Blessed Event

Chatty Manchester Boddy, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, was busting to tell the news that nearly everybody guessed (TIME, July 19). In a Page One editorial he spilled it: "We don't like to scoop the dear old lady of First and Spring on a secret she has so zealously guarded, but . . . on Monday . . . the Los Angeles Times will announce that she is expecting. It will be a spanking new tabloid newspaper, to be born in the afternoon field some time early in October."

Last week the Times crossed him up by one day. What the mother paper did on Monday was to blossom out in a new look, with new typography, bigger departments of opinion and women's news, and a green-colored sports section. But Tuesday noon, Publisher Norman Chandler called staffers to his fifth-floor auditorium, solemnly told them: "The news is too exciting to be withheld from you any longer . . . The Times is to sponsor a new newspaper. It will appear in the fall . . . and will be housed in our new annex. If anybody asks you about this, tell him you don't know the details." Then he introduced its new publisher, who (to nobody's surprise) turned out to be ex-U.P.man Virgil Pinkley.

The Times's tabloid baby will probably be christened the Mirror. When it toddles out into the afternoon field against Hearst's rough & tumble Herald & Express, Los Angeles may see its lustiest newspaper scrap in a generation. Momentarily on the sidelines, rival Publisher Boddy told the Times to take heart: "Nearly a quarter of a century ago," he wrote, "we adopted a penniless, tattered little brat that was languishing in bankruptcy . . . It kept on keeping on until it has, I fear, become somewhat respectable. So chin up, Norman, it can be done."

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