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NEWSPAPERS IN THE 1960s

Struggle and Decline

The decade of the 1960s was one of continued struggle and decline for newspapers. In 1909 there were 689 cities in the United States that had competing daily newspapers; by 1963 that number had shrunk to 55. Among major cities that number was down to 20. Over 1,400 cities had only one newspaper or two papers owned by the same publisher. Chains such as Scripps-Howard, Hearst, Newhouse, Knight, and Cox bought up papers around the country, having the effect of making newspapers more alike editorially regardless of the competitive status. Also people began to move outside the cities to the suburbs, taking away circulation and targets of advertisers.

Competition

Newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s performed three functions for the public: they provided news information, they provided entertainment, and they were advertising vehicles. The decline of a competitive news environment was a product of the rise of television journalism, as network and local-affiliate news became the new competitive forces. Television obviously provided an entertainment medium more conducive to the general public. As an outlet for advertisers, the new vitality of radio along with television took away many of the advertisers the newspapers relied upon. In 1950 local radio had advertising revenues of $273 million; in 1965 this figure had increased to $889 million. Television ad receipts increased from $171 million in 1950 to $2.5 billion in 1965. Newspaper ads increased from $2.1 billion to $4.4 billion. But this revenue was spread among 1,751 daily papers and 562 Sunday papers as against only 604 television stations.

Paring Down

Cities were increasingly left with one newspaper because that was all that the city could support economically. Cities such as New York saw the number of daily newspapers drop because the major advertisers—such as Macy's or Bloomingdale's—could no longer afford to buy huge advertising spreads in both The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, for example. New York papers were also faced with union troubles, some papers having to deal with as many as ten unions when renegotiating a contract. While other cities, such as Nashville, Miami, and Tucson, had competing papers functioning under joint operating agreement—in which they shared production facilities—New York unions threatened strikes to prevent the reduction in labor that would result from such a move.

New York

The practical costs of this operating environment showed up in the stories of failed papers across the country. The most famous, and possibly best, newspaper to fold was the New York Herald Tribune, which finally succumbed to a long illness on 24 August 1966. The New York Herald Tribune was founded as the New York Herald in 1835 and merged with the Horace Greeley-founded New York Tribune in 1924. During its prime, as Jimmy Breslin writes, "It was a fatter and far better-written paper than the [New York] Times." Its list of contributors included John O'Hara, Walter Kerr, Richard Harding Davis, Walter Lippmann, Red Smith, Art Buchwald, and Joseph Alsop.

Strikes

The decline of the paper was due to mismanagement after the death of owner-editor Ogden Reid in 1947. In an attempt to compete with television, the new owners, Reid's widow and two sons, adulterated the editorial program of the paper, at one time placing a gossip column on page 1. The cachet of the New York Herald Tribune slowly evaporated, and financial losses mounted. U.S. ambassador to Great Britain John Hay ("Jock") Whitney bought the paper in 1958 and slowly began to rebuild it, both its circulation and its editorial base. By 1962 circulation was up to 411,000 and gaining 1,000 per week. Then in 1962 the head of the printers' union called a strike that lasted 114 days; when it ended, circulation was crippled and annual losses ran to $5 million.

Merger

In April 1966 the New York Herald Tribune was merged with two troubled afternoon dailies, the New York World-Telegram & Sun (itself a merged paper) and the New York Journal-American. On 24 April 1966 another strike started and lasted 113 days; the New York Herald Tribune was never again published. The paper that did remain, called the New York World-Journal-Tribune, lasted only until 1967. There were scattered successes among the failures. New York Newsday, founded in 1940 and actually published on Long Island to serve the suburban community, took much of the circulation and advertising revenue from the city dailies.

Lower Quality

Competition among the newspapers and with television and radio had the effect of lowering the quality of the major papers. Many executives believed that a national paper might succeed where a large city daily did not. The New York Times began a national edition, and the Wall Street Journal became a national business paper by establishing printing and distribution centers in eight locations across the country. The publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Dow-Jones, started the National Observer, a general-interest weekly paper, in 1962, but it failed to generate the huge circulation expected and was closed. It took until the 1980s and the Gannett group's USA Today to strike the right formula for a national general-interest paper.