The Press: 1,848,320 of Them

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Of the four morning and four afternoon newspapers published in Manhattan all but two are conservative: the morning, tabloid Daily News and the evening Post. Last week, after six up-and-down years under Philadelphia Publisher J. David Stern (TIME, June 26), the Post got a new owner: the American Labor Party's City Councilman George Backer, whose liberalism is more profound than J. David Stern's and whose financial resources are greater. Young (36) Publisher Backer's first acts were to pay back, with interest, the 10% of their salaries the Post's staff members had been contributing to the paper since last September and to hire Cartoonist Rollin Kirby, who was dropped by the World-Telegram in March after he had shown himself too pronounced a liberal for the Scrippsless Scripps-Howard newspaper.

Manhattan's liberal News was 20 years old this week. In contrast to its anemic colleague, it is the most successful newspaper ever established in the U. S. The News has a daily circulation of 1,848,320, which is more than half the total circulation of all Manhattan's morning papers put together, the largest daily circulation in the land and third largest in the world (the London Daily Express has 2,466,323, the Herald over 2,000,000). The Sunday News sells 3,464,290 copies, a bare 300,000 less than London's record-holding News of the world.* The News employs 3,500 people, pays them $8,000,000 a year. Its annual profit is usually estimated at around $5,000,000. Its fabulous success is due almost entirely to Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson's unique and highly individualistic application of a saying of Abraham Lincoln's, the last six words of which are chiseled across the front of the $10,700,000 News building: "God must have loved the common people because HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM."

Up From the Manure Pile. The News's touch with the common people is no accident, but the result of self-conscious effort on the part of its publisher, who is famed for his rough-&-ready dress, his brusque manners and his liking for rubbing shoulders with the proletariat in saloons and subways. A rich boy himself, Joe Patterson never got along with other rich boys, had made several sporadic efforts to become a man of the people before he found his chance as a publisher. From 1914 until 1925 he and his cousin, Robert Rutherford McCormick, shared the running of the Chicago Tribune (which their grandfather, Joseph Medill, had founded), and Patterson was as much responsible for the common touch in its news coverage as McCormick was for its conservative editorial bias. The two conceptions did not quite jell in the Tribune and Joe Patterson did not get along with his Cousin Bertie much better than he had with other rich boys. During the War they agreed that the Tribune was too small for them both. The decision to start the News, according to Colonel McCormick's recollection, was reached on a manure pile in France.

Joe Patterson had talked to Lord Northcliffe, whose London Daily Mirror, a half-size picture paper, was selling nearly 1,000,000 copies daily. Northcliffe suggested that he try out the tabloid idea in the U. S. Captain Patterson met Colonel McCormick somewhere behind the lines; they dined with some other officers, then stepped outside and seated themselves on the dung heap.