Le New New York

This week the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune had its second birthday. A little over two years ago, when Geoffrey Parsons Jr. arrived in Paris to edit it, the paper had ceased to exist. The fabled Old Paris Herald, eccentric foster child of the New York Herald Tribune, had died when Paris fell four years before. Parsons didn't even try to restore its old ways. His orders were to make it better. Last week the European Herald Tribune looked even more like its clean-columned New York parent than young Geoff Parsons looks like his father --who is the New York paper's chief editorial writer.

Alcoholic History. Le New York, as Frenchmen had called the prewar Herald Tribune, was always better to read about than to read. Its roster of alumni scans like a Who's Who of U.S. journalists abroad. The staff was an odd mixture of serious newsmen who liked to work in Paris and assorted spirits working briefly and indifferently for a grubstake. In the years between wars, young reporters jumped at the ill-paid chance to make the Herald part of their journalistic and alcoholic history.

On its well-made-up front page, sound news coverage and conscious inaccuracy were often neighbors. Says sports columnist Al Laney, a Heraldmau for ten years "We used to fake stories all the time. Often we used to make up the front page at 8 p.m. [it was a morning paper], before we knew what the news would be. Then we would just find stories to fit." Touring Americans, flattered to find their names in the society columns, often bought 50 or more copies to send to the folks back home.

In the '305, most of the Herald's profits came from its fat German and Italian shipping and resort advertising, and the Paris edition shamelessly toadied to the Nazis and Fascists--while its New York superiors were stoutly antitotalitarian. Newsmen might complain or quit, but its late editor, Laurence Hills, could always find enough reporters on the town to fill the gaps. Finally, in 1939, Hills began to write scathing frontpage, anti-Hitler editorials. Expatriate Americans were heading for home, and the Herald's 35,000 circulation plummeted to less than 10,000. On June 12, 1940, Managing Editor Eric Hawkins put out the last issue almost singlehanded as the Germans approached Paris, hopefully covered the presses and left town. The presses were undamaged when he returned in 1944.

Calling All Europeans. Serious, middle-aging (38) Editor Parsons, who "was thrown out of Harvard on his ear" (says Parsons Sr.) for failing to study, was the able wartime chief of the Tub's London Bureau. A Francophile like his father, he lives with his authoress wife (Drue Leyton Tartiere, The House Near Paris) in an apartment whose windows look out on the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Until two weeks ago, Geoff Jr. had borrowed most of his lead editorials from his paper's (and his) New York parent, editorials written primarily for U.S. readers. He now plans to write four editorials a week, specially tailored to make U.S. foreign and domestic policy less puzzling to Europeans. His decision was indicative of the Herald's new ways: it is no longer primarily for Paris, or primarily for Americans. Britons and Europeans (among them the Duke of Windsor) make up more than 90% of the paper's readers. They get the Herald daily by plane in 21 countries. Last week the circulation climbed from 66,000 to 70,000. Says Herald Publisher Kenneth Collins: "The European edition could just as well be published in a balloon suspended anywhere over Europe. It is merely an accident of tradition that the plant and staff are in Paris."

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