Old Hand, New Experts

One of the nation's half-dozen best newspapers last week became in name, as it has long been in fact, a woman's responsibility. Mrs. Ogden Reid, inheriting her late husband's estate (TIME, Jan. 13), became president of the New York Herald Tribune and possessor of 170 of the paper's 200 shares. In as editor went her 33-year-old son Whitelaw ("Whitie") Reid, Yaleman, Navyman and fifth in a line of editors that started with Horace Greeley in 1841.

Mrs. Reid, 64, is a tiny, efficient and self-assured woman who married Ogden Reid in 1911 while serving as his mother's social secretary. He had pumped $15 million into the ailing Trib before she started showing up for work at the office in 1918, and gradually took over. She is one of three women who run major U.S. newspapers. The others: the New York Post's Dorothy Schiff Thackrey, the Washington Times-Herald's terrible-tempered Cissie Patterson.

The first big change in the Trib under its new editor and new president was announced last week, but had been in the works for some time. Foreign Editor Joe Barnes put in his pet scheme for Rover Boy world coverage. Unable or unwilling to compete with the New York Times's 27 bureaus and 59 foreign correspondents, the Trib decided to keep its foreign bureaus at eight (nine if Moscow gives in to a year of pleading).

Barnes's plan is to have his foreign Tribmen become "specialists in ideas rather than areas." Once his stable of world-trotting pundits is trained (one in diplomacy, others in business, labor, nuclear fission, etc.), he expects to move them as stories break. The Trib would rely on wire services for the first 24 hours of an important story, then close in with an expert who would stay with it as long as it made news.

Already named to Barnes's first team are some of the Trib's top reporters. Walter B. Kerr, who "has been living with Byrnes, Molotov and Bevin for months," will trail diplomats. Lanky A. T. Steele, a veteran of Far East coverage, will stick to what he knows best. Pulitzer Prizewinning Homer Bigart's assignment: trouble. As a war correspondent he got schooling for covering riots, revolutions, and world violence, lately has been doing post-graduate work in Palestine and Poland. Says Joe Barnes: "We can't use men who have been stuck in one capital for 20 years as modern reporters."

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