The Press: The High Cost of Publishing

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In the last ten years only one big, new daily has been launched, the Los Angeles Mirror. It has cost Publisher Norman Chandler millions already, and is still losing at the rate of an estimated $20,000 to $30,000 a week. Last week the Mirror, along with Hearst's Los Angeles Herald & Express, raised its street-sale price from 7¢ to 10¢. But publishers have found out that price increases are no solution to the cost squeeze (only two U.S. dailies still sell for 2¢, only 22 for 3¢), since circulation accounts for only about one-third of an average daily's income.

With revenue from circulation and advertising bumping the ceiling, many a publisher has looked for income from new sources. The Dallas Times-Herald receives one-third of its income from its profitable TV station, and the Washington Post and Times-Herald has found that earnings from its TV and radio stations provide a valuable cushion against the shocks of newspaper expenses. Publishers are also installing expensive color-printing equipment that enables them to earn more money from advertisers for the same amount of newsprint. But improvements run high. "I bought the Free Press [for $3,200,000]," says Publisher John Knight, who controls the Akron Beacon-Journal,

Miami Herald, Chicago Daily News and Detroit Free Press, "but now I'm having to buy it again" by paying $3,500,000 for new equipment.

Revolution. Publishers rightly feel that because of competition, increases in advertising rates and the sales price of their papers are fast approaching the limit, that the only recourse is to cut costs more. In the last two years hundreds of dailies have trimmed the size of their pages by an inch or more. By doing so, the New York Herald Tribune has made an estimated saving of more than $400,000 a year in newsprint.

More than a dozen dailies in smaller cities have combined with their competition to print in the same plant, thus cutting production costs while keeping editorial staffs separate. Marshall Field's tabloid Chicago Sun-Times has begun to stay in the black by adding a sixth column to its five-column page, thus crowding more news into less paper. Pittsburgh's three dailies are getting ready to make a similar move by adding a ninth column to their eight-column pages. Says one publisher: "The ninth column is here to stay."

But it is on the production side that the biggest savings can be made, and there newspapers have been much too chary of research. Nevertheless, more than half of all U.S. dailies have adopted wire-service Teletype-setting (TTS), which is causing the biggest revolution in newspaper production (TIME. July 13) since the invention of the Linotype machine. Other papers are experimenting with electronic and photographic typesetting devices. Last week in Atlantic City, newspaper production men got their first view of new electronic and chemical processes that may be cheaper and faster than the antiquated engraving and etching methods used by most dailies.