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All but Canyon. Unable to catch up to the News, the Mirror was finally forced to sell out to it. For a reported $10 million, the News took over what the Mirror described in its own obituary as "the name, good will and other intangible and physical assets." This boiled down to little more than the Mirror's antiquated plants and equipment and all the Mirror's comic strips but Steve Canyon. Along with the Mirror's flesh-and-blood columnists—Winchell, Drew Pearson, Victor Riesel, Dear Abby, etc. —Canyon was switched to Hearst's other New York daily, the evening Journal-American.
Other tangible assets—the Mirror's 1,600 employees—began looking for jobs, helped along by a hastily improvised Hearst placement bureau and a pledge of $3,350,000 in severance pay and other benefits. They were not likely to find work along Hearst's diminishing chain, down to ten papers from a high of 26. Nor did the city's six surviving dailies, still licking their strike wounds, stand in sore need of new hands.
Up, not Down. By week's end the Mirror had vanished with scarcely a trace. Some of the other New York dailies hustled excitedly in pursuit of the departed paper's readership; the Journal-American, for example, rushed out with a new 7 p.m. edition designed to compete with the first editions of the morning press. It was an elusive quest. The News jumped its press run by 400,000—which turned out to be rather more than was needed to accommodate potential transfers.
As usual, the last sounds over the Mirror's grave came from the moaners, among them former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who pronounced the death of the Mirror "a great tragedy." White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, a former newsman himself (the San Francisco Chronicle), invited U.S. newspapers to search their souls, by the light of the Mirror's wake, if they wanted to survive. But such lamentation overlooked an important point. The census of U.S. dailies is up, not down: from 1,749 papers at the end of World War II to 1,760 today—and the combined circulation has more than paced the nation's growth by rising in the same period from 48 million to almost 60 million.
* Without Gauvreau the Graphic lost steam and expired in 1932. * The Mirror was not alone in suffering a post-strike decline. Other announced circulation losses: the Times, 78,000; the News, 140,000; the World-Telegram, 69,000.