The Press: If I Had $10 Million

After his defeat in last fall's election, Michigan's Democratic Senator Blair Moody, long the Washington correspondent for Detroit's News, told friends he would like to start a newspaper "if I had $10 million."

Last week Moody's wistful hope seemed less of a pipe dream. With a syndicate of well-heeled and well-connected backers of predominantly Democratic leanings, Moody took a 15-year lease on Detroit's Michigan Rotary Printing Co., which has been printing a profitable 800,000-copy Shopping News, and several weeklies. Its modern presses could easily print a daily newspaper of either 32 or 48 pages. Reported cost of the lease (with an option to buy): $250,000.

That was a far cry from $10 million. But Moody's backers included some who could doubtless raise that much or more. Most prominent: Mrs. Paul Hoffman, wife of the ex-ECAdministrator, now back at Studebaker, and Roger Stevens, Michigan real-estate potentate who engineered the $25 million purchase of Manhattan's Empire State Building (TIME, June 4, 1951). Others, such as Bernard Baruch's secretary, Miss Mary Boyle, and W. Averell Harriman's protege, Philip Stern, research director of the Democratic National Committee, were possibly stand-ins for bigger money. Detroit, which already has three newspapers (the locally owned News, Hearst's Times and Jack Knight's Free Press), buzzed with speculation over whether Moody and his backers would dare to start a new one. Moody had previously made offers to buy the Times and the Free Press, was turned down by both. At week's end, he was looking over the small-town Michigan dailies.