TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.016

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 81

The Last Stand of the Tabloids


As newspaper competition declines nationwide, three New York
City papers slug it out for survival

By Laurence Zuckerman


    At a time when most U.S. cities boast only a single
large-circulation daily newspaper, New York City has four. While
the broadsheet New York Times (circ. 1 million) has a
comfortable lead in the scramble for local advertising dollars,
three of the country's seven remaining big-time tabloids -- the
New York Post (circ. 713,786), New York Daily News (1.3
million) and Newsday (633,119) -- are fighting a bruising battle
for the rest. If old-style newspaper competition is dying
nationwide, New York just might be the site of the tabloids'
last stand.

    This week the heaviest round yet in the newspaper war was
fired when the Post unveiled a new Sunday edition in a $25
million attempt to fight its way into the black. The Sunday
edition is the big gun of millionaire real estate magnate Peter
Kalikow, who bought the ailing Post from press lord Rupert
Murdoch last year. Kalikow, 46, admits he did not know much
about publishing when he took over the paper. "When you fly on
an airplane," he says in his thick Queens accent, "you don't
know how the plane works. You fly on it because it's going to
take you someplace." So far, however, the Post has been
speeding Kalikow toward a destination all too familiar to his
predecessors: debt city.

    In addition to the $37 million purchase price he paid
Murdoch, who reportedly lost $150 million in the twelve years he
owned the paper, Kalikow has already sunk $17 million into the
Post. The Chicago-based Tribune Co., owner of the Daily News,
has spent more than $100 million reviving the paper since it
nearly folded in 1982, while the Los Angeles-based Times-Mirror
Co. has invested about the same amount in its attempt to create
a New York paper by expanding Newsday from its profitable base
on Long Island.

    Though Wall Street analysts are very pessimistic about the
Post's future, they agree that a Sunday edition is the
newspaper's only hope for survival. The reason: while daily
newspaper readership has stagnated all across the U.S. in the
past decade, Sunday readership has grown. Sunday editions
account for 40% to 50% of the advertising revenue of many
dailies. "It's a Hobson's choice," says Gary Hoenig, a veteran
New York newspaperman who recently left Newsday to edit a new
industry trade magazine called NewsInc. "The Post can't succeed
without a Sunday paper, but it is very hard to win over Sunday
readers."

    Unlike weekday readers in the city, who may buy two papers
or more, Sunday readers tend to stick with one. This is a
serious obstacle for the Post, which shares many of its daily
readers with the Times. Nonetheless, Kalikow is confident that
many Times readers will also pick up the Sunday Post and that he
can wrest others away from the Daily News. Projecting a 35% to
40% increase in revenue, Kalikow predicts that the Sunday
edition will help the Post show a profit in 1989.

    Whether or not that optimistic forecast comes true will
ultimately depend on the quality of the paper, which is the
province of editor Jane Amsterdam. A respected veteran of the
glossy Manhattan Inc., Amsterdam has moved slowly since arriving
at the Post last May. While she has curtailed most of the
Murdoch-era excesses, revived the paper's credibility and
boosted staff morale, the Post still retains much of its
traditional gamy flavor. DEVIL-LOVING TEXAS TEEN NABBED IN
MOM'S SLAYING was the headline over one story last week.

    The Sunday edition, which features 30 pages of sports, a
section of magazine-style local reporting, a travel section and a
respectable book review, will be the real test of Amsterdam's
abilities. She has succeeded in recruiting some experienced
journalists as her Sunday lieutenants but has apparently had
trouble persuading many of the writers she has befriended over
the years to appear in the Post. "You do have this fear that
she will put the loyalty test to you," says one.

    The Post's rivals, meanwhile, are revamping their own Sunday
papers. Both New York Newsday and the Daily News have added more
sports, entertainment and opinion pages. When the Daily News
learned that USA Weekend, the nationally syndicated Sunday
newspaper insert, had done a profile of New York power broker
Donald Trump especially for the Post's first Sunday edition, the
News scooped the competition by rushing its own Trump profile
to press a week earlier. The News has also hired three sports
writers from the Post, which retaliated by recruiting the News's
No. 2 sports editor. For its part, New York Newsday added
Pulitzer-prizewinning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette and
bloodied the News by luring away popular columnist Jimmy
Breslin.

    So far, the only clear winner is the New York
newspaper-reading public. By importing its tradition of
top-flight local and investigative reporting, New York Newsday
has forced the other papers, including the Times, to compete on a
higher level, and new columnists introduced by the three
tabloids consistently turn out first-rate work.

    As quixotic a venture as reviving the New York Post may be,
Kalikow enjoys the challenge. He has purchased bound volumes of
every issue of the paper dating back to the year it became a
tabloid in 1942, and acts as if he is the caretaker of a great
American institution. "Why does it have to be a war?" he wonders
aloud, walking down a corridor newly decorated with replicas of
memorable Post front pages. "I just want to sell on the seventh
day."