37 Million Can't Be Wrong

From more than 100 Sunday newspapers last week tumbled fat and gaudy magazine supplements devoted to a subject that to many dailies was once a bad word: TV. Newspaper publishers still fret over the economic challenge of TV, and critics chide it for challenging the intellect too little. Nevertheless, on the theory that 37 million TV-owning families can't be wrong, newspapers today are giving TV far more space than they gave to movies in Hollywood's heyday--just as the average family spends far more of its time with TV than it ever spent in movie houses.

Newspapers have thrown their pages wide open to the news, gossip and pictures of TV that flood in from wire services and network publicity mills. CBS alone churns out 100,000 stories a year for 1,200 publications, and the network even plants finished feature articles in dailies and some magazines. In addition to Sunday supplements--often modeled on TV Guide, the most successful magazine (circ. 5,315,659) started since the war--most newspapers each day feature syndicated TV critics and program previews, give free rein to scores of local' TV columnists. Though many newspapers balked for years at carrying radio program listings without charge, the great majority of dailies now carry TV logs as routinely as they run weather forecasts. In fact, says San Francisco News Editor Charles H. Schneider, "television is the weather in every living room. It is the news."

Moon Talk. But while their editors play up TV, many publishers still deeply resent the golden rain of advertising that makes TV pastures green. The rivalry is most evident in areas where TV is giving monopoly newspapers their first run for advertisers' money. The biggest open battle between newspapers and TV raged last week in New Mexico, where the state's three biggest dailies and two biggest TV stations were trading tirades over the papers' longtime policy of charging broadcasters advertising space rates for running program listings. When Albuquerque radio and TV stations KOB and KGGM said they would no longer pay for the space, the papers--the Albuquerque Journal and evening Tribune, the Santa Fe New Mexican--dropped their listings. The TV stations countered by showering Albuquerque (pop. 175,500) with 165,000 free program logs, while the far-roving Denver Post snatched at local circulation by adding Albuquerque programs to its daily TV log. "These television stations are asking for the moon," protested the New Mexican's Managing Editor Joe Lawler. Invoking lunar logic himself, Lawler added: "If we list their programs as a service to readers, what's to stop the local grocery store from demanding that we list his specials on ham and potatoes?" Though the press-TV battle is widely debated in New Mexico, it was symptomatic of publishers' and broadcasters' sensitivity to criticism that neither the Associated Press nor the United Press filed a single story on the fight. Nor was it an isolated skirmish. On a grander scale, some TV network executives charge, economic rivalry is prompting newspapers to wage a subtle and far-reaching campaign to discredit TV even while they promote it. Item: Scripps-Howard's New York World-Telegram and Sun in the past month has run four Page One stories quoting authorities ranging from Poet Carl Sandburg to Scriptwriter Goodman Ace in dispraise of TV's "cultural smog" and "deathless mediocrity."

Up, Up, Up. In the long run, the best laid plans to downgrade TV will probably prove as futile as some newspapers' efforts in the 'aos to throttle radio at birth. One reason is that newspapers have been quick to copper their bets by buying into TV. Some 30% of all TV stations are now newspaper-owned; increasingly, as in Detroit and Dallas, all competing dailies own or are affiliated with stations.

A more cogent argument for peaceful coexistence is that most readers' thirst for the printed word is only whetted by TV. It is likely that TV was a big factor in newspapers' gain of 1,000,000 circulation (to a record 57 million) last year. Los Angeles Times Editor L. D. Hotchkiss even credits his paper's saturation coverage of TV with helping to cure the summer circulation slump that has long plagued dailies. Madison Avenue also seems to have heeded publishers' arguments that newspaper ads command greater attention than TV commercials. While TV's ad revenues have jumped $452 million in the past two years, daily newspaper advertising in the same period grew by a record $610 million, and in 1956 logged a peak total of $3.3 billion, v. TV's $1.2 billion, also a record.*Said Editor & Publisher in January: "Advertisers' 'splurging adjustment' to TV is over."

New Cast of Characters. The statistics suggest that the press can use TV far more than TV can use the press. This is most evident in the growth of a new species of newsman, the full-time local TV critic, who on many papers matches judgments daily with such syndicated TV pundits as the Herald Tribune's John Crosby, the New York Times's Jack Gould, Hearst's Jack O'Brian--and often comes out ahead. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Bill Jahn, who runs monthly popularity polls that frequently draw more than 1,000 returns, tagged Jack (Dragnet) Webb and Lawrence ("Champagne Music") Welk as coming stars months before they received national recognition. The Los Angeles Mirror News Columnist Hal Humphrey's previews and criticism have caught on so fast that he is now syndicated to 51 other dailies. From readership surveys and the mail, editors invariably discover that staff-written columns are among the most faithfully read in the paper. For TV, as the San Francisco Chronicle's Managing Editor Scott Newhall argues, "gives newspapers a whole new field to write about, a whole new cast of characters for people to be interested in." It is even possible for TV journalists who seriously observe the living-room weather to do something about it.

* Magazine ad income, also higher than ever, has grown $114 million, to $782 million.

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