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Dubious Goal. The Mirror's ills are basic and probably incurable. Its birth announcement in 1924 contained the astounding promise that the new tabloid would be "90% entertainment, 10% news," and for a while the Mirror floated saucily in the wake of the Daily News. It also pulled in thousands of readers with a column by Walter Winchell, the first and best of all gossipmongers. But at 64, Winchell is past his prime, and so is the Mirror—at 37. Its dubious goal of entertainment has been undermined by TV, and, despite a sizable circulation of 840,644, the paper is chronically anemic —it lost $700,000 last year alone. Unless it can reverse the trend, the Mirror may disappear, possibly by a merger with the Journal-A merican.
The Herald Tribune is also in difficulty, but of a different kind. Once a respectable second to the Times (in 1925 it had 281,672 circulation to the Times''s 350,-406), the Trib has slid steadily through the years into a kind of newspaper no man's land—a journey accelerated to some degree by four successive changes of command and a proliferation of editors. Today the Trib is out of the running. It cannot hope to match the Daily News's direct appeal to the solar plexus. Nor can it compete effectively with the Times, a paper that is constantly finding so much more news fit to print that it is now in a class all by itself.
Curiosity Value. Under a new editor, former Newsweek Managing Editor John Denson, 55, the Trib is trying to find a level of its own. What that level may be is not readily discernible. Under Denson, the Trib's tidy front page, which used to win beauty prizes, has taken on the look of a parquet floor—all overblown pictures, klaxon headlines (THE LIBERTY
BELL RINGS AGAIN IN PHILADELPHIA
YOU CAN GET A DRINK ON SUNDAY) and framed summaries of the major news.
To some observers, the new Trib seems more summary than news. Says the Times's Assistant Managing Editor Ted Bernstein wryly: "Today you can read the Trib only if you read another paper."
Denson's program is at least high in curiosity value: the paper's claimed circulation of 395,000 is up 40,000 from a year ago. Among the curious is John Hay Whitney, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, who bought the Tribune in 1958. Fortnight ago, Whitney, until recently an absentee landlord, appointed himself editor in chief and moved in for a closer look. But while Multimillionaire Whitney expresses qualified satisfaction with the paper, he has no intention of letting it become an expensive habit. "We have a five-year plan for the Tribune," says he. "If, at the end of that time, it's just not doable, it would be unfair to the paper's readers and to private enterprise to continue it on a subsidized basis."