New Daily in Mississippi

This week, out of a brand-new printing press in Jackson, Miss., rolled a new daily: Jackson's State Times. The paper was launched with about $1,000,000 put up by 868 stockholders as an answer to the monopoly of the Hederman family's Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Daily News (TIME, Nov. 8). For its first run, the afternoon State Times printed more than 40,000 copies of a neatly made-up 32-page issue. State Times Chairman Dumas Milner, millionaire manufacturer and Chevrolet dealer who led the movement to start the newspaper, said that the State Times already had between 30,000 and 35,000 subscribers, thus reached its estimated break-even point for circulation even before it started publishing.

From the State Times's new air-conditioned building, 32 editorial staffers (average age 32) work under Editor Norman Bradley, 42, former associate editor of the Chattanooga Times. Politically, the new daily, says Editor Bradley, is "Democratic by persuasion, independent by nature, middle-of-the-road but slightly more on the liberal side than most Mississippi papers." Its syndicated features include everyone from Right-Wing Columnist David Lawrence to Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers, Fair-Dealer Doris Fleeson and the Washington Post and Times Herald's Fair-Dealing Cartoonist Herblock. Since most of Jackson's leading businessmen own stock, the State Times had no trouble filling its first issue with ads. But the opposition Clarion-Ledger (circ. 47,269) and Daily News (41,324) will offer stiff competition. Said a Clarion-Ledger editorial last week in an angry blast aimed at the new daily: "No business founded on hatred, envy, malice . . . can long survive."

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