The Paper That Actually Came Out

No one could find his desk. Switch board operators, unfamiliar with the personnel, fouled up phone calls. Files were locked and the keys were missing. Page proofs were misplaced and lost for hours. Copy boys, new to the neighborhood, wasted precious time on the coffee run. Then, when the presses were finally ready to roll with the first issue of the World Journal Tribune last week, pressmen balked at the, plan to have Mayor Lindsay press the starting button. After all, he is not a union man.

Before Lindsay left and some dues-paying pressman pushed the button, an hour of printing time was lost. But at last the WJT appeared. Stabbing the air with one of the first copies, Editor Frank Conniff exclaimed with proud surprise: "This paper actually came out."

Makeup Mishaps. It came out to the tune of 900,000 copies a day, and every day the newsstands quickly sold out to a public curious for a look at the paper that had existed for so long only in plans and promises. For the most part, the public was not disappointed. The WJT, reported the Washington Post, has a look of "lively respectability--sober enough for the suburbs and sharp enough for the subways." The paper's four sections averaged a fat total of 60 pages, enough to keep a male commuter occupied all the way home. And there were more than enough features that his wife might want to read too. All of which was not lost on advertisers, who seemed to be giving the new daily a cordial welcome.

Composition was neat and attractive, marred only by muddied pictures that reflected some kinks in the engraving process. Here and there, the makeup seemed out of whack. A write-up of city firemen's beefs found room in the women's pages; on the first page of the second section, four humorous columns surrounded a somber piece about women convicts. Such gaffes only reflected a first-week confusion. "Those stories were in type," explained Conniff. "We simply had to put them somewhere."

Signs of Life. Unsure of their motley staff, editors have thus far been uncertain about assignments--mainly in the city itself, the home town for which the WJT promised exciting coverage. But if local reporting is still weak, there are signs that the paper's reporters are beginning to dig.

As expected, there were days when the supply of columnists seemed almost suffocating. Most performed predictably: Joseph Alsop was back full of high optimism about the war in Viet Nam; Henry J. Taylor took up space with a familiar complaint about undercover "Red spies" at the U.N. Others lent the paper a noticeable lift. Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin took a fresh look at the opening of the city's schools and a dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan opera. Society Columnist Suzy Knickerbocker was at her caustic best:

"And how about that nice simple sweet American lady who had coronets embroidered on her panties the minute she married that count? Apparently her title didn't go to her head."

Quarrel over Columnists. By midweek, despite such nasty little union harassment as the mailers calling a chapel meeting just when they should have been mailing, the paper began to settle into stride. Then the Justice Department went into court to argue that the WJT was picking up "a decisive competitive advantage" over the New York Post, simply by hanging onto Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, Art Buchwald, and Rowland Evans and Robert Novak --all syndicated columnists who used to run in the Herald Tribune. Taken at its face value, the Justice complaint would give the Post the dubious privilege of temporarily publishing any of those columnists even while they are appearing in the WJT--at least until a federal court rules on Justice's request that the contracts for all the syndicated columns and features be put on the market for open bidding.

Puzzled by the first suit ever to ask that a newspaper born out of a merger divest itself of syndicate contracts that were picked up as part of the merger, the WJT has every intention of fighting back. For one thing, the columnists in question have all expressed a desire to stay where they are. And as for that "competitive advantage," the WJT may very well have, gained that merely by appearing. During the four-month strike that gave it the undeniable competitive advantage of an afternoon monopoly, the New York Post did little to expand its news coverage; it merely increased its press run.

"It's strange," said one ex-Tribman, "to be told now that those columns are what sells newspapers. The Trib had them for years, and look what happened to it."

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