reid had installed her older son, Whitelaw, as editor. Together they instituted an economy wave. Out went 19 hard-to-lose reporters. Asked which two men could be spared in the sports department, Stanley Woodward memoed: “Stanley Woodward and Red Smith.” Less than a year later, “Whitey” Reid stopped laughing and fired the Coach. TV had come along; the heat was on newspapers and all the print media. Whitey was not up to it. Mrs. Reid replaced him with younger (by twelve years) brother Ogden.

Mint Green. “Brownie,” as he had been called since childhood, had plenty of vim and vigor and decided to give the place a shaking-up. He also clasped to his bosom an ex-pressagent named Hy Gardner. Gardner got a gossip column and a big voice in the upper echelons. Soon Brownie brought in a dismally square Tangle Towns puzzle contest, a mint-green third section, a weekly pocket TV magazine (editor: Gardner), and an early-bird edition that came out at 8 p.m. The puzzles boosted circulation, but the green section did nothing, the TV guide lost money; and the early bird was a disaster as reporters cut corners to make the new deadline and then caused massive replating as they updated their stories.

The paper was floundering, and staff morale sank. The Trib had ample gimmicks but little direction. “Editorially,” says New York Times Executive Editor Turner Catledge, “they couldn’t seem to make up their minds whether to slug it out toe-to-toe with us or to try to outflank us.” The Trib still had stars: Drama Critic Walter Kerr, TV Critic John Crosby, Fashion Editor Eugenia Sheppard, Food Editor Clementine Paddle-ford; Columnists Red Smith, Art Buchwald, Joe Alsop and Walter Lippmann; Pulitzer Prizewinning Korean War Correspondents Homer Bigart and Marguerite Higgins. But while they still provided some bite, the paper had no molars. Able reporters and rewritemen, a paper’s lifeblood, were vanishing. Star Reporter Bigart, back from Korea, was appalled at the change and defected to the Times.

Style Without Spark. The Reids could not bankroll the losses indefinite ly, and in 1957 they asked Millionaire Diplomat-Sportsman John Hay Whitney for a loan. Anxious to support Republicanism’s leading moderate voice, Whitney chipped in $1,200,000, took a stock option, finally decided to convert the loan to a controlling interest and see what he and his Wall Street troops could do. Naturally, they began with an economy drive; another layer of the Trib’s staff was peeled off. Whitney did bring back Coach Woodward, but for editor he chose a small-town boy from Mexico, Mo., who was replaced four months later by Newsweek’s John Denson. Denson gave the Trib new direction by trying what he seemed to think was a magazine approach.

Pictures were cropped to closeups of chinless, earless faces. The Trib s prizewinning front page was now a blotch, with capsule news summaries and headlines that always seemed to end with a question mark. (One staffer swears he received a wire saying, WE HAVE THE FOLLOWING HEADLINE. WRITE STORY FOR USE WITH IT.) A lot of money was spent on promotion: “A good newspaper doesn’t have to be dull.” And circulation rose a bit. Then the 1962-63 printers’ strike smashed the effort. Another economy drive had already got Denson (he missed too many deadlines), and after the strike, the Trib began vainly trying to imitate his style without his spark. When the 1964 Harlem riots broke on a Saturday night, the Trib refused to break its solidly locked Sunday front page, covered the story inside. And all along the paper kept losing money.

Miraculously the stars hung on; new ones even appeared: Movie Critic Judith Crist, Pop Chronicleer Tom Wolfe, Reporter-Columnist Jimmy Breslin. Book Week and the hip-swingy New York Magazine were good and popular additions to the Sunday paper. Young tyros still regularly appeared with dreams of past glory. But there was no one to teach them, and they soon left. So did the Trib’s editorial topkicks—five of them in six years.

Down the Drain. Whitney had undertaken the Trib’s rescue as a public service, and in an effort to preserve a voice for intelligent Republicanism. But the voice could be no stronger than the paper itself, and even Whitney’s millions, despite the best will in the world, could not keep the Trib afloat. After a reported $20 million went down the drain, he reluctantly decided last April to merge his paper with the afternoon Journal American and World-Telegram & Sun to “keep the Herald Tribune’s voice alive.” It never spoke again. The merged papers were struck, and the Trib’s coup de grace came in the crossfire.

The result left New York with just four regular dailies, compared with the 15 that flourished in 1900. When and if the fourth daily appears, it will be the World Journal Tribune. Most big-time Trib names will move over to the new afternoon amalgam, but it will not be the same. “The Trib is the paper I wanted to die on,” said Political Reporter Tom O’Hara, brother of Novelist John. “This is the paper that reporters came to with no idea of ever going anywhere else.”

The trouble was that the Trib itself had for too long forgotten where it was going; it could find no clear role in one of the world’s greatest newspaper markets, and its identity crisis was fatal. Even a last pathetic surge a year ago fooled nobody. The Trib had decided to print while the Daily News and Times were on strike, and circulation soared temporarily to 750,000. One rosy-eyed reporter suggested that the Trib might hold the temporary readers; a hardened colleague knew better. “This outfit,” he said sadly, “has a death wish.”