Cowles Conquest

For a bad 24 hours last week a rumor gutted the Minneapolis morning Tribune and evening Times-Tribune. Pressmen huddled together outside the Tribune building on Newspaper Row in Fourth Street. Reporters, some panicky and angry, some stunned or recklessly casual, gravitated toward the bars--to hold a wake for their jobs.

Heard oftenest--usually profanely--that night in Minneapolis bars was the name of John Cowles, 42-year-old publisher of the Minneapolis Star-Journal. Rumor was that John Cowles (rhymes with bowls) had bought the two Tribune papers, was going to fold them for good--as he had the Minneapolis Journal two years before.

Next day John Cowles announced what had really happened: he had bought controlling interest in the Tribune papers--paying for it with "a substantial minority interest" of Star-Journal stock--and intended to keep all three going.

Magically reversed among Minneapolis newspapermen were the previous day's diatribes against able, round-faced John Cowles; no more was he called a coldblooded Midwestern Frank Munsey (paper-folder extraordinary of his day). With this deal John Cowles had taken Minneapolis as his father before him, with the Register & Tribune, took Des Moines and the State of Iowa.

Like the Des Moines Register in 1903, the Cowles paper in Minneapolis began as third and weakest paper in its community. In the beginning it was the Minneapolis Star, the "Workingman's Paper," bought in 1935 for $1,000,000 by John Cowles and his younger brother, Gardner Jr. ("Mike"). Under the "Cowles Formula" --crack editors, maximum wire and syndicate service, expert circulation technique --Star circulation of 78,000 grew by 1939 to 155,000. That year the Cowleses bought the Minneapolis Journal (circulation: 135,000) for $2,500,000. John Cowles, after twelve years as vice president of the Register & Tribune, moved to Minneapolis, leaving brother Mike as vice president in Des Moines (where he also started Look and took over four broadcasting stations).

With shrewd, persuasive John Cowles to Minneapolis went the Register & Tribune's high-powered, Mencken-shaped Managing Editor Basil ("Stuffy") Walters, who got his start as editor of an A.E.F. newspaper in Italy with Adolphe Menjou and Robert Maynard Hutchins (now president of the University of Chicago). Third of the potent Cowles general staff on the Star-Journal was John Thompson, onetime editor of Pearson's Magazine.

Last week under Cowles management one of the changes for the Tribune papers was cancellation of all liquor ads, effective in 60 days. (The Cowles have a no-liquor advertising policy.) Also, the price of the realigned papers was boosted from 2-c- to 3-c-. The morning Tribune's Editor Thomas J. Dillon remained in charge, but the Cowles general staff moved into key positions on the paper: John Cowles as president, John Thompson as vice president and publisher, "Stuffy" Walters as vice president and executive editor. Having got the circulation of the evening Star-Journal up to 240,000, it remained to be seen how far their enterprising methods would boost the morning Tribune's modest 93,000.

A bigger question mark hovered over the evening Times-Tribune, circulation 115,000 (now renamed the Times). Publisher Cowles insisted that he thought Minneapolis was big enough for two afternoon papers. But Minneapolis newspapermen were skeptical that the Times had a long life ahead.

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