For Proper Bostonians

With the insistent spiel of carnival barkers, Boston's newspapers were dangling moneymaking lures to get circulation. In recent weeks, their readers could try for a $20,000 top prize in the morning Herald's and afternoon Traveler's "Know New England" contest, untangle "Tangled Towns" for $15,375 in the morning & evening Globe, unscramble movie stars' names for $20,000 in the morning Post. If they still kept a sense of direction, they could play "Where Am I?" for $25,000 in prizes in Hearst's morning Record and afternoon American.

By such timeworn stunts, Boston's seven daily and four Sunday newspapers were desperately trying to win new readers; they needed them. For some, circulation had already slumped badly: the Post, after raising its price from 3-c- to 5-c-, had lost 70,000 of its 400,000 readers in a year. Even the morning Herald and its afternoon sister, the Traveler, reputedly Boston's biggest moneymakers, had lost 40,000, and their profits had fallen 20% to $753,000. All the others were having a hard time just holding their own.

A big part of Boston's newspaper trouble is an overcrowded market. With only one less newspaper than New York, Boston has a circulation area (3,000,000) only one-fourth as big. But some of the papers' troubles also stem from a unique and weirdly wonderful kind of indigenous Boston journalism.

Kings & Puppies. Although all other big city papers long ago dropped the practice, Boston papers still carry Page One display ads, charge three to six times as much for them as for inside ads. The result is that much valuable news space below the fold is filled with ads. What space is left is largely wasted by oversized headlines, and a make-up as haphazard as if the type had been fired from a blunderbuss.

The big play is usually given to such local news as murders, rapes and fires. One day last week, the Post carried no less than ten such Page One stories, ineluding: BEATINGS OF WAIFS CHARGED; WOMEN SAVE BLAZING MAN; 2 BOYS DROWN IN TRUCK CAB: MAN KILLED IN TRUCK CRASH; AUTO DRAGS CHILD OF THREE 200 YARDS ; and EXPECT INN DEATH

CASE BREAK SOON. As if to balance this gruesome fare, the Post's two Page One pictures that day were of a Catholic bishop and of Revivalist Billy Graham (TIME, March 20), now on a tour of New England.

In the drive for street sales, editors often reach preposterously for a local angle. Hearst's American reached all the way to Siam and back again last week for the headline on its story about Cambridge-born King Phumiphon's return to Siam: BOSTON KING IN ODD RITES. With equal zeal, Boston papers reach for any story labeled B.O. MUST (e.g., a story from the business office sent in by an advertiser). But when news breaks that might offend an advertiser, such as a fire or robbery at a department store or a suicide at a leading hotel, either the story is not covered or the location is thoughtfully omitted.

Because of Boston's preponderantly

Catholic population, the papers are equally careful not to print any news which might offend the church, even though top Boston newsmen know of no instances where it has tried to exert pressure on the newspapers. Nevertheless, such stories as the debate between Paul Blanshard and Father George H. Dunne at Harvard in February over the political power of the church are virtually ignored (only the Globe printed a story on the debate). Such sacred cows, real or fancied, tend to blunt the nose-for-news of even the best reporters.

No Boston paper except the Christian Science Monitor, which newsmen regard as a national rather than Boston paper and thus to be excepted by critics of the Boston press, has a full-time Washington correspondent. Since few of the papers give any consistent play to national and international news, they don't think special correspondents worth the expense.

Saving Graces. For all their uniform mediocrity, Boston papers do have an individuality of their own. The Democratic Post, with its crazy-quilt makeup, somehow conveys the air of a loquacious New England storekeeper with a lot to say, if not about anything important.

The Republican morning Herald, the least harum-scarum typographically, carries the most foreign, i.e., out of Boston, news. Its sprightly editorial-page column by Rudolph Elie, also the Herald's able music critic, is probably the brightest newspaper writing done in the city; its editorials last year by John Crider, editorial page editor, were good enough to win a Pulitzer Prize for general excellence. The Herald's biggest circulation asset is Sportwriter Bill Cunningham, whose orotund mastery of the cliche is often a frontpage delight to readers. Wrote Cunningham from the Florida training camps last week: "Theodore Samuel Williams, the quondam splendid splinter, caught one squarely upon the schnozzola and propelled it in a spectacular parabola all the way into the unchartered [sic'] reaches beyond the right center field fence."

The Traveler seems like a shrieking sister of the Herald, but unlike most Boston papers, it often has the courage to shriek in crusades against political shenanigans and incompetent bureaucrats. Last year, its able newshen Sara White wrote a series which helped reinstate Miriam Van Waters, a competent reformatory superintendent who had been fired for too progressive penal methods. Last week, Reporter White also won freedom for a pregnant mother of four children, imprisoned for neglect without having been given legal counsel. But neither the Traveler nor any other Boston paper printed the prison record of J. Joseph Connors, appointed an election commissioner in 1948 by Mayor James Curley, until more than a year after out-of-town publications carried the story. By & large, the Boston press was best summed up by a proper Bostonian's remark: "For murder and rape, we can read the Boston papers. For the news, we read the New York Times."

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