Go West

"Is it really the greatest newspaper in the world?" asked a newsstand clerk at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. In San Francisco. Hearst's Examiner gave the newcomer a qualified editorial greeting: "It cannot and won't attempt to compete with us in our traditional role as San Francisco's and Northern California's No. 1 newspaper. Welcome to our shore." The Los Angeles Times dismissed the debut in two paragraphs back in the business section. Later, its management chortled over how many Los Angeles stories the immigrant had missed.

Thus last week, the New York Times went West--with a paper edited in New York, transmitted by wire and printed in Los Angeles. Predictably, the new West Coast edition was a sellout at 100,000 copies--half of which went to subscribers by mail. At 10-c- a copy, the Western Times (every day but Sunday) costs twice as much as its Manhattan parent --and so far is about one-third as big. By eliminating all news of purely East Coast interest, it made its debut at a spare 32 pages. At week's end it was down to 20 pages, a slenderization due in part to the defection of first-blush advertisers (the Western Times carries both national and Western accounts).

The leased presses in Los Angeles rolled at 7:30 in the evening (10:30 New York time), early enough to assure overnight air shipment to newsstands in all 13 of the Far Western states, including Alaska and Hawaii. But not all the Times's mail subscribers in the West got their paper on issue date. In the state of Washington and other distant points, as well as in cities reachable only by train, copies arrived at least 24 hours late.

Despite its establishment in the West, the Times plans to stay an Eastern paper. Times news bureaus in San Francisco and Los Angeles will continue to work for New York, and not for the Western edition. At the new headquarters in Los Angeles, all but six of the 82-man complement are technicians or circulation and ad men.

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