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New York Herald Tribune
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The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald. The Herald Tribune was a leading Republican paper, and a voice for moderate "internationalist" Republicans as opposed to the "isolationist" variety represented by the Chicago Tribune. With a nation-wide readership, the Herald Tribune was a respected and influential paper, often rivaling The New York Times in the quality of its reporting.
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The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald. The Herald Tribune was a leading Republican paper, and a voice for moderate "internationalist" Republicans as opposed to the "isolationist" variety represented by the Chicago Tribune. With a nation-wide readership, the Herald Tribune was a respected and influential paper, often rivaling The New York Times in the quality of its reporting. It was home to respected writers like Dorothy Thompson, Red Smith, Richard Watts, Jr., and Walter Kerr.
Origins
The New York Herald and the New York Tribune were established in 1835 and 1841, respectively. The papers were very different: the Herald was a penny press newspaper whose editor, James Gordon Bennett was a firm Democrat and a pioneer of crime-reporting. The Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley, was a Whig (and later Republican) newspaper sold as a sober alternative to some of the excesses of the penny press.
It is worth noting that in 1851, the New York Tribune, during Horace Greeley's prominence had Karl Marx on its payroll as a London correspondent. For his labors, Marx earned five dollars per installment.
The Herald was the largest circulation newspaper in New York City until the 1880s (when Joseph Pulitzer's World over took it), while the Tribunes weekly publication was circulated throughout the United States.
The Tribune went into decline in the 1870s, after Greeley died. The paper was taken over by Whitelaw Reid, who used it to further his ambitions in the Republican Party; circulation gradually declined under his leadership. The Herald, taken over by James Gordon Bennett, Jr. in 1867, continued to perform well through the century. Bennett had a strong commitment to international news, and financed Henry Stanley's expedition to find David Livingstone. He later founded the Paris Herald as an English-language paper for the continent.
Bennett moved permanently to Paris in 1877 following a scandal in New York: the publisher, arriving drunk at a party at his fiancee's parents' mansion, reportedly urinated in the fireplace or the piano (the exact location differed in witnesses' memories). The engagement was broken off, and Bennett remained a bachelor into his 70s. Despite the move, Bennett continued to direct New York operations, usually by telegram, and his distance hurt the overall quality of the paper.
20th Century and merger
Whitelaw Reid died in 1912 and was succeeded as publisher by his son, Ogden Mills Reid. The younger Reid devoted more time and resources to his newspaper, and gradually started increasing circulation. Bennett died in 1918, and his paper was sold to Frank Munsey, an inveterate collector of publications who developed a reputation for selling or merging newspapers, to the animus of the newspapermen around the country.
Neither the Herald nor the Tribune was doing well in the 1920s, but the Herald, with its larger circulation, was in better shape than the Tribune. A merger was expected, with the widespread belief that the larger paper would absorb the smaller one. It came as a surprise, then, when Reid purchased the Herald from Munsey in 1924: at the Herald, a sign was hung up that said "Jonah just swallowed the whale."
New York Herald Tribune
The newly merged paper was not profitable, and the Reid family had to subsidize the paper in its first few years of existence. But the Herald Tribune quickly began establishing a reputation as a "newspaperman's newspaper", with literary writing encouraged by city editor Stanley Walker. After losing $650,000 in 1932, the Herald Tribune turned a marginal profit the following year, and would remain relatively healthy for the next two decades.
After the death of publisher Ogden Mills Reid in 1947, the Herald Tribune, despite some star writers and columnists, went into a decline under his widow Helen Rogers Reid, and sons Whitelaw Reid II and Ogden R. Reid (later a congressman). Many of the staff felt there was too much focus on circulation at the expense of the paper's editorial standards, for example the new push for puzzle contests such as Tangle Town, which was given credit for a rise in weekday circulation of 60,000 to bring the total to over 400,000.
In 1958 the Reids sold control to John Hay Whitney. Under Whitney, the paper regained some of its lustre, deciding that since it could not compete with The Times in sheer volume of news it would be faster, feistier and funnier. In this period the Herald Tribune was radically re-designed under editor-in-chief John Denson and executive editor Freeman Fulbright, and new writers like Tom Wolfe were encouraged to contribute. But the key to success was still advertising dollars, and on that count The Times was the leader. A series of strikes throughout the Sixties did not help the paper's balance sheet.
In 1966 Whitney attempted to organize what would have been New York's first joint operating agreement with the Hearst-owned New York Journal American and the Scripps-owned New York World-Telegram and Sun; under the proposed agreement, the Herald Tribune would have continued publication as the morning partner, and a merged Journal-American and World-Telegram would have been the afternoon paper. The JOA was to take effect on May 1, 1966, but the unions immediately threw up a strike, and as the months dragged on, a compromise three-way merger was arrived at on August 15.
The result was the short-lived afternoon New York World Journal Tribune. The first weeks' editions were dominated by the input of the Hearst and Scripps papers, but after a time, the "Widget" (as the merged publication was nicknamed) took on the appearance and style of the late-era Herald Tribune. But the paper was not a success, and folded for good on May 5, 1967.
Following the collapse of the World Journal Tribune, The New York Times and the Washington Post became joint owners with Whitney of the Herald Tribune's European edition, the International Herald Tribune, which is still published. New York magazine is also a descendant of the Herald Tribune, having originally been the Herald Tribunes Sunday magazine, a livelier version of The New York Times Magazine. Following the death of the World Journal Tribune, New York Magazine editor Clay Felker organized a group of investors who bought the name and rights, and successfully revived the weekly in 1968.
In the movie À bout de souffle (Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Seberg's character famously sells the New York Herald Tribune along the Champs-Élysées. It is also the major focus of the 1952 thriller Assignment Paris, with Dana Andrews as an aggressive New York reporter sent to the Paris newsroom and then Budapest. The IHT gets minor attention in later years, being fluffed about in a scene of the 1985 Chevy Chase tourist comedy, National Lampoon's European Vacation.
Awards
In the 1920s the New York Herald Tribune established one of the first book review sections that reviewed children's books, and in 1937, the newspaper established the Children's Spring Book Festival Award for the best children's book of the previous year, awarded for three target ages groups: 4-8, 8-12, and 12-16. This was the second nation-wide children's book award, after the Newbery Medal, and vied with the Newbery for most prestigious for many years.
Further reading
- Kluger, Richard, with the assistance of Kluger, Phyllis, The Paper: the Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, New York: Knopf, 1986.
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