Not Exactly the Proper Bostonian

Australian Rupert Murdoch buys Hearst's Boston paper

The Boston Herald American was dying, it seemed, even before it was born. Founded in June 1972 as the merger of a played-out Hearst tabloid, the Record American, with a once elegant Brahmin broadsheet that had gone broke, the Herald Traveler, the fledgling paper lost more than $35 million in its first decade. Its circulation, 238,000 as of last week, was less than half that of the rival Boston Globe (circ. 510,000), which runs away with four times the advertising linage. Thus almost no one in Boston was surprised when the Hearst Corp. announced that the Herald American would be sold or shut down by Dec. 3.

Hopes for its survival were hardly raised when the only prospective buyer, flamboyant Australian Publisher Rupert Murdoch, declared the condition of his purchase: the paper's eleven unions would have to give up 180 of the Herald's 800 jobs to save $4 million a year. Nonetheless, the sale went through, five hours after Hearst suspended publication and sent employees home. The settlement, after 30 consecutive hours of bargaining, closed a week of allegations by Hearst executives that the Globe was trying to sabotage union negotiations. Crowed the Herald on its front page Saturday morning: YOU BET WE'RE ALIVE!

The salvation of the paper was reached substantially on Murdoch's terms. Besides layoffs they included a cash price of only $1 million, with up to $7 million of future profits going to the Hearst Corp. Murdoch also assumed pension liabilities. The takeover was in sharp contrast to Murdoch's last attempt at acquisition: unable to get big enough union concessions at the failing Buffalo Courier-Express, he withdrew his bid, and the paper died last September.

The sale of the Herald saves Boston, the nation's tenth largest metropolitan area, from the dubious distinction of becoming the biggest city with just one major paper. Instead, the staid, august Globe faces the possibility of a no-holds-barred newspaper war. Murdoch has pledged to invest $15 million in the Herald American. Said a senior Herald editor: "This will cost the Globe millions. They will have to fight." Globe Publisher William O. Taylor, whose family has operated the paper for more than a century, canceled a trip to Seattle this week and said, "I will be right here at my desk, waiting to see what kind of paper Murdoch puts out."

Murdoch, 51, is best known in the U.S. for his raffish New York Post, a tabloid heavy on sex and crime that has almost doubled its circulation in six years to surpass the New York Times, 960,000 to 906,000. In London his Sun was the first daily to display a woman's bare breasts. Yet included among 100 other newspapers he owns around the world are the upper-brow Australian and the London Times. Says Murdoch: "The role of a newspaper is to inform, but in such a way that people buy it."

Don Forst, Herald editor since 1979, would probably agree. Last year he converted the paper to a zippy, insouciant tabloid that is perhaps more like the Post than any other non-Murdoch daily; it features vivid sports coverage, a populist-conservative editorial page and, emblazoned across the front page, hard-selling headlines sometimes 4 in. high. (Samples: TORTURE MODEL TEEN TO DEATH; POLS TAKE CARE OF SELVES.) The tabloid format boosted circulation by 48,000. Stephen Mindich, publisher of the weekly Boston Phoenix (circ. 140,000), is an admirer: "The Herald may hype stories, but the facts are correct, and it has credibility." Advertisers, however, have not been buying. Edward Eskandarian, president of the Boston advertising agency Humphrey Browning MacDougall Inc., explained: "The Herald has an older, downscale audience, while the Globe delivers the $35,000-and-up households." John Morton, dean of newspaper industry analysts, summarized the struggle ahead: "Hearst has already Murdochized the Boston paper. I do not know what more Murdoch himself can do." -

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