The Lesson: Be Local

The board meeting had adjourned, and the publisher of the New York Times had a statement to make. "We are proud," said Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, "of the devoted new audience that came to us, and have tried earnestly to find a feasible way to go on serving them. Unhappily, the economics of the situation gave us no choice." So saying, Publisher Sulzberger last week suspended, after 16 months of publication, the Los Angeles-based Western Edition of the Times.

The economics of the situation certainly played a major role in defeating the Times's ambition to move westward. There were neither enough readers nor enough advertisers to keep the Western Edition going. Although preliminary surveys conducted by the Times had indicated a potential readership of 100,000 or better, the Western Edition reached that high only in the first months, thereafter declined to 85,000--scattered widely through 13 states. Advertisers seemed indisposed to spend money on so diffuse an audience. In its first year, the Western Edition carried only 2,183,902 lines of ads--fewer than the New York edition prints in an average month.

There were other financial burdens. The 1962-63 New York newspaper strike, which lasted 114 days, was an unexpected disaster that deprived the struggling Western Edition of sorely needed parental support. In the first nine months of 1963, the Times lost $2,709,000--as compared with a profit of $618,000 for the same period in 1962. And the elaborate communications hookup between New York and Los Angeles, which permitted the West Coast paper to be edited back East, proved extremely expensive to operate.

But what really hurt was an editorial miscalculation in New York. Out to Los Angeles headquarters went a small army of technicians and advertising and circulation men--but no additional writers and reporters. The Western Edition, aimed at a Western readership, was never much more than a slenderized Eastern Times, exported from New York. It had neither the hefty attributes of the original nor the local attractions of a truly local paper. "One thing that used to make my job just a little less pleasant," said Executive Editor Scott Newhall of the San Francisco Chronicle, "was that people would ask me why we weren't more like the new York Times. Since they started this Western Edition, I haven't heard that question once."

There was a lesson in that, however costly. And the Times seemed to have learned it. Henceforth, its International Edition will not be edited from New York, but in Paris. Its editorial staff has been expanded, and it will soon be reporting more European news.

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