Specialist Called

Having promised themselves "the largest magazine circulation in the world" by 1934 (TIME, July 1), publisher-cousins Robert Rutherford McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson of nickel-weekly Liberty last week moved to make that circulation profitable. They simplified the duties of the general manager who had gotten Liberty's present circulation, by calling in a man better fitted to supervise the getting of Liberty's advertising.

The general manager thus relieved is Max Annenberg, Number Three Man of the Patterson organization. Jewish-born, raised among the Irish of Chicago's First Ward, a newsboy early trained by the Chicago Tribune and for several years by Hearst papers, Max Annenberg learned all there was to know about circulation. When he returned to the Tribune in 1907 he said: "You make the newspaper. Ill sell it." His confidence in himself was shared by the newsdealers, whom he made his friends by every means at his command. Once, when they were crying for newspapers to sell during a Chicago strike, he ignored death threats, put his Tribunes on armed trucks, saw that every newsstand was supplied. In newsdealers' tiny offices, storerooms, back-alley loafing places, the name Max Annenberg became a great name. They call him "Max," he calls them by their first names. Once when a newsdealer died and left his business to a son who knew little about circulation, Max Annenberg stepped in, said he would be responsible for the efficiency of the son's organization. Other magazine publishers who, fearing incompetence had removed their publications from the son, promptly put them back on Max Annenberg's say-so. The son prospered.

After duplicating his Tribune circulation success with the Patterson-McCormick New York Daily News (largest in the U. S.), Circulator Annenberg was put in charge of circulating Liberty when it was founded in 1924. Later he was given the general managership. That meant supervising the sale of white-space as well as newsstand sales. Manager Annenberg drove into the job. Than Liberty's advertising sales-methods nothing more high-powered has ever been seen in the business. But advertising men are different from newsdealers. They must be coaxed, cannot be driven. Somehow, Liberty's advertising did not keep pace with its readership. "Trick" layouts, a special testimonial issue, salesman's "thermometers" in the office and other features of the hard-driving Annenberg technique, did not bring in the business as fast as required. Rapid changes of advertising managers did the magazine no great good among agency men. Dark-haired, resourceful Nelson Revitt Perry, formerly with Curtis publications, has now held down the job for three years.

Rather than demote General Manager Annenberg, a new title of Business Manager was created for the man now called in to build up Liberty's advertising. And the man is an oldtime Liberty counsellor, the best in the business, grey-haired James O'Shaughnessy, longtime Executive Secretary of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (Four A's), famed as a goodwill-maker as well as for his knowledge of advertising, one of the most universally popular practitioners in a highly temperamental profession.

Business Manager O'Shaughnessy `sketched his policy at once:

"I do not expect to take a dollar's worth of advertising away from our main competitors, Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. And after all, there is no real competition among magazines. Rivalry, yes--but there is room for all. However, we do expect to make Liberty the greatest magazine in the history of the publishing business."

Continuing to satisfy readers Max Annenberg gets, and new advertisers James O'Shaughnessy plans to get, will be Publisher Patterson. Since the day Liberty started, the Patterson eye has read, the Patterson hand has personally okayed every story, every article that has gone into his magazine, in much the same manner that his grandfather, the late great Publisher Joseph Medill, had put "J. M. Must" in blue pencil on every news story that appeared in his Tribune years ago.