Newcomers

Out within the fortnight were three new periodicals, in Buffalo, London, Lansing, Mich.

Trend. Cities like Buffalo are accustomed to four distinct types of local publications: daily newspapers for national and local news; country-clubby monthlies for social chatter; chamber-of-commercy magazines to brag about the city and back-pat its bigwigs; and, after the success of The New Yorker, a rash of local smart-charts broke out, flourished briefly, faded away. Buffalo last week was the scene of a new kind of small-city journalistic enterprise. Out came a four-page tabloid to review and, where possible, go behind the week's local news, develop news personalities. It was called Trend (price: 5-c-), "Buffalo's Newsweekly of Fact and Opinion." "Frankly TIMEly in air," said its editors, "it will carry in addition an opinionated undertone." Authors of the undertone are eight members of the University of Buffalo's faculty, and local newspapermen.

Vol. 1 No. 1 carried departments for Government, Business, Art, Medicine, Sport, Music, Theatre, Persons. It told how Mayor Roesch "lit a fresh cigar, twiddled his watch chain a moment," slashed the city's budget. Happiest stroke was a three-column report on the just-published memoirs of Buffalo's Mabel Ganson Dodge Sterne Luhan who, now married to a Taos Indian, gained bohemian fame by previously marrying Painter Maurice Sterne and writing her intimate reminiscences of Author David Herbert Lawrence (Lorenzo in Taos).

The editor and business manager of Trend have helpful connections. Publisher Peter Vischer of Polo is the brother-in-law of Editor Frederick Guyn ("Fritz") Brownell, onetime general manager of the Washingtonian and editor of Buffalo Town Tidings. Adman Albert Davis Lasker is cousin to Business Manager Eugene Meier Warner. Money from Warners, Schoellkopfs and other rich & prominent Buffalonians will tide the enterprise over until the promoters decide whether they will accept advertisements, add another four pages. Five advts, claimed Trend, had already been turned down.

Air-Mail Pictorial was published for the benefit of lonesome English Colonials who, loving illustrated weeklies, love them even more when they arrive promptly. Air-Mail Pictorial is printed on "gravure news" stock, some 20% lighter than usual rotogravure paper. Through an arrangement with Imperial Airways, the 16-page, 2-oz. magazine is whisked to Egypt, Irak, India, Africa, Palestine while such old-timers as The Illustrated London News wallow along on steamers. Imperial Airways makes a rate somewhat less than its standard 10-c- an oz. to carry Air-Mail Pictorial, gets credit therefor in the masthead.

The issue which reached the U. S. last week displayed a telephoto of the California earthquake, shots of the Cambridge crew, the running of the United Hunts' Challenge Cup, fashion, disaster and cinema pictures, and a fine photograph of Private Cruddas of the ist Green Howards belting Private Alexandra of the ist Oxon & Bucks in a boxing match. The magazine is published weekly in London, costs sixpence.

Michigan Sportsman. Jan Adrian ("Jack") Van Coevering, 33, is a short, blond, blue-eyed missionary. His gospel is the mental and physical healing power of Nature, his mission the preserving and popularizing of Michigan's great outdoors. The Detroit Free Press gave him a weekly column for a pulpit. Now William C. Sowell has given him a whole magazine. In the first (March) issue of The Michigan Sportsman Editor Van Coevering foresees Depression ending with "America's mills again . . . operating at feverish heat, fiendish efficiency." Then men & women, if they are not to be reduced to "pill-fed automatons," will need escape to woods and lakes. His program: Co-operation between sportsman and farmer, a united front behind the formulation of sound State water, wildlife, tourist & resort policies.

Editor Van Coevering does not overburden his magazine with preaching. Most of it is filled with conversational stories about Michigan fields & streams, articles on sports and Nature-lore. Michigan's foremost Nature-lover and onetime Governor, Chase Salmon Osborn, contributes a lyrical paean to Spring. First issue of 40,000 sold out 95%, even in hard-pressed Detroit.

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