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Brisbane had been called in to shore up the Mirror, which was losing ground steadily in its race with the News. But he failed, and was succeeded in 1935 by Charles B. McCabe, then 36, who stayed on as publisher until the paper's death. McCabe did all a publisher could to polish the Mirror's public image, redesignated it "the paper with a heart," sponsored numerous community activities. Its pages, already crowded with lively columnists—Walter Winchell and Dan Parker, got more of the same. McCabe also stitched in some new comics and features beamed at the juvenile set. That helped some, but not enough.
The death of the Chief in 1951 spelled the Mirror's ultimate doom. Control of Hearst's empire passed to unsentimental custodians. Tallest of these was Richard E. Berlin, president (since 1940) of the Hearst Corp. and onetime Hearst ad salesman. In 1956 Ber lin began hacking away at the Hearst chain with both hands. By sale or merger he dropped money-losing papers in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee; he also sold Hearst's International News Service to United Press. Earlier this year, he put to death Hearst's unprofitable Sunday supplement, the American Weekly. "Personally," said Berlin, "I would sell anything but the wife and children if the proper price were offered."
Fickle Readership. What probably spared the Mirror so long was that Berlin could not get the proper price. Several years ago the paper was offered to Publisher Samuel Newhouse, whose appetite for new "properties," as he calls them, is inexhaustible. Newhouse would not even bid on a paper that was losing $2,000,000 a year. The Mirror simply had nothing to sell that others were not selling better. TV had usurped its entertainment function. And even sex, that once dependable tabloid ware, was not so marketable any more. Contemporary fiction and the new girlie magazines did the job more clinically than any newspaper could hope to. Besides, the newspaper reader had outgrown the Mirror. He wanted news.
To a fatal degree, the Mirror had become a copy that was nowhere as good as the original. Even its circulation was a dangerous overlap of the News's. A 1961 survey, conducted by an independent Manhattan research company for the Daily News, showed that seven out of ten Mirror readers also read the News on weekdays—and nearly nine out of ten on Sunday. Such duplicate readership is fickle, as New York's 114-day newspaper strike proved when it ended last April. Almost at once, Mirror circulation dropped by 85,000—the suspicion was that the defectors were readers who had found they could do without the other morning tabloid.* Advertisers seemed to feel the same way: the Mirror's ad linage, chronically low, fell lower.