The Press: Sheer Coincidence

Publisher Otis Chandler's Los Angeles Times has long been the West's proud and prosperous voice of conservatism. President Philip Graham's Washington (D.C.) Post and Times Herald is a lively advocate of the New Frontier. Last week the two papers announced that they are pooling their talents to form the first new U.S. news service since World War II. The partnership is both curiously distant and distinctly promising.

The Times-Post service will offer its clients (18 papers so far) 10,000 to 15,000 words a day, seven days a week, from well-staffed bureaus in Washington and California, plus twelve corespondents overseas (though none yet in Moscow, Southeast Asia or Africa). The Times will supply a quartet of excellent California political reporters, plus a fresh, enterprising bureau in Washington; the Post offers first-rate foreign correspondents and a solid Washington staff. "We don't expect to compete with the A.P. and U.P.I.," says the Post's Alfred Friendly. "Where we fit in is supplementary coverage."

Both papers stoutly insist that the expanding national ambitions of the New York Times had nothing to do with the birth of the news service. But the Post has long been aware of the tall shadow cast from New York, and the service will start operating in October, on the very day the Times's Los Angeles-based West Coast edition first appears in California cities. Says L.A. Times Managing Editor Frank McCulloch: "I know it looks bad, but I'll swear on a stack of Bibles it's a sheer coincidence."