Doctor for Liberty

Constant readers of Liberty have recently been seeing less & less of it. After 23 years as a chronic money-loser, Liberty turned from a weekly into a semimonthly in February, a 10-c- monthly in August. Each change, explained Publisher Paul Hunter, was making a "more impressive package" out of the product. Advertisers were not impressed; Liberty (circ. 1,700,000) lost about $300,000 this year.

Last week the package passed into new hands. Harassed Paul Hunter had quit, to become a magazine distributor in Florida. The man who moved into his job was an aggressive "magazine doctor" named Franklin S. Forsberg. From experience on Yank and Mademoiselle, he thought he knew what the languishing patient needed.

In his first three days, Publisher Forsberg decided to kill the editorial page, add a food section for housewives, print on better paper, and establish Liberty as a monthly for keeps. Forsberg said that Liberty's big stockholders, including Floyd Odium's Atlas Corp., have come through with more money.

Forsberg is from Salt Lake City, the son of Mormon parents. He got into the magazine business as an expert on marketing and selling. At Street & Smith his advice resulted in the cutting down of 22 weedy pulp magazines to five flourishing ones, helped Mademoiselle's circulation grow from 100,000 to 450,000. In 1942, he helped Advertising Man Egbert White found Yank. Later, as a colonel, Forsberg was in charge of Yank, Stars and Stripes and various Army news services around the world.

Back at Street & Smith after war's end, he got into a squabble because he had "two titles and nothing to do," and left last fall to set up as a magazine doctor. He has high hopes for his latest patient.

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