Judge

PRESS

For Judge, nation's oldest humor monthly, 1937 has not been funny. Harry Hart, when he founded it in 1881, confessed: "I have started this magazine for fun. Money is no object; let sordid souls seek that." No sordid soul but a top-notch syndicator, General Manager Monte Bourjaily resigned from United Feature Syndicate last September, bought Judge to have fun & make money. He found Judge's financial ill health too much ingrained. When Life disappeared as a comic weekly and reappeared as a picture magazine. Judge lost a competitor besides acquiring old Life's circulation and features, but Judge's net paid circulation averaged only 181,902 for the first half of 1937.* By August, Publisher Bourjaily was optimistically soliciting subscribers with a chain-letter plan. Last week, however, after its twelfth issue under Mr. Bourjaily, Judge had a new publisher for its December number--slow-spoken, seasoned Salesman Harry M. Newman.

Once publisher of the newspaper trade journal Fourth Estate, organizer and first president of Columbia Broadcasting System, 51-year-old Harry Newman is best known to newspapermen as the clever promotion expert who undertook in 1927 to make America reindeer-meat conscious, so that rich Arthur & Leonard Baldwin could realize profits on their $6,000,000 reindeer business in Alaska. Mr. Newman sold many a leading newspaper his Christmas circulation promotion stunt which had as its climax the arrival of Santa Claus on local streets in a jingling sleigh drawn by a reindeer team. With a publicist's acumen, Mr. Newman acclimated his animals to Klaxon horns, Ford motors and shouting Eskimo youngsters while still in Alaska, coaxed them from a moss to alfalfa diet.

When most of his 200 reindeer shed their antlers aboard ship en route to Seattle, he equipped them, with papier-mache antlers. Later, as head of the Philadelphia agency of Union Central Life Insurance Co., he raised his office in two years' time (1935-36) from 24th to second place among the company's 80 agencies.

As publisher of Judge, Mr. Newman is proceeding with plans to bolster his drama, golf and advertising departments. But he is not yet the magazine's owner. Stock control remains with the printers, Kable Bros. Co. in Mount Morris, Ill., who took over the monthly last year on a lingering printing bill, passed title to Syndicator Bourjaily on his notes, pending sale of his comfortable United Feature stock holdings. When Kable Bros, returned Mr. Bourjaily's notes a month ago they asked Mr. Newman, then Judge's political writer, to step in as publisher; are negotiating with him over purchase of Judge.

Meanwhile, ex-Publisher Bourjaily is going back to the syndicate business. His first personal publishing venture was to buy from the New York Times its unnoticed Mid-Week Pictorial, which he jettisoned in February. His second was Judge. Wiser but smiling, swarthy ex-Publisher Bourjaily announced he would form a one-man "selective syndicate" through which he hopes to handle only big attractions such as the columns of Hugh Johnson and Eleanor Roosevelt which he originally secured for United Feature.

* Judge now claims 220,447 circulation.

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