Color in the News

At 9:30 one morning last week the Associated Press got a request by longdistance telephone from the Minneapolis Star: could A.P. take color pictures of General George C. Marshall's funeral, airship the developed film from Washington to Minneapolis that same night? The A.P. could and did. Next morning at 10:20, right on schedule, five big Star presses rolled. On Page One: a five-column, four-color picture showing the flag-draped casket and its uniformed pallbearers, the pearl-grey columns of Washington Cathedral, the green trees and the blue sky.

Star readers are used to such fast and timely color with their news. The paper prints news or news-related color pictures five times a week, recently spread a four-color picture of an American Legion parade across Page One just 5 hours and 19 minutes after the photograph was taken--and while the parade was still going on.

Before the Legionnaires left town, the Star recorded their activities in dozens of color pictures. This is more color than most newspapers use, but they use plenty. The increase in run-of-press color, i.e., in regular press runs as opposed to specially preprinted color, is a major development in U.S. journalism. Moving westward, its importance grows almost in geographical proportion: in the East, 52% of newspaper readers get multicolor dailies; in the Midwest, 87%, and in the Far West, 96%.

Rainbow's Reach. Color in daily journalism is not new. The Milwaukee Journal first used run-of-press color in 1891. But such color remained a prohibitively expensive rarity until after World War II, when technical improvements in the process brought costs down to a level that newspapers--and newspaper advertisers--could afford.

Since then, the spread of color has been swift. The Milwaukee Journal, which ran only 346,867 lines of run-of-press color ads in 1946, carried 2,400,344 last year. The number of U.S. dailies using run-of-press color has increased 25% since 1956. Color now appears in more than 800 U.S. dailies. Even small-circulation papers are taking on hue: last year only four papers outranked the Midland, Texas Reporter-Telegram (circ. 17,650) in the use of color advertising.

Nor is the rainbow all in the ads. The Nashville Tennesseean uses editorial color pictures daily, the Spokane Chronicle, which can rush through an emergency color job in four hours and ten minutes, at least twice a week.

The Holdouts. The only significant color holdout, in fact, is New York City, which prints more big dailies (seven) than any other city in the U.S. Manhattan papers have shown little inclination to depart from the traditional black-and-white news package, and point, with some justice, to the poor quality and high cost of newspaper color and to reader indifference as reasons for staying in the black. A full-page color ad in the Chicago Tribune costs $6,324.72, v. $4,374.72 for black and white. Color equipment may require an investment of as much as $500,000.

But as the use of color continues to spread, even the relatively colorless New York papers may be forced to join in the parade. All, that is, but one. "We pride ourselves on the appearance of our paper, and we don't want to detract from it," says a spokesman for the paper that will presumably remain the good, grey New York Times.

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