From Good to Bad at the Posf

Matthew J. Culligan, chairman and president of the troubled Curtis Publishing Co., invited the nation's leading financial reporters to the Bottle Room of Manhattan's swank "21" Club, for "an important announcement." After cocktails and lunch, Culligan broke the good news: four successive quarterly increases in ad pages for a total 3.5% gain, he said, had put enough strength back into the Saturday Evening Post to resume weekly operations in 1965 (it had cut back to 45 issues yearly in a 1962 economy move). He also announced lower advertising-page rates for the Post and a reshuffling of the magazine's complicated ad-discount structure in an attempt to attract more small advertisers. Metaphored Culligan: "When you see a man who has suffered a broken leg out skipping rope, you know he has recovered. But it is obvious that the recovery didn't happen just this morning." Not surprisingly, Curtis got bullish headlines across the country.

That was two weeks ago. Last week, laying his skipping rope aside, Culligan held a non-Bottle-Room press conference and announced that Curtis' loss in the first half of 1964 exceeded the $3,456,000 loss for the same period last year, and that the third quarter would also be unprofitable. But he predicted that his company will make a profit in the fourth quarter. Even if it does, that profit is not likely to be large enough to prevent Curtis from finishing in the red for the fourth consecutive year.

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