The Press: Experiment's End

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You could have heard a pica drop in the third-floor city room of Manhattan's shrill PM. Said the mimeographed announcement: Editor-Founder Ralph McAllister Ingersoll was out, advertisements were in.

Neither was a great surprise. In its 6½ years the Great Adless Experiment had cost Publisher Marshall Field III more than $4 million. Ingersoll's plaintive plea last June for 100,000 more readers had been generally regarded as a last-gasp try for profits on circulation alone. But circulation last week was just 170,755—only 5,000 more than when Ingersoll cried for help, and nowhere near enough.

Now Angel Field had had enough. Said he: "I cannot justify to myself . . . the continuous meeting of the deficits." If advertising would sully PM's soul, as Editor Ingersoll believed, then PM would have to be sullied. Said Ingersoll: "I have no choice but to resign."

PM's new editor is John Philip Lewis, 43, a hardworking, shirt-sleeved newsman. He has been with PM since it was born, as managing editor quieted its shrillness and briefly got its nose above water while Ingersoll was away at war.