Death of Herald Tribune, 40 years later

[slappy4428]

Breslin, Royko, Waldmeir ...or ... Loopy, Munster and the Dwarf....
How times have changed in the big cities.....

 

[Ben_Hecht]

I've heard people talk about SE Stanley Woodward with a reverence you wouldn't believe.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

I'm staring at my bookshelf copy of The Paper (obtained off Amazon at a most-reasonable
price). The section on sports is alone worth the price of admission.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I've heard people talk about SE Stanley Woodward with a reverence you wouldn't believe.

I read his books Sports Page and Paper Tiger, both excellent. I notice now that the cheapest copy of Paper Tiger available on the Net is $73.88. I may have to think about selling mine.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Sports Page is a magnificent book. I was always told the H-T sealed its own fate during WWII. Newsprint was limited. The Times decided to forego ads for war news, the H-T went the other way. Times circulation soared past them, and when the war ended, the advertisers jumped, too. After that, the paper didn't have the strength to fight off TV.

 

[Gold]

As someone who read it, I can say that the Herald-Tribune was a great paper, one that any of you would be proud to have worked for. In the Whitney period, it was elegantly written and edited. There may have been 7 million stories in the Naked City, but the H-T knew which ones to go for and had the writers to go for them. The paper did an amazing series, which seemed to go on forever, called "City in Crisis." Great journalism, Pulitzer journalism, particularly if you know what happened to NYC in the late 60s and 70s. ("FORD TO CITY/DROP DEAD"). The fact that it didn't win a Pulitzer says a lot about where the H-T was and where everyone else was. Compare the NYT obit on JFK with the elegant H-T obit. If you can find it, read Breslin's story on the death of Malcolm X. I remember an editor telling me: "We can't run this because it doesn't have a lede." Or the early H-T stuff by Wolfe ("Junior Johnson Is the Greatest American Hero. Yes!"). Not only can't most of us imagine writing a story like that, most of us can't even imagine writing the headline. So earlier advice was right: run down to your nearest used book store and pick up a copy of The Paper. Great stories about the crazy Reids (how one fired the great sports editor Stanley Woodward, how another hired a guy from the back woods of Oregon as editor of the paper, weird stuff about John Denson, the editor who preceded Bellows). And if you want to know why the paper folded, ask me.

I'm pulling up a log and waiting ....

Another great Breslin story is his out-of-the-box account from JFK's funeral. He went to Washington and instead of hanging out with the 6,403 other reporters talking to people lined up in the Capital Rotunda, he went out to Arlington National Cemetery and talked to the gravedigger who was digging JFK's grave.

Amazing, amazing journalism. Read it if you can.

Yessss... that is a great story. Anybody can learn a lot about writing from that story.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Sports Page and Paper Tiger are not to be found at reasonable prices. If you find
either at a rummage sale, grab -- and run.

 

[EStreetJoe]

I've heard people talk about SE Stanley Woodward with a reverence you wouldn't believe.

"There has never been a sports editor like Stanley Woodward. heck, there never has been any editor at all like Stanley Woodward, and things being what they are in my business — where graphics, charts, information snippets and other adjuncts are often permitted to cannibalize the written word — there never will be again. " - Jerry Izenberg

http://www.nj.com/sports/ledger/index.ssf?/sports/ledger/izenberg/content/jerry_two.html

 

[oldhack]

Suddenly, we're all sitting around the camp fire, and the old feller's picking up his guitar....

OK, OK.

I just posted a PM to Gold about this that I had to split into two pieces. So this is the Readers Digest version, without all the background I made Gold wade through:

1. By the time Whitney bought the paper, it was in pretty bad shape, courtesy of the silly Reids. See The Paper.

2. A strike in '62 was settled at a horrific price for the NYC publishers. Yes, they got some rights to use automated typesetting, which the Herald Tribune, stupidly, did not take advantage of, but the wage rates went through the roof, folding one newspaper, the Mirror, within months of the settlement.

3. Whitney understood more about the importance of a great cadre of editors and reporters than he did about a strong, enterprising business operation. Lesson: They go hand in hand.

4. The '62 settlement, forced on the other publishers by the News and the Times, weakened the Herald Tribune, Journal-American and World-Telegram to the point that they entered into an ill-conceived and poorly planned JOA, the idea being a morning M-Sat H-T, a p.m. World Journal and one Sunday paper, editorially pretty much the Herald Tribune. They didn't talk to advertisers, distributors or the unions, who shut it down before the presses started on the first edition. Whitney pulled out as he saw his editors and reporters moving to other papers, into TV or magazines. The project got off the ground with a p.m.-Sunday paper that folded within a year.

Note that no one has mentioned: New York magazine was the Sunday magazine of the Herald Tribune, with Felker as editor, before it went independent after the HT folded. Lots of Wolfe's stuff ran in the magazine. And the Herald Trib published a great book review, called Book World, which was the lively, interesting, imaginative alternative to the dull NYT Book Review.

 

[jaredk]

Or the early H-T stuff by Wolfe ("Junior Johnson Is the Greatest American Hero. Yes!"). Not only can't most of us imagine writing a story like that, most of us can't even imagine writing the headline.

Except he wrote it for Esquire.

 

[oldhack]

Or the early H-T stuff by Wolfe ("Junior Johnson Is the Greatest American Hero. Yes!"). Not only can't most of us imagine writing a story like that, most of us can't even imagine writing the headline.

Except he wrote it for Esquire.

You're right. I stand corrected.

 

[friend of the friendless]

Mr Ridgeway,

I'd sell your copy of Paper Tiger ASAP. The market is going to crater. The University of Nebraska Press is publishing Paper Tiger (new introduction by John Schulian) next year. Bison Books imprint, maybe.

YHS, etc