New York Herald Tribune

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York Herald Tribune shut its doors on the 15th of August 1966, and the rival it had battled for decades marked the occasion with a eulogy. "It was a competitor of ours," wrote The New York Times, "but a competitor that sought survival on the basis of quality, originality and integrity, rather than sensationalism or doctrinaire partisanship." That send-off captured the essential tragedy of the Herald Tribune: a newspaper that many considered the finest writing showcase in American journalism, brought low not by lack of talent but by a cascade of financial missteps, labor strife, and a rival too determined to let it survive. How did a paper that employed Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dorothy Thompson, Homer Bigart, and Walter Lippmann end up folding after just forty-two years? And what did its death cost American newspaper culture?

• 2. Two Papers, Two Characters

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  James Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald on the 6th of May, 1835, as a penny newspaper with a relentless eye for crime and financial news. A Scottish immigrant who arrived in the United States at twenty-four, Bennett had already made a name for himself in the 1820s filing dispatches from Washington sharply critical of President John Quincy Adams. By 1839 the Herald's circulation exceeded that of The London Times. When the Mexican-American War began in 1846, the Herald was the only New York newspaper to assign a reporter to the conflict, using the telegraph to beat competitors and brief Washington policymakers with the first dispatches from the front.

  Horace Greeley founded the New-York Tribune six years later, on the 10th of April, 1841, with a very different mission. Where Bennett reveled in crime coverage, Greeley saw his newspaper as a moral instrument, its editorials described as "weapons in a ceaseless war to improve society." Greeley opposed slavery and briefly embraced socialism, though his positions were never fixed; one account called the result "a potpourri of philosophical inconsistencies." His Weekly Tribune circulated nationally, blending news with agriculture tips and reaching a circulation of 50,000 within ten years. The Tribune's staff in those years included Henry Raymond, who went on to found The New York Times in 1851, and Charles Dana, who would later edit The Sun for nearly three decades.

  Bennett's son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., inherited the Herald after his father retired in 1872 and ran it with a heavy hand, telling executives he was "the only reader of this paper." He bankrolled Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to find David Livingstone in Africa and scooped competitors on the Battle of Little Big Horn. But he also relocated permanently to Paris in 1877 following a scandal at his fiancée's family home, spending the Herald's profits on his own lifestyle while circulation drifted. The Tribune, meanwhile, passed to Whitelaw Reid, who turned it into an orthodox Republican organ. Reid bankrolled Ottmar Mergenthaler's development of the linotype machine in 1886 and in 1917 made the Tribune the first American newspaper to use the Bodoni font for headlines, earning it a reputation for typographical excellence it would carry for more than four decades.

• 3. The 1924 Merger

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  Frank Munsey had spent years buying, selling, and consolidating New York newspapers when he approached the Tribune's owner Elisabeth Mills Reid in early 1924 with a proposal: he would purchase the Tribune and merge it with his Herald. Reid refused to sell, countering that she would buy the Herald instead. Negotiations stretched through winter and spring. Munsey proposed swapping his profitable evening Sun for the Tribune; Ogden Reid refused. The Reids then offered $5 million for the Herald and its Paris edition, and Munsey agreed on the 17th of March, 1924.

  The journalism community was stunned. The Herald's management informed its staff with a brief note on a bulletin board; one reporter read it and remarked, "Jonah just swallowed the whale." The merged paper published its first edition on the 19th of March. It carried the ungainly name New York Herald New York Tribune until the 31st of May, 1926, when the familiar New York Herald Tribune replaced it. The consolidation was brutal for the Herald's staff: only twenty-five of its reporters were retained, while six hundred people lost their jobs. Within a year, the new paper's circulation reached 275,000.

  What the merger created was, by the account of those who worked there, essentially the Tribune intact. Apart from the Herald's radio magazine and weather listings, the combined paper changed very little from the Tribune's existing form. Helen Rogers Reid, who had taken charge of the Tribune's advertising department in 1919, had already begun transforming its business side. In her first two years on the job she raised annual advertising revenues from $1.7 million to $4.3 million, with circulation accounting for no more than ten percent of that increase.

• 4. Writers and Reputation

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  Stanley Walker became the Herald Tribune's city editor in 1928 and pushed his staff toward a new kind of reporting he called social journalism, aimed at "capturing the temper and feel of the city, its moods and fancies, changes or premonitions of change in its manners, customs, taste, and thought." The staff Walker shaped briefly included Joseph Mitchell. The paper won its first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1930, for Leland Stowe's coverage of the Second Reparations Conference on German reparations for World War I.

  War correspondent Homer Bigart became the paper's most celebrated field reporter. During World War II, while wire services handled broad strategic coverage, Bigart focused on tactical operations by small units and individual soldiers, "to bring a dimension of reality and understanding to readers back home." He covered the Anzio Campaign, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the Battle of Okinawa, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. During the Korean War, Bigart and Marguerite Higgins engaged in a fierce rivalry that ended with both of them sharing a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 alongside Chicago Daily News correspondent Keyes Beech and three other reporters.

  The Herald Tribune was also where columnist Walter Lippmann landed after The World closed its doors in 1931, despite the paper's conservative Republican editorial voice. Dorothy Thompson wrote a column there until she openly backed Franklin Roosevelt's re-election and was forced to resign. Walter Kerr began a three-decade career as a Broadway reviewer at the paper in 1951. John Crosby's radio and television column was syndicated in twenty-nine newspapers by 1949. At one time or another, the paper's writers included Roger Kahn, Richard Watts Jr., St. Clair McKelway, Judith Crist, Dick Schaap, Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Jimmy Breslin. When the paper described itself as a "writer's newspaper," it was not boasting idly.

  In April 1963, the Tribune published Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." From 1963 until the paper's demise, it published the weekly literary supplement Book Week, where Susan Sontag published two early essays. The paper's Sunday magazine, New York, edited by Clay Felker, became the incubator for the New Journalism, with Tom Wolfe writing lengthy features about city life after an editor told him to keep going "until it gets boring."

• 5. The Price Hike and the Long Decline

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  The moment that may have sealed the Herald Tribune's long-term fate came in 1946, when business manager Bill Robinson decided to raise the paper's price from three cents to a nickel. Robinson expected the Times to follow, since it also needed facility upgrades. The Times refused. "We didn't want to give them any quarter," Times circulation manager Nathan Goldstein said. "No free rides for the competition was the way we looked at it." In 1947, the Tribune's daily circulation fell nine percent, from 348,626 to 319,867.

  Ogden Reid died early in 1947 and his son Whitelaw, known as "Whitie," took the editor's chair. Whitie had done creditable work covering the London Blitz but had not been trained for the position and could not provide forceful leadership. Meanwhile, the Times was reinvesting heavily in its plant and hiring staff; the Tribune, with Helen Reid's approval, cut $1 million from its budgets and fired twenty-five people on the news side. The paper fell into the red in 1951. Losses reached $700,000 in 1953.

  Whitelaw Reid was gradually replaced by his brother Ogden R. Reid, nicknamed "Brown," who tried promotions to boost circulation: he printed the sports section on green newsprint, published a pocket-sized television magazine, and ran a contest called "Tangle Towns" inviting readers to unscramble city names for prizes. The stunts boosted weekday circulation past 400,000 but did not hold audiences. The Sunday edition slid, and the paper returned to red ink in 1957. The Tribune was the only newspaper in the city that decade to see its share of advertising lineage drop.

  By 1958, the Reids were seeking a buyer. They turned to John Hay "Jock" Whitney, a multimillionaire Wall Street investor who had chaired Dwight Eisenhower's fundraising campaigns in 1952 and 1956 and had recently been named ambassador to Great Britain. Whitney gave the newspaper $1.2 million over the objections of his investment advisors, with the option to take controlling interest if he made a second loan of $1.3 million. Brown Reid had expected the $1.2 million to cover deficits through the end of 1958; by that year the projected loss had risen to $3 million. Whitney exercised his option. On the 28th of August, 1958, Helen, Whitie, and Brown Reid announced Whitney's takeover.

• 6. Whitney and New Journalism

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  John Hay Whitney left day-to-day management to his longtime advisor Walter Thayer, who moved to build a cluster of media properties to protect Whitney's investment. Over the next two years, Whitney's firm acquired Parade magazine, five television stations, and four radio stations, merging them into Whitney Communications Corporation. In 1961, the Tribune hired John Denson, a Newsweek editor from Louisiana who had raised that magazine's circulation by fifty percent through innovative layouts. Denson dismantled the Tribune's traditional vertical front-page structure and replaced it with horizontal story layouts, unorthodox headlines, large photos, and information boxes.

  Denson's redesigned front page drew sharp reactions. Tribune copy editor John Price called it "silly but expert silliness." Time called it "all overblown pictures (and) klaxon headlines." Yet circulation jumped in 1961, and those inside the Tribune said the alternative seemed to be the paper's death. The Tribune launched an advertising campaign attacking its rival directly with the slogan "Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?" Daily circulation reached an all-time high of 412,000 in November 1962.

  Denson left in October 1962 after clashing with Thayer, but his successor James Bellows kept the spirit of the format while eliminating what Bellows called features that "lacked substance or sparkle." National editor Dick Wald wrote in a memo that "there is no mold for a newspaper story." Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gail Sheehy all found prominent homes in the paper under Bellows. The Tribune's Sunday magazine New York, edited by Clay Felker, became the platform through which the New Journalism reached a wide audience. After the paper closed, Felker organized a group of investors in 1968, bought the rights to New York, and successfully revived it as an independent magazine.

• 7. Strikes and the Final Closure

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  On the 8th of December, 1962, the local chapter of the International Typographical Union, led by Bert Powers, walked off the job. The union, known as Big Six, represented 3,800 printers as well as workers at 600 printshops and twenty-eight publications. The issue was partly money and partly technology: teletypesetting, used by The Wall Street Journal, promised to be far more efficient than the linotype machines still in use at the Tribune and most other New York newspapers. The ITU was not opposed to the new technology but wanted to control the pace of automation and guarantee that no printer would lose a job as a result. Publishers were willing to reduce the workforce through attrition but balked at what they characterized as tribute payments to the unions.

  The strike lasted 114 days, ending in March 1963 with a wage and benefit increase of $12.63 per week and an agreement that largely forestalled automation. For the Herald Tribune, the cost was severe: losses rose to $4.2 million and circulation fell to 282,000. The Times's publisher Orvil Dryfoos died of a heart ailment shortly after the strike and was replaced by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who ended ongoing merger discussions with the Tribune, saying they "just didn't make any long-term sense."

  A second strike in 1965 pushed the Tribune's losses to $5 million. Whitney and Thayer then negotiated what would have been New York's first joint operating agreement, combining the Tribune with the Hearst-owned New York Journal-American and the Scripps-owned New York World-Telegram and Sun. On paper the JOA projected profits of $4 million to $5 million annually, but it required eliminating 1,764 of 4,598 employees across the three papers. The Newspaper Guild struck the day the agreement was supposed to take effect. The strike dragged into August. Half the Tribune's editorial staff left during the stoppage. Editor Bellows wrote to the head of the new company that it would be "almost impossible with the present staff to publish a Herald Tribune I would be proud to be the editor of."

  On the 15th of August, 1966, Whitney announced the closure from the ninth-floor auditorium of the Tribune building. "I know we gave something good to our city while we published and I know it will be a loss to journalism in this country as we cease publication," he said. "I am sorry that it had to end." Combined with investments in the successor World Journal Tribune, Whitney had spent $39.5 million in his attempts to keep the newspaper alive. The World Journal Tribune itself folded on the 5th of May, 1967, and the International Herald Tribune, heir to the paper's Paris edition, continued publishing until 2013, when The New York Times renamed it the International New York Times.

• 8. Beyond the Masthead

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  The Herald Tribune's influence extended well past its news columns. From 1938 to 1966, the paper participated in the American Booksellers Association's Book and Author Luncheons, held eight times a year at the Waldorf Astoria and hosted by literary editor Irita Bradford Van Doren. Van Doren selected guests that included Jane Jacobs, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Moses, Rachel Carson, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Radio broadcasts of the luncheons aired on WNYC from 1948 to 1968.

  In 1937, the paper established the Children's Spring Book Festival Award for the best children's book of the previous year, covering three age groups. It was the second nationwide children's book award in the country, after the Newbery Medal. The Herald Tribune Syndicate, which dated to at least 1914 when it was part of the New-York Tribune, distributed comic strips and newspaper columns nationwide; its most notable strips included Johnny Hart's B.C. and Mell Lazarus's Miss Peach. When the paper folded in 1966, Publishers Syndicate inherited these strips and continued distributing them.

  For more than a century, the paper's logo carried a hand-drawn ornament called a "dingbat" between the words Herald and Tribune. The design originated in the Tribune's front page logotype on the 10th of April, 1866, and depicted a clock set to 6:12 p.m., a toga-clad thinker on the left, a child holding an American flag on the right, and an eagle spreading its wings above the clock. It was meant to place antiquity and the American future in tension. The dingbat was retired on the 21st of May, 2008, when the International Herald Tribune replaced it with an all-text header. The significance of the clock's specific time has never been explained.