News-Week-Today
P: Four years ago this week the U. S. reading public was told that, since it had approved and for ten years supported its first weekly newsmagazine, TIME, now it should have another, an improvement on the original. "We believe there is a field unplowed," said the editors, "and we are sharpening another plow. . . . News-Week's ample treasury is the sum total of more than 120 individual investments, made by men and women who believe that thousands of Americans want and need the particular kind of a newsmagazine that News-Week is."
Last week News-Week's investors found their ample original treasury, plus subsequent investments to a grand sum total of $2,250,000, completely wiped out. Although their magazine had 250,000 circulation, it was not paying its way, needed yet more funds to continue.
P: Three and one-half years ago, appreciating what a hammering the policies of his friend Franklin Roosevelt were receiving from the opposition press, Vincent Astor consented to finance a weekly magazine called Today, to hammer back. Editor was Mr. Roosevelt's close adviser, Dr. Raymond Moley.
Last week, Dr. Moley had long since ceased advising Mr. Roosevelt, who was no longer bothered by hammering; Today had about 100,000 circulation, little advertising, and small prospects of more; and Mr. Astor's publishing bill, shared by his railroading friend William Averell Harriman, stood at about $1,000,000.
Separately but with identical emotions the backers of News-Week and Today had arrived thus expensively at the conclusion that, if they were going to have money in the publishing business, they had best put it in charge of an experienced publisher. Thus it was that the two groups found themselves this week negotiating a deal with astute President William Bishop Warner of The McCall Co. whereby they would put up more money, he would melt together the stalled plow and the superfluous hammer, publish the result under McCall management.
Salesman of News-Week to its charter investors was an ambitious Englishman, Capt. Thomas J. C. Martyn, a onetime foreign news editor of TIME. Through his second wife, a Cheney (silk), and other connections, and using TIME's record as a sales argument, he was able to enlist the following sums from the follow-ing principals for original and salvage financing:
Ward Cheney (cousin) $200,000
Wilton Lloyd-Smith 200,000
Howell van Gerbig 200,000
John Hay ("Jock") Whitney 300,000
Paul Mellon 325,000
Starling Winston Childs Jr. 800,000*
As a sales record, during Depression years, the list is impressive, but in this week's reorganization of News-Week, Captain Martyn was watching anxiously from the sidelines. To make the deal with Mc-Call possible and have one more shot at retrieving their lost money, the heaviest News-Week losers, led by Mr. Childs Jr., were understood to be producing a fresh $500,000. The Astor-Harriman group were to add another $600,000 cash, and Dr. Moley. McCall Corp. was to put in $100,000 for the time being, decide later if it wanted to go in deeper.
The caution of this deal was characteristic of McCall President Warner. His is one of the few publishing companies that made anything like a good Depression showing. Its main interests are McCall's Magazine, Redbook, the SM News Company (distributors) and a big, profitable dress pattern business. Its interest in News-Week is primarily that of a printer rather than a publisher. At its press in Dayton, Ohio, the weekly was a profitable filler for the idle time between printings of monthly McCall's and Redbook.
Spare, thin-lipped William Bishop Warner has not always been a publisher. Up from a traveling salesman, he had been 28 years in the dry goods business when, in 1919, White, Weld & Co., bankers for the then ailing McCall Co., called him in to rescue its pattern business. This he soon did and while at it pushed McCall's Magazine toward the front of the profitable "Women's Group'"' (see p. 50). A more recent rescue job by Mr. Warner was done on American Woolen Co., which he helped from a $7,269,000 deficit in 1932 to $7,053,000 profit in 1933.
In reviving McCall's Magazine, Mr. Warner had the skill or luck to pick one of the most phenomenal editors in recent publishing history, slender Otis L. Wiese who, fresh from the University of Wisconsin and reputed a prodigy, was entrusted with McCall's 2,260,000 women readers at the tender age of 22. Boy Wonder Wiese made so good that his women now number 2,650,000. In 1932 he divided McCall's into three sections-- News&Fiction, Homemaking, Style & Beauty--with such success that he is next month expanding the first ingredient, News, adding the subtitle "The Newsmagazine for Women." Observers waited to see whether news-conscious Editor Wiese would now be called on to galvanize News-Week or whether it would be left under diligent, deliberate, fortyish Editor Samuel T. Williamson, a product of the fatherly old New York Times whom Promoter Martyn drafted four years ago. Whoever was editor would have to find a spot for Today's Dr. Moley. Mr. Astor insisted on that.
Never an extravagant spender, McCall President Warner nevertheless believes that dollars intelligently spent never fail to yield a harvest. His first moves with News-Week are expected to be a careful scrutiny of personnel, salaries and the overhead of costly Rockefeller Center offices and appointments; energetic renovation of the circulation promotion technique. Not prone to snap judgments, he intends to "lend" his right arm, Vice President Marvin Pierce, production expert, to survey and analyze News-Week. Then precise, untheatrical shifts in money, men and things may be made, and perhaps a decision to transform the magazine from a press customer into a member of the McCall Publishing group.
-Ori