Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune was highly recognized for her front-line reports of the Korean War in the 1950s, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Photo Credit: Life Magazine
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Whatever became of the once thriving newspaper market in New York City?
Despite the mass migration to the Internet over the last two decades, you would think in a city of over 8 million inhabitants, New Yorkers, at the very least, could support two major dailies aside from the gargantuan, financially secure, New York Times.
Apparently not.
In its second quarter of 2018, The New York Times has more than 3.8 million total paid subscriptions of which 2.9 million are digital-only with operating profit leaping to $40 million from $26.5 million in the same period of 2017.
In June, the N.Y. Daily News slashed its editorial staff in half to focus on breaking news at the expense of local news and sports. According to regulatory filings, the Daily News loses about $30 million a year.
In addition, the Tronc owned tabloid has seen its daily circulation dwindle to 200,000 from a once robust one million readers; while its online traffic to its website has plunged 30 percent.
In 2013, Gabelli & Co media analyst, Brett Harriss, estimated News Corp.’s New York Post loses $110 million a year.
New Yorkers suffered another mighty blow when it was learned at the end of August that the Village Voice, founded as a nickel alternative news weekly in 1955 by three New Yorkers: Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher, and Norman Mailer, announced it was ceasing operation. In April, 2017, the tabloid known for its lively counterculture coverage ended its print edition to focus on online content. Declining revenue, stiff local competition for classified advertising revenue, high staff turnover, and the departure of prominent writers were the reasons most cited for its collapse.
Interestingly, just as I was reading about the calamitous financial state of the newspaper industry in New York, I stumbled on a reference to a book I never read before: “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune’’ by Richard Kluger, a former New York Herald Tribune and Wall Street Journal reporter. He left journalism to concentrate on writing books. His 1996 examination of the tobacco industry, "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
“The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune” is hardly a new book. It was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986, over thirty years ago.
Though an oldie, it’s certainly a goodie.
The New York Herald Tribune was published between 1924 through 1966. Its 20-story building was located at 230 W. 41st Street.
The Herald Tribune came about as a result of the merger between The Herald founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835 and the Tribune founded by Horace Greeley in 1841.
Before the merger, like the Tribunes of ancient Rome, Greeley, as founder of the New York Tribune, or so it has been told, would serve the common people in the defense and promulgation of their rights. The Tribune was a Whig paper dedicated to abolishing slavery and prohibiting liquor. It also became the voice of the Republican Party.
The New York Herald under James Gordon Bennett earned its stripes for its crime coverage, the more lurid the better, and sensational crimes, such as the killing in 1836 of 23-year-old Manhattan prostitute Ellen Jewett, whose body was hacked to death, including suffering partial burns to her body on 41 Thomas Street, about six blocks from City Hall.
As I made my way through this rich and colorfully written history of the Tribune, its celebrated tradition, prize-winning writers, its biting editorials, and thorough foreign coverage, especially its unmatched war coverage, I gained a much greater appreciation of its pioneering journalists and its reverence for editorial integrity.
During its celebrated history, the Herald Tribune won nine Pulitzer Prizes for exemplary journalism.
This was a newspaper, after all, which featured Emma Bugbee, who became the first female reporter at the Herald in 1911 and would remain at the Herald Tribune for 55 years, covering the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. a number of political conventions, and most prominently, the women’s suffrage hike from Manhattan to Albany in 1912.
Another revolutionary journalist at the Herald Tribune was Marguerite "Maggie" Higgins, who remained at the paper from 1942-1963, principally as a war correspondent, covering World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and is credited for blazing a new trail for female war correspondents.
Higgins was the first woman, moreover, to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War.
Highly touted Herald Tribune foreign affairs reporter, Ralph Barnes, in 1935, through shear dogged reporting, unearthed much of the twisted mind set of the Nazi regime, particularly surrounding Adolf Hitler's blatant anti-Semitism. Later, he covered the “The Munich Agreement” (permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia) in 1938.
On November 17, 1940, Barnes boarded a British bomber to report on Benito Mussolini's invasion of Greece. The airplane crashed in Yugoslavia, killing Barnes and three Royal Air Force crewmen. The Salem, Oregon native is remembered for being the first war correspondent killed during World War II.
In addition to its brilliant war coverage, the Herald Tribune hired some of the most gifted and shrewdest editors in the business.
Stanley Walker, for example, was the city editor of the Herald Tribune from 1928 through 1934, during the paper's golden age. Walker strongly believed reporters did their best work during the ages of 25-30 when journalism was still an adventure for them. "After that," Walker maintained, "it would become too much of a grind to pursue sources day and night all over town." Walker was heralded for his keen attention to detail when reporters submitted a story and ferreting out abuses of the English language. Among Walker's stern rules of thumb to his young reporters, included: "Pick adjectives like you would a mistress or a diamond; too many are dangerous and produce diminishing returns."
And "fancy writing is a sign of an insecure craftsman." Another: "let the verb tell the story."
The Trib's night city editor, Lessing Lanham (Engel) Engelking, preached, "The right verb is the shortest path to maximum impact."
James Bellows, editor of the Herald Tribune from 1961 through its closing, developed a predilection for taking a chance on young writers, encouraging them to write in a style that best worked for them. Bellows was instrumental in hiring what might be considered the “Murderers' Row” of writers, including, Gail Sheehy, Thomas Wolfe (later would write “Bonfire of the Vanities”), and a young, brash, Irish-American reporter, Jimmy Breslin, who joined the staff in the middle of 1963. As Kluger tells it, Breslin found his unique writing style early in his career, usually siding with the "debtors and deadbeats, the impoverished, trapped in criminality."
New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin found it difficult to produce copy unless "goaded" by a fast approaching deadline.
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Dan Blum, assignment editor on the Herald Tribune’s metro desk, once described Breslin as "noisy, aggressive, argumentative, hostile and obscene-he threw daily tantrums. He was great and wanted everyone else to know it. He was an immense pain in the butt, the Maria Callas of the city room, but she was worth the trouble."
Walter Arm, a reporter for the Herald Tribune for 25 years, was considered one of the finest police reporters in town.; and Nathaniel Fein was a photographer for the New York Herald Tribune for 33 years (1933-1966), capturing some of the biggest newsmakers of the age, including Albert Einstein, Ty Cobb, Queen Elizabeth, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, William Westmoreland, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg. Fein is best known, of course, for photographing the frail, cancer stricken, Babe Ruth on his final appearance at Yankee stadium, which earned him the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph "The Babe Bows Out."
Those who work hard, usually play hard. The Herald Tribune was frequently described as a “hard-drinking staff,” who often could be found whetting their whistle at the Artist and Writer's Restaurant at 213 W. Fortieth Street, affectionally known as "Bleek's,'' for its owner, Jack Bleek.
Much like the news department, The Herald Tribune's Sports Department was blessed with a number of talented journalists, including its editors.
Roger Kahn (who would write “Boys of Summer”), was a former Herald Tribune copy boy who would cover the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Tribune in 1952 and 1953 before becoming sports editor of Newsweek in 1956.
Stanley Woodward, arguably journalism's most famous sports editor, who during his tenure wanted to compete head on with the New York Times by “out-writing them.” Woodward brought Red Smith to the Herald Tribune in 1945. In a 1933 column of his, Woodward coined the word, “ivy’’ in reference to Ivy League schools.
A reporter once wrote the following sentence after a college football game: "The second half saw the tide of the game turn." Woodward immediately jumped on the reporter's misguided sentence. " A period of time cannot see anything; do it again and I'll jump out of the window."
One thing the Herald Tribune never lacked was compelling, widely read columnists, like Walter Lippmann, who won two Pulitzer’s for the Herald Tribune (1958 and 1962), Joseph Alsop ( a top insider of Washington politics), and Evans and Novak (Rowland Evans and Bob Novak) who beginning in May, 1963 introduced their "Inside Report," a popular column noted for bashing the tenets of liberalism and taking a hard line against the Soviet Union, subjects, amazingly, rarely touched upon by their contemporaries. Humorist Art Buchwald was another widely publicized columnist.
The Arts Department at the Herald Tribune took a back seat to no one.
Judith Crist was with The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter, film critic and arts editor for 22 years. She was the first woman to become a full-time film critic at a major American newspaper. She broke from other film reviewers by writing scathing reviews of “Spencer's Mountain,” “The Sound of Music”, and “Cleopatra,” among other Hollywood classics.
Film director Billy Wilder once said that inviting Crist to review a film was "like asking the Boston Strangler for a neck massage.”
Eugenia Sheppard revolutionized fashion reporting by introducing a women's fashion page in 1956 accompanied with a column, "Inside Fashion."
Virgil Thomas was the New York Herald-Tribune's music critic from 1940 to 1954, and according to Washington Post writer Tim Page, "was a force in American cultural life." Much like Judith Crist, Thomas broke from contemporaries by puncturing the "masterpiece syndrome." In his very first review for the New York Herald Tribune in 1940, he wrote that the "New York Philharmonic was no longer a part of the city's intellectual life."
Book Week attracted a number of distinguished intellectuals and literary giants to review books, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Grantland Rice, Don Marquis, Ivan Turgenev, Stephen Crane, Robert Benchley, Henry Morton Stanley, and Richard Harding Davis.
Much like the way daily newspapers websites tarnished the quality of reporting, by rushing to get content online, the Herald Tribune followed a similar path. In 1950, in hopes of beating their competitors to the punch, they introduced an 8 p.m. “Early Bird” edition. As Richard Kluger wrote: "The hallmark of the Tribune had always been good writing and good editing. Which went by the wayside when it launched its Early Bird edition." "The edition," Kluger noted, "curtailed research and churned out hastily and incomplete stories. Editorial integrity was sacrificed to boost circulation.”
But this would be just the beginning of the end for the Herald Tribune.
Under publisher Ogden Reid (1955-1958), the Herald Tribune’s profits vanished by 1957.
By 1963, the New York Times gobbled up 40 percent of the advertising revenue in the area; with the Daily News, (a solid money maker) 24 percent, while the other four papers scrambling for the other third. The Herald Tribune lost $4 million in 1963.
In addition, a 1963 Gallup Poll reported that readers preferred the New York Times to the Herald Tribune, largely due to its comprehensive and diverse coverage.
The final, crushing blow to the Herald Tribune was the 114-day newspaper strike of 1962-63, a strike which involved 10 unions and seven daily newspapers, including the New York Times, the N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post and the New York Herald Tribune.
When the strike ended, the Herald Tribune's circulation was down 92,000 copies, forcing them to raise the price of the paper to a dime. More importantly, during the lengthy strike, readers found they could get along without a newspaper and increasingly began to turn their attention to television for the latest news. As of September 30, 1963, circulation of six daily New York papers were down 11.9 percent on weekdays and 8.3 percent on Sundays, according to reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Loss of readers, revenue, advertisers, and an outdated printing plant all factored into the Herald Tribune’s decision to cease operation. Its final edition was April 24, 1966, leaving New York City with only four major dailies: The New York Times, N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post, and World Journal Tribune in the afternoon. The World Journal Tribune folded on May 5, 1967.
Imagine, in 1923, New York had 17 daily (English language) newspapers.
After the Herald Tribune folded in 1966, the Washington Post and New York Times each acquired one-third of the newspaper from Whitney Communications. In 1991, they became co-owners when they bought out the Whitney shares. And on October 22, 2002, The New York Times’ bought the Washington Post's share of the International Herald Tribune for less than $75 million.
As testament to the enormous talent housed inside the Herald Tribune newsroom, four writers for the paper, after it folded, went on to win Pulitzers, including Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, art critic Emily Genauer and Art Buchwald.
So, after finishing Richard Kluger’s scrupulously researched, brilliantly written history of the New York Herald Tribune, I can’t help but mourn the immense talent that has gone down the drain at the N.Y. Daily News and the Village Voice in a city that was once fertile ground for talented reporters and thriving newspapers.
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—Bill Lucey
September 11, 2018
