The Syndicated Times

Each afternoon at 4 o'clock, the New York Times switches on a bank of Teletype transmitters that, for eight hours and in eight languages, carry a steady selection of stories that will appear in the next morning's Times. On the receiving end are some 70 daily newspapers in the U.S. and 16 other countries, with an estimated total readership of 25 million, ranging from Seattle to Seoul. They are subscribers to the Times News Service, and they pay for the privilege of seeing in advance and, if they wish, printing Times stories.

Other newspapers, chief among them the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Tribune, run syndicated news services along similar lines. But in its influence and in the play given its copy by subscribers, the Times News Service has within recent years come to stand alone. In an average month, Times News Service subscribers use 4,500 Times stories, 500 of them on the front page and all with proper syndication credits.

By Accident. The Boston Herald regularly runs three or four Times stories on its front page, and Managing Editor George Minot says of the service: "We'd be lost without it." In Salt Lake City, as many as twelve Times stories have appeared on Page One in a single edition of the Tribune, which generally prints about 7,000 of the Times's daily transmission of some 20,000 words. Even the editors who use the Times News Service more sparingly rely on it heavily. The Providence (R.I.) Journal's Night Managing Editor Charles Spilman checks the Times list each night to "see if we've made any mistakes."

The Times got into the news service business by accident. During World War I, a Times correspondent in France discovered that by paying triple rates he could move cables several hours ahead of anyone else. His success brought requests from other U.S. newspapers to see his copy before it was actually printed in the Times. The Times decided to meet the requests--and thus was born its news service.

"Depth" Vision. The service was continued on a fairly casual basis until 1956, when the Times began going all out. Placed in charge of the Times News Service was Bruce Rae, a veteran of nearly 50 years on the paper. Rae began selecting copy with a canny eye for the sort of "depth" and background stories that the big wire services, Associated Press and United Press International, seldom provide. Nearly all the stories of the Times's Washington and foreign bureaus now go out over the wire. Since March, Rae has also included for the first time the thrice-weekly punditing of James Reston, Arthur Krock and C. L. Sulzberger. The results are impressive: from Boston to Bombay, the reader can pick up his paper and find his news as it is reported by the New York Times.

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