Sunday Battle

To 5,800,000 readers every Sunday go Hearst's American Weekly ("greatest circulation in the world") and Comic Weekly. Into Publisher Hearst's purse clink fat profits from national advertisers at $16,000 a page. Weary of trying to battle Hearst singly on the Sunday front, eleven competitors, led by the Chicago Tribune, banded together two years ago to sell comic section advertising for the group. Last week 21 newspapers east of the Rockies formed a gang to carry the fight to the American Weekly.

The new group, named United Newspaper Magazine Corp., includes such potent members as the New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Daily News, Baltimore Sim, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Washington Star, Boston Herald, St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Beginning Feb. 24 the 21 will appear with the identical Sunday* tabloid magazine called This Week. Combined circulation: 4,051,000. Advertising rate: $10,000 a page. This Week's editor will be the Herald Tribune's Mrs. William Brown Meloney (TIME, Oct. 8). She will make it more conservative than The American Weekly, with first-run fiction, tony articles.

Back of the venture is Alco Gravure Inc., controlled by Joseph Palmer Knapp who heads Crowell Publishing Co. and whose father set up an insurance company out of which grew Metropolitan Life.

*Saturday for the Chicago Daily News

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