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The Trib might turn the profit corner tomorrow but for the Times, which, by refusing to hike its price from a nickel to a dime (as did New York's afternoon papers in 1957), forces its competitors to follow suit. As if anxious to crowd out the Tribune, the Times skirts economic disaster by holding the price line: last year, on a gross of $112,149,402, it cleared a profit of less than $350,000. A top Times executive once confided to friends that if the Sunday Times gained 50,000 in circulation, the increase would cost the paper some $750,000—a puzzle explained by the fact that each copy of the Sunday edition costs some 30¢ more than it takes in from ads and sales.
Indefatigable Patroller. But what really hurts the Trib—and all other New York dailies—is the Times plays ball in a journalistic major league all its own. The familiar jests about the Times's heft (it often scales 8 Ibs. on Sunday) and its inability to leave anything out of the paper are compliments to the only complete newspaper in the U.S. The Times operates on the principle that its readers want to be edified, not just amused, and that the job of serving them cannot be overdone.
No serious student of current events can get along without the Times. It patrols all newsbeats, domestic and global, with expert, indefatigable and unduplicated thoroughness, reporting the important and interesting news in every field from anthropology to politics. As an inevitable consequence, the Times's influence ranges wide: to Washington (where even the White House finds it a superb staging area for trial balloons), into the world of fashion (where women shoppers watch both the women's section and the ads for advance word on style trends), and into all varieties of leisure-devotees of Times Food Editor Craig Claiborne, who never lets a restaurant pick up the tab, have learned to trust his judgment on where and where not to dine out.
Common Deficiency. If New York's morning newspaper scene has its dark spots, the afternoon picture is unrelievedly bleak. All three evening papers—the Journal-American, the World-Telegram & Sun and the liberal Post—have yet to regain the circulation they lost by boosting their price to a dime four years ago. All three papers insist that they are now making money, but they offer no proof. Facing automatic pay increases, averaging $3 a week, for its editorial staffers next fall, the Post told the New York Newspaper Guild that it could find the money only by deficit financing. Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff, who inherited a $9,000,-ooo fortune from her banker father, has pumped more than half of it into the paper she bought in 1939.
The evening papers share a common deficiency: news. Totally dependent on newsstand sales—an estimated go%-gs% of total circulation—they sue wildly for the homebound commuter's unselective eye. At the Journal-American, which still prints Page One banners in red ink, Hearst National Editor Frank Coniff admits that the noisiest afternoon headline can mean as many as 30,000 extra sales. In content, the papers run heavily to features, prize contests, décolleté pictures, columnists by the dozen, and other trivia.