PRESS, Page 81The Last Stand of the TabloidsAs newspaper competition declines nationwide, three New YorkCity papers slug it out for survivalBy Laurence Zuckerman
At a time when most U.S. cities boast only a single
large-circulation daily newspaper, New York City has four. While
the broadsheet New York Times (circ. 1 million) has a comfortable
lead in the scramble for local advertising dollars, three of the
country's seven remaining big-time tabloids -- the New York Post
(circ. 713,786), New York Daily News (1.3 million) and Newsday
(633,119) -- are fighting a bruising battle for the rest. If
old-style newspaper competition is dying nationwide, New York just
might be the site of the tabloids' last stand.
This week the heaviest round yet in the newspaper war was fired
when the Post unveiled a new Sunday edition in a $25 million
attempt to fight its way into the black. The Sunday edition is the
big gun of millionaire real estate magnate Peter Kalikow, who
bought the ailing Post from press lord Rupert Murdoch last year.
Kalikow, 46, admits he did not know much about publishing when he
took over the paper. "When you fly on an airplane," he says in his
thick Queens accent, "you don't know how the plane works. You fly
on it because it's going to take you someplace." So far, however,
the Post has been speeding Kalikow toward a destination all too
familiar to his predecessors: debt city.
In addition to the $37 million purchase price he paid Murdoch,
who reportedly lost $150 million in the twelve years he owned the
paper, Kalikow has already sunk $17 million into the Post. The
Chicago-based Tribune Co., owner of the Daily News, has spent more
than $100 million reviving the paper since it nearly folded in
1982, while the Los Angeles-based Times-Mirror Co. has invested
about the same amount in its attempt to create a New York paper by
expanding Newsday from its profitable base on Long Island.
Though Wall Street analysts are very pessimistic about the
Post's future, they agree that a Sunday edition is the newspaper's
only hope for survival. The reason: while daily newspaper
readership has stagnated all across the U.S. in the past decade,
Sunday readership has grown. Sunday editions account for 40% to 50%
of the advertising revenue of many dailies. "It's a Hobson's
choice," says Gary Hoenig, a veteran New York newspaperman who
recently left Newsday to edit a new industry trade magazine called
NewsInc. "The Post can't succeed without a Sunday paper, but it is
very hard to win over Sunday readers."
Unlike weekday readers in the city, who may buy two papers or
more, Sunday readers tend to stick with one. This is a serious
obstacle for the Post, which shares many of its daily readers with
the Times. Nonetheless, Kalikow is confident that many Times
readers will also pick up the Sunday Post and that he can wrest
others away from the Daily News. Projecting a 35% to 40% increase
in revenue, Kalikow predicts that the Sunday edition will help the
Post show a profit in 1989.
Whether or not that optimistic forecast comes true will
ultimately depend on the quality of the paper, which is the
province of editor Jane Amsterdam. A respected veteran of the
glossy Manhattan Inc., Amsterdam has moved slowly since arriving
at the Post last May. While she has curtailed most of the
Murdoch-era excesses, revived the paper's credibility and boosted
staff morale, the Post still retains much of its traditional gamy
flavor. DEVIL-LOVING TEXAS TEEN NABBED IN MOM'S SLAYING was the
headline over one story last week.
The Sunday edition, which features 30 pages of sports, a
section of magazine-style local reporting, a travel section and a
respectable book review, will be the real test of Amsterdam's
abilities. She has succeeded in recruiting some experienced
journalists as her Sunday lieutenants but has apparently had
trouble persuading many of the writers she has befriended over the
years to appear in the Post. "You do have this fear that she will
put the loyalty test to you," says one.
The Post's rivals, meanwhile, are revamping their own Sunday
papers. Both New York Newsday and the Daily News have added more
sports, entertainment and opinion pages. When the Daily News
learned that USA Weekend, the nationally syndicated Sunday
newspaper insert, had done a profile of New York power broker
Donald Trump especially for the Post's first Sunday edition, the
News scooped the competition by rushing its own Trump profile to
press a week earlier. The News has also hired three sports writers
from the Post, which retaliated by recruiting the News's No. 2
sports editor. For its part, New York Newsday added
Pulitzer-prizewinning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette and
bloodied the News by luring away popular columnist Jimmy Breslin.
So far, the only clear winner is the New York newspaper-reading
public. By importing its tradition of top-flight local and
investigative reporting, New York Newsday has forced the other
papers, including the Times, to compete on a higher level, and new
columnists introduced by the three tabloids consistently turn out
first-rate work.
As quixotic a venture as reviving the New York Post may be,
Kalikow enjoys the challenge. He has purchased bound volumes of
every issue of the paper dating back to the year it became a
tabloid in 1942, and acts as if he is the caretaker of a great
American institution. "Why does it have to be a war?" he wonders
aloud, walking down a corridor newly decorated with replicas of
memorable Post front pages. "I just want to sell on the seventh
