Along with the cash, an infusion of seasoned talent at the top
Nearly every major capital in the Western world supports half a dozen or so daily newspapers. Every capital, that is, except Washington, D.C., which boasts only two dailies and has long faced the prospect of becoming a one-newspaper town. For more than 20 years, as the jaunty, aggressive, morning Washington Post (circ. 561,640) has enlarged its share of readership and advertising, the evening Star has waned. The struggling 126-year-old Star was assured survival last March when Time Inc. bought the paper for $28 million, giving it a strong financial base. Since then Star watchers have waited to see what moves Time Inc. would make to improve the paper.
Part of the answer came last week when the Star's two top jobs were filled by seasoned executives from Time Inc. Named as editor was Murray J. Gart, 53, who since 1969 has headed the TIME-LIFE News Service with the rank of assistant managing editor of TIME. The paper's new publisher is George W. Hoyt, 42, former president of a thriving Time Inc. weekly newspaper chain, the Chicago-area Pioneer Press.
The two appointments capped a series of personnel shifts and editorial changes that began shortly after Time Inc. acquired the newspaper. Star Veteran Sidney Epstein, 57, was promoted from managing editor to executive editor. Philip Evans, 44, and Barbara Cohen, 33, became joint managing editors, in charge of production and news, respectively. Edwin Yoder Jr., 43, a Rhodes scholar, was confirmed as editor of the paper's editorial page. The TIME-LIFE News Service has been providing the Star with stories from its own worldwide network of correspondents, as well as features adapted from Time Inc.'s other magazines: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, PEOPLE, FORTUNE and MONEY.
Joe L. Allbritton, the feisty Texas tycoon who bought the paper in 1974, pumped in millions of his own money to keep it afloat. Allbritton had planned to stay on as the Star's publisher for at least five years. However, last month he decided to leave the paper, to avoid possible conflict of interest problems over his ownership of WJLA-TV, a lucrative (estimated value: $100 million) local ABC affiliate that is up for license renewal with the FCC.
The Star had been without an editor since last November, when able James G. Bellows, 55, went to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Bellows had begun an energetic program of editorial rebuilding, but was convinced that Allbritton's austerity moves, which had brought the paper back to near the break-even point, were blocking his efforts. Indeed, the work of both men had greatly strengthened the Star, but, says a Star staffer, "we've been rudderless since Bellows left."
Gart was a newspaper reporter and editor (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wichita Eagle and Beacon) before joining TIME as Toronto bureau chief in 1955. As TIME'S bureau chief in Chicago from 1959 to 1964, he covered both the Kennedy-Nixon and Johnson-Goldwater national presidential campaigns. Gart reported on the overthrow of the Diem regime in Saigon in 1963 and in 1965 went on to head the newsweekly's London bureau.