A Star Is Born

PM, which began life as a newspaperman's dream, would this week be just a newspaperman's memory. The idealistic Manhattan tabloid, which its founders meant to be the voice and the solace of pushed-around people, had never made the grade either as a business proposition or as a newspaper. One day this week, seven weeks after Attorney Bartley Crum and Newsman Joseph Barnes took it over from disheartened Marshall Field (TIME, May 10), PM became the New York Star.

It was indicative of the new team's thinking that the Star's first gleam was timed to coincide with the news-heavy Republican convention--a consideration that would never have moved the old, pink-eyed PM. The paper now has only a puny 90,000 circulation in New York City. About 2,900 of its 125,000 copies go to Philadelphia, and Crum & Barnes want to get 50,000 readers away from Philadelphia's Inquirer and Bulletin.

The old PM began as an afternoon paper but actually came out late in the morning with yesterday's news; the new Star will soon frankly be a morning newspaper. Although the city badly needs a good afternoon paper, the Star chooses to buck the tougher competition of the monolithic Daily News and Hearst's Mirror.

Final Decree. The Star's first edition would show a new face and format, new talent and backers. Page One, unlike other New York tabs, would change from a poster to a news page. Inside, by Joe Barnes's decree, news and comment would be finally divorced. On the editorial page, run by George Wells, lately of Newsweek, the signed editorials were out; from now on the paper would speak for itself.

PM Editorialists Max Lerner and I. F. Stone (now in Palestine) will become thrice-a-week columnists, and have been told to keep it brief. As cartoonists, the Star has hitched a talented team: young Bill Mauldin and, for the editorial page, Veteran Edmund Duffy, three-time Pulitzer Prizewinner, who recently left the Baltimore Sun.

Ask the Experts. To help build a comic page, Editor Barnes has called in able Strippers Al (Li'l Abner) Capp and Milton (Steve Canyon) Caniff as consultants, figuring that if he can't publish their strips he can at least pick their brains. Others in the new braintrust: Editor Richard Lauterbach of '48, part-time adviser on layout and features; Lawrence Resner, who left a labor reporting job on the New York Times to be Crum's right-hand man; Managing Editor Jay Odell, a Nieman Fellow and former telegraph editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. PM Editor John P. Lewis, who had kept the staff together during eight uncertain weeks, was out on the street.

Publisher Crum was still coy about his backers. Marshall Field, he explained, will keep only a 25% interest in the Star. Together, Crum & Barnes will hold 33 1/3%. In the next fortnight they will select, from offers of $3,000,000 in working capital, the $1,500,000 they want.

The new team is not without ideals (it intends to speak for the non-Wallace left), but one of its ideals is to make money. Already, says Bart Crum, the staggering $15,000 weekly loss has been nearly halved; he hopes to be in the black by Labor Day. Good management will help, and so will such sidelines as syndicating the Star's stable of talent. But the main chance is to steal readers from two tabloids that are past masters of rough-&-tumble newsstand methods. If the Star ever seriously threatens either the Daily News or the Mirror, New York is in for a rousing street brawl.

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