Birth of a Daily

It takes more than a gleam in a publisher's eye to create a new Metropolitan newspaper. Since 1895 only three big dailies have been born in Manhattan. All three were tabloid children of rich men, who could afford to spend millions nursing them to maturity. One (Bernarr Macfadden's Evening Graphic) died a-weaning. Two survive: Joseph Medill Patterson's Daily News, William Randolph Hearst's Daily Mirror.

Two years ago a tall, bald, shambling magazine editor, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, got a yen to enter that select company. What he had in mind was a new kind of paper: an evening picture-paper with not so big a page as present tabloids, with news digested and departmentalized somewhat as in TIME. Selling such a paper at 5-c- a copy, Editor Ingersoll figured he could break even with a circulation of 190,000, but it would cost $1,500,000 to launch his daily.

At that time, Ingersoll was publisher of TIME, but his project was his own and TIME Inc. had no desire to go into the newspaper business. So last April he resigned from TIME, gathered a staff of unpaid writers to turn out experimental dummies, looked around for a couple of rich men to back him.

One evening last August, just before Hitler's armies marched into Poland, three backers agreed to put up the $1,500,000. Then Hitler marched into Poland and the stockmarket shot skyward. Overnight two of Editor Ingersoll's angels backed out, decided that the place for their money was in the market. Ingersoll swallowed his disappointment and set out to find new backers.

This time he took a different tack, tried selling stock in "small lots" of around $100,000 each. For four exhausting months he wined & dined, talked & cajoled, fumed & persuaded. One night last week Publisher Ingersoll sold his last parcel of stock, once more had his $1,500,000.

In doing so he had sold an interest in his daily to some of the biggest fortunes in the U. S. A roll call of his paper's stockholders reads like a list of Dun & Bradstreet's AA ratings. Some of them: John Hay ("Jock") Whitney; Marshall Field III; Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.'s George Huntington Hartford II; Chewing Gum's Philip Knight Wrigley; Marion Rosenwald Stern and her brother, Lessing Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; Lawyer Garrard Bigelow Winston, Under Secretary of the Treasury in Calvin Coolidge's Administration; Producer Dwight Deere Wiman; Columnist Dorothy Thompson.

Publication date for the new tabloid, tentatively called P.M., has now been tentatively set for June 1. According to Ingersoll's plans, it will carry no advertising for at least two years but will run, as news, a digest of advertisements carried on other Manhattan papers. Managing editor of the paper will be burly, apoplectic George Harry Lyon, onetime city editor of the New York World-Telegram (1929-33), editor of the Buffalo Times until it folded last July. Editor of his own paper will be Ralph McAllister Ingersoll.

New Haven-born Editor Ingersoll, 39, an engineer's son, was graduated from Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School in 1921 as a mining engineer. He practiced his trade for two years, then left it for a job as reporter on Hearst's New York American. For five years (1925-30) Ingersoll was managing editor of The New Yorker.

His new daily will have to compete with four other evening papers in Manhattan: the Journal & American, World-Telegram, Sun and Post. But all four together have less circulation than one morning tabloid, the Daily News. Unless one of Manhattan's other tabloids decides to head him off, comes out with an afternoon edition, Publisher Ingersoll will have the evening tabloid field to himself.

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