The Press: Engineering Feat

Famed for its losses (about $25,000 a week), the Marshall Field-Ralph Ingersoll tabloid PM last week had apparently produced a money-making byproduct. It was a national Sunday supplement called Parade, with content lifted discreetly from PM itself. Fifth issue of Parade was last week distributed to 700,000 readers through newsstands (5¢ a copy), such un-PM-like newspapers as the Nashville Tennessean, John Shively Knight's Detroit Free Press and Akron Beacon-Journal, Eugene Meyer's Washington Post.

No fault of Editor Ingersoll's, the idea for Parade belongs to an efficiency expert named Ross Art Lasley, a 42-year-old Yalester whose high-powered advice has for ten years been sold to such high-powered clients as Standard Oil, Western Union, National Dairy Products, Pennsylvania Railroad. Called in by Marshall Field's lawyers and trustees to dilute PM losses (TIME, June 2), Expert Lasley came out with Parade. He also decided to do the editing himself.

A self-confessed ignoramus about publishing, Engineer-Editor Lasley regards money-making as no bar to respectable publishing. Last week he broke with PM's ad-less tradition by selling space in Parade's Tennessean section to the Nashville Gas & Heating Co. Later, if present progress continues, he plans a fat ad budget. He continues to function as efficiency expert, selling ideas to a soap and a steel company. But he shows no inclination to retire as editor of Parade, no matter if it makes a million.

Parade emphasizes pretty legs, movies, theater, the more picturesque side of national defense, the more colorful reporting of PM's foreign correspondents. "Just what we have been looking for," said Washington Post Publisher Eugene Meyer.