Gotham's War of Tabloids

The sagging Daily News mounts a mighty turn-around drive

At the New York Times's sprawling headquarters on Manhattan's West 43rd Street, Executive Editor Abe Rosenthai gathered some top staff members to announce what he described as a "very good" development: "We're going to have some better competition here in New York City." Downtown, at the offices of the scrappy but financially hemorrhaging New York Post, Australian Publisher Rupert Murdoch was not quite so cheery.

The competition's strategy, he declared bluntly, "is to get rid of us."

To both editors, the competition in question was the Daily News, Gotham's immense (circ. 1.6 million) but laboring morning tabloid. Last week the News launched a fat and handsome-looking new evening paper called Tonight (projected circulation:

300,000) as part of what promises to be the hardest fought press war the Big Apple has seen in years.

At the very least, Tonight offers readers a needed alternative to the Post, which has used its once exclusive position as the only general afternoon daily in town to flaunt the Murdoch formula: skirting serious news while playing up sex, celebrity gossip and crime. The formula has paid some dividends; circulation is up 30,000 over the past year, to 654,000, though the Post still costs Murdoch an estimated $8 million a year in losses from an otherwise profitable empire that includes newspapers, magazines and airlines.

Tonight offers an ambitious mix of hard news stories, columns and features.

One departure, for a tabloid, is ten pages of business news; the subject rates about half that in the Post and sometimes even less in the regular News, but Tonight is bidding for the commuter crowd that wants to read closing stock prices on the 5:24.

Another indication that News Editor Michael O'Neill aims to outclass the Post is his choice of a boss for Tonight: Clay S.

Felker, 51, the innovative founder of New York and New West magazines and former publisher of Manhattan's Village Voice, all of which Murdoch wrested from Felker's control in 1977.

For all his magazine experience, Felker is no stranger to New York newspapering. Before the old World Journal Tribune died in 1967, leaving the afternoon field to the Post, he was hired to help liven up the paper. Felker bridles at suggestions that he took the Tonight job so he could "zap Murdoch." He says he just wants to put out a solid afternoon paper "for people who have been in a news vacuum."

After word leaked out last June that the News was planning an afternoon edition, the Post counterattacked with an edition that rolls off the presses before dawn to compete with the News for early morning readers. But unlike Tonight, which is substantially different in hard news content from the morning edition, the Post remains virtually the same all day long, although the editors may change headlines as many as six times throughout the day to perk up sales. And Tonight is only part of a $20 million investment that the News and its parent, Chicago's Tribune Co., are making in what News Publisher Robert Hunt calls "the most ambitious editorial-improvement plan in our 61-year history."

Over the past year the News has imported platoons of new staffers Among them are Media Critic Ed Diamond, Boston Globe Pulitzer Prizewinner Bill Henry and the Post's red hot gossip columnist Claudia Cohen. The new News recruits are not only putting out Tonight but also preparing daily special-interest sections like those successfully pioneered in New York by the Times starting in 1976. The sections, including a "Getting Ahead" feature on Tuesdays (dealing with personal finance and career advancement) and a Friday "Sports Extra," wil" debut in September. O'Neill hopes that these innovations will help the News turn around a serious erosion in circulation. Largely because many of the News's traditional blue-collar readers have moved o the suburbs, daily circulation has slid by 500,000 since 1970. This year the paper lost its vaunted position as the nation's largest circulation daily to the Wall Street Journal (circ. 1.8 million). While the News is still profitable, it is especially vulnerable to a readership decline since it depends on newsstands for 80% of its circulation and now commands just 36% of the city's newspaper advertising, compared with the Times's 59%.

Though his efforts to change the News from a sensation-mongering tabloid into a relatively serious paper over the past decade have not stemmed the circulation slide, Editor O'Neill believes that the News's old reliance on mass circulation is "no longer valid." He plans to turn the News into a "full-service community newspaper" focused chiefly on prosperous residents of the city and its nearby suburbs--the kind of readers who could help the News attract more department-store advertising. The problem for the News will be to attract those "upscale" readers while still appealing to the average straphanger. News editors insist that they can maintain the necessary split personality. For example, they believe that Tonight will not cut into the morning News circulation, since most of the anticipated evening readers will be suburbanites who do not buy the morning paper anyway.

If the News's strategy is successful, the paper could pull readers and ad dollars away from not only the Post but also the Times (daily circulation: 915,000). Though Times officials deny persistent rumors that they will launch an afternoon edition if Tonight takes off, they do admit to plans for various unspecified "innovations" in the paper this fall and winter. For the moment the Times seems preoccupied with other matters. The paper last week began printing in Chicago for distribution in nine Midwestern states, with home delivery in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, as well as the Windy City. Mindful of the drubbing they took in the early '60s, when an attempt to publish in California collapsed for lack of ads and readers, Times executives are insisting that their Midwest venture is just a delivery improvement, not the kickoff of a plan to go national. Nonetheless, around the Times shop the Chicago offshoot is described as a "national" edition, and is modified to de-emphasize parochial, New York-based stories.

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