Cub Reporter

In their mailboxes one day last week, 100,000 businessmen, labor leaders, governors, novelists and professors found free samples of The Reporter, a new, slick-paper fortnightly magazine of "facts and ideas." Heralded by newspaper ads, another 50,000 copies went on sale (at 25-c-) on newsstands across the U.S. With no other preliminary promotion, The Reporter hoped eventually to pick up 50,000 readers who would be attracted by its basic editorial proposition: "America as a nation [is] inseparably tied to the freedom and well-being of other nations."

It was a well-intentioned idea, but it did not provide The Reporter's reporters with a plain or specific journalistic target, and the first issue showed it. Almost half of the 36-page issue was devoted to a leisurely, dull analysis of President Truman's program for developing the world's backward areas. The rest of the articles ranged from a talk with an Iowa farmer to an essay on the Adamses of Massachusetts. Future issues will also be devoted to one political or economic "symphonic theme," such as civil rights, cotton, or EGA.

Growing Up. The Reporter's editor, publisher and financial angel is scholarly, Italian-born Max Ascoli, 50, whose opposition to Mussolini, while teaching political philosophy at an Italian university, forced him to leave Italy for the U.S. in 1931. Ascoli has since taught at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, recently wrote a book of political philosophy, The Power of Freedom.

Now a U.S. citizen, he believes that the

U.S. has not yet "grown up" to its responsibilities for world leadership, and needs more intellectual cod-liver oil. Publisher Ascoli is prepared to invest in The Reporter $1,500,000 of his own fortune and that of his wife, Marion, daughter of Julius Rosenwald (Sears, Roebuck).

Audience Poll. Ascoli will write the lead editorial for each issue, and look over the shoulder of Managing Editor Llewellyn White, 49, a veteran newsman (the Paris Herald, Newsweek, the Chicago Sun, OWI). Besides his editorial staff of 34, including Pulitzer Prizewinner Leland Stowe, White has lined up an impressive list of outside contributors, e.g., Herald Tribune Editorialist Walter Millis, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Critic Alfred Kazin. The Reporter will print few photographs, use cartoons and black & white drawings to brighten the text.

The first issues will carry no advertising. Explain the editors: "When twelve issues of The Reporter have been published, we will know who reads our magazine, and what they think of it . . ." But until The Reporter knew the audience it was aiming at, it was not likely to make a hit.

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