Looping with the Post

Boston's famed, ailing old Post, once the biggest morning newspaper in the U.S., was in a bad way when Financier John Fox paid $3,500,000 for it four months ago (TIME, June 30). It was losing $12,000 a week, and it was doing a poor job of covering and handling the news. To change all that, quick John Fox jumped into his new job of publisher with both feet.

He began trimming costs; he lopped off more than 12 heads in the advertising department and business office, began to shake up the news side. Veteran Managing Editor Charles Doyle was put on the copy desk, and aging (72) City Editor Eddie Dunn turned down a lesser job, quit. Sunday Editor John Griffin, 53, moved in as editor-in-chief and named tough-talking Assistant City Editor J. J. (Joe) McManus, 55, managing editor. Star Reporter John Mannion, 43, became city editor. Fox promised that the Post would become a "lively, aggressive newspaper devoted to the public interest," and the new Postmen quickly made good on his promise. The Post's confusing "shotgun" makeup, which crowded a score or more stories on Page One by running only a few lines of some, gave way to fewer stories and a more eye-catching paper.

Good Beats. The stories were often beats, good exclusives. When the state legislature passed a "sneak" bill to pension its former members--including a $12,000-a-year lifetime pension for ex-Governor and ex-Convict James M. Curley (TIME, Sept. 15)--the Post was the first paper to spot it, rode it so hard that the bill was repealed. The Post exposed a city land deal which would have enriched inside politicos. A reporter visiting City Hospital found things so poorly run that strangers could get free meals; another reporter made off with an $80 wheel chair without being stopped. Another Postman got into the Charlestown Navy Yard without any trouble and wrote that he could easily have sabotaged millions of dollars worth of Navy equipment. But three weeks ago the Post rode off on another crusade--and took a tumble.

Alerted by a reader's tip, the Post found to its horror that Boston's Public Library was providing its patrons with Russian magazines and newspapers, e.g., Pravda and Izvestia and the Communist magazine New World Review, as well as with books by Lenin, Vishinsky and Karl Marx. The Post, overlooking the fact that the books and periodicals are standard reference material for serious students of the Soviet system,* criticized the library board for having "Red propaganda" on the shelves, demanded that the books be removed or plainly labeled "Propaganda --Communist." Publisher Fox himself led the attack with rambling Page One editorials that confused readers but made Fox as happy as a cub with his first byline.

Good Beating. The Post's campaign had some unlooked-for results. Requests for the material under attack rose sharply. The conservative Boston Herald walloped the Post for trying to stifle "freedom of the mind," and the library board refused to knuckle under to the Post. At week's end Dr. Luther Harris Evans, librarian of Congress, dedicating a library at Northeastern University, also pointed out the error in the Post's method of fighting Communism:

"If you were to get rid of Communist propaganda in the Boston Public Library, you would have to withdraw from it the Boston Post itself because it quotes what Stalin has said on various occasions . . . The oversimplified position that you can just throw out all Communist propaganda by a wave of the hand ... is not a simple solution. It is a simpleton's solution."

Unfazed by the criticism, Publisher Fox last week claimed that his circulation and advertising are rising so much that by month's end the Post will be making money for the first time in five years. Outsiders were skeptical of the claim. But there was no doubt that, despite John Fox's unwise visit to the public library, the Post had picked up. Said Fox: "It's looping now . . . This paper had been losing money with no need for it. It went ten years without any active management, and primarily that was what it needed . . . The readers want color, and we'll give it to them."

*Among them students at Harvard, Boston University, Radcliffe and Boston College, which offer courses that include a study of Communism.

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