The Shout & the Whisper

When Steve and Norman Rosenblatt bought Salt Lake City's suburban weekly Holladay Neighbor for $15,000 last year, the sum of their newspaper experience was Norman's three years on the Yale Daily News. Friends argued that their purchase was questionable for other reasons. Not only were they leaving good paying jobs with a prosperous mining-and construction-equipment business, but they were buying a paper that was losing money and readers as a result of its steady diet of back-fence gossip and trivia.

The Brothers Rosenblatt--Steve, 30, and Norman, 33--were unconvinced. They had read in TIME. (Nov. 22, 1963) that giveaway weeklies were thriving as never before, were convinced that they too could turn a profit by putting out a good paper. They began by giving the paper a new name, the Rocky Mountain Review, and a new purpose. No more "whispering," they told readers on April 2, 1964. From then on, the paper would switch from a giveaway to a "voluntary" 10-c- per copy--and its news columns would "shout."

Beating the Big Times. To find a scriptwriter for their "shout," the Rosenblatts went all the way to Maryland's Prince Georges County News to hire away Editor John Bill Lunsford. And ever since Lunsford's arrival, Review readers have been peppered with the kind of stories that most newspaper subscribers expect from aggressive dailies, not slow-paced weeklies.

By sheer digging the Review has managed to beat its big-time competitors on stories ranging from the deficiencies of the new $9,000,000 Metropolitan Hall of Justice, which was too small before it was built, to its latest exclusive that the Internal Revenue Service has no record of receiving income-tax returns from Utah's Democratic Attor ney General Phil Hansen for either 1962 or 1963, an exclusive that the Deseret News later headlined with IRS

KEEPS CLOSE MOUTH ON HANSEN.

Measuring Its Success. The Rosenblatts are Republicans, but editorially the Review lined up with Johnson and Democratic Senator-elect Frank E. Moss in the last election. Once, when a Utah state Republican representative, J. McKinnon Smith, threatened to "investigate as subversive" a model U.N. session conducted by Utah high school students, the Review editorialized: "Should Mr. Smith escape the call to public service at the polls next November, it has been suggested that he would make some corporation a wonderful vice president. These wags define a vice president as a man who goes to work in the morning and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 p.m. to make a mountain of it."

The Review's success can be measured by more than its fourfold increase in circulation (to 30,000) or the fact that the Rosenblatts expect to make a profit this fall, despite original expectations of running in the red for four years. It is even more significant that the weekly Review has made the morning Tribune and the afternoon Deseret News notice that they no longer monopolize the news in Salt Lake City.

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