The Press: Iowa Formula

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Minneapolis is one of the few cities in the Midwest where the newspaper situation has not completely jelled. The farm-booming Tribune and the Journal share leadership and prestige, but neither has anything like the circulation coverage that denotes a dominant paper. The liberal Star (called by its competitors the "Workingman's Paper" because its mechanical departments are completely unionized and because it is shunned in the silk-stocking areas) gained slowly while the leaders stood still. Home-delivered circulation of all Minneapolis papers totaled only 145,000 in a population of 488,000. The field looked ripe for the sort of circulation ability in which the Cowleses are well versed. They bought the Star for $1,000,000, installed Friend Merwin as publisher with full authority to run the paper his way. Working with General Manager John Thompson and Managing Editor George Adams, he will be free of interference from Des Moines.

Slight, handsome Dave Merwin, 35, was something of a wild man, a jolly drinker, an able cartoonist, at Harvard. After college and a round-the-world trip, with tiger-hunting in Indo-China, he quieted down, succeeded his ailing uncle as publisher of the Pantagraph. A licensed transport pilot, he flies about in his orange-colored airplane called Scoop, loves to whisk his small son & daughter 100 miles or so for an ice cream soda. To the Cowles team. Publisher Merwin takes financial wizardry and a profound knowledge of all newspaper mechanical operations which both brothers lack.

To Where? If Cowles & Co. should fail in their Minneapolis venture, they would doubtless retire to their Iowa pasture for a long time. If they succeed, it is a practical certainty that the next year or so will see them buying into another city. They have long been surveying the field, have in their files a complete detailed index about almost every newspaper in the U. S. that might be for sale. With 30 years of active publishing ahead of them, with William Randolph Hearst settling into old age, with Scripps & Howard in their prime, the youthful Brothers Cowles of Iowa may yet step out as one of the great chain newspaper publishers of tomorrow.