Newspapers: Mercy Killing

• Share

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."