Tribune Content Agency (TCA) is a syndication company owned by Tribune Publishing. TCA had previously been known as the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (CTNYNS), Tribune Company Syndicate, and Tribune Media Services. TCA is headquartered in Chicago, and had offices in various American cities (Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Queensbury, New York; Arlington, Texas; Santa Monica, California), the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong.
Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1919
New York, June 25.—{Special.]—New York’s new daily pictorial, the Illustrated Daily News, made its initial appearance today.
Modeled somewhat after British illustrated dailies, the new publication was replete with American innovations. Its direct appeal was made with dozens of news pictures from every part of the world. News stories were condensed and concise, practically every one carried in the other New York morning papers being covered in a short form.
The new paper received a cordial reception, and other New York papers commented favorably upon it. Walter Pulitzer said of it that it filled a long felt want in New York daily journalism. Sales on the news stands were rapid. Indicating a widespread interest.
Will Pay $10,000 for Photo.
Prior to publication much attention had been attracted to the Illustrated Daily News by the announcement that the paper would pay $10,000 for a photograph of the most beautiful girl in New York. Judges are to be D. W. Griffith, celebrated motion picture producer; Harrison Fisher, world renowned painter of beautiful girls, and George M. Cohan, famous theatrical producer, and the contest was opened to any unmarried girl or widow who has not “made a profession of her beauty.”
A page of photographs submitted was carried in the first number, while several thousand more were being prepared for publication at tghe editorial offices of the paper.
Up to Minute News.
Prominent place in today’s issue was given a signed article by Frank A. Vanderlip, one of America’s leading financiers and a former Chicago Tribune reporter.
Another striking feature was the first details of the Prince of Wales’ contemplated visit to Newport as the guest of Mrs. Ogden Goelet and her sister, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. It told of the elaborate plans for the entertainment of the royal visitor at the watering place.
An exclusive local news story which attracted much comment was to the effect that officers of the United States navy quietly have been forming a labor union, to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, for the purpose of obtaining increased pay and other concessions from the government.
Big Features Printed.
A daily cartoon by John T. McCutcheon and other features syndicated by The Chicago Tribune were announced. Among them was a column by B. L. T. “In the Wake of the News,” by Jack Laitt; a “Miniature News,” by Carey Orr; “The Gumps,” by Sidney Smith, and a health column by Dr. W. A. Evans. In addition the first number had the opening installment of “The Whimsical Three,” a new, never before printed detective story by E. Phillips Oppenheim.
The publication announced editorially its intention “to give every day the best and newest pictures of the interesting things that are happening in the world . . . and concise news stories covering every happening recorded by news gatherers.”
The policy of the paper, it said, “will be aggressively for America, and for the people of New York, and always will be fearless and independent.”
Convenient Size for Reader.
With its three page quota of advertising filled, the publication was printed in a semi-magazine form, having sixteen pages, each 11 by 16 inches. This style was adopted, it was asserted, that it might be convenient reading for the busy person, particularly during transportation. There were two pages of news, six pages of pictures, an editorial page, one of sports, one of the drama, a society page, and woman’s page and a story page.
The Illustrated Daily News will appear daily, excepting Sunday, and sells for 32 cents. It is published by The News Syndicate Company, Inc., a subsidiary corporation of The Chicago Tribune. Its editors and publishers are J. M. Patterson and R. R. McCormick, also editors and publishers of The Chicago Tribune. William H. Field is general manager; George Utassy, business manager, and Arthur L. Clarke, managing editor.
…Pictured Encyclopedia of the World’s Greatest Newspaper, 1928
COMICS. As constituted at present, The Tribune’s comic family includes Andrew Gump, with his family and relations; that perfect hoodlum, Moon Mullins; Smitty, the patron saint of office boys; Gasoline Alley, the likable doings of a group of real and natural people; Harold Teen, the pen and ink replica of a million young Americans; Winnie Winkle, the petite stenographer, and her family; Orphan Annie, the lovable little waif whose disappearance from her usual niche one day caused as much attention as though the front page of the paper had been omitted; Texas Slim, the bashful buckaroo; Ching Chow, the whimsical Chinese philosopher; and the cartoon series, Among the Folks in History, Our Secret Ambition, A Strain on the Family Tie, Wotta Life!, etc.
In every case these comics are prepared for The Tribune by members of The Tribune staff, and the artists bring far more than humor to their work. Study these comics, and you will notice that running beneath their rich humor is a shrewd knowledge of human nature and many a well-placed thrust at common inconsistencies in human nature. In short, in their rollicking way these comics are true to life and as thought provoking as so many well-written novels; and perhaps the undercurrent of shrewd philosophy has a great deal to do with the preference exhibited by the American public for the daily and Sunday offerings of the men engaged in this phase of Tribune activity.
These comics also appear in scores of newspapers over the continent, being released the The Tribune syndicate in time to appear in the papers purchasing them on the same day they are printed in The Tribune.
Popular Mechanics, March, 1926
In a hundred Sunday-morning, newspapers from coast to coast each week appears a full page, in four colors, showing the adventures of a group of just average everyday people whose garages abut on one common alley. In as many, or more, papers the same characters appear each weekday in a “strip” seven or eight columns wide. In a year’s time the papers devote more than a million dollars’ worth of space (at their current advertising rates) to this one cartoon alone.
The reason lies in the new idea in newspaper comics-human-interest stories with a continuity, as the film people say, instead of the antics of impossible boys sawing holes in the floor for their elders to drop through, or performing similar stunts.
Frank King, creator of “Gasoline Alley,” which appears in American newspapers reaching more than 5,000,000 people each day, was one of the leaders creating the new style in cartoons. From a $22.50-a-week artist on the Chicago Tribune staff, drawing fancy borders to fit around the pictures of beautiful divorcees and other news celebrities, he has one of the highest-paid newspaper cartoonists, helping to keep a vast organization busy distributing his work and the work of his fellow comic-strip artists.
The story of the distribution, or syndicating, of the features which appear simultaneously in papers throughout the country is a story of big business organization. No one paper, even the largest of metropolitan dailies, could afford to employ an entire staff of feature writers and artists at the salaries they command, but by syndicating their output among scores or hundreds of papers, the smallest city can see each day the same features that appear in New York or Chicago, and pay only its proportionate share of the large expense.
Newspaper syndicates are owned by number of the large-city papers, and others work independently, employing their own artists and writers. The cartoonists are usually ex-newspaper artists who got their start, as Frank King did, retouching photographs and drawing borders in some newspaper art room. Then comes a chance to do a cartoon on some timely subject, or the artist in his spare moments gets an idea for a whimsical drawing. From that, if his ideas hold out, he develops a strip; his paper tries it out for a while, and if it takes hold with the public, it goes into the syndicate, and a fat contract follows. Sidney Smith, creator of the Gump-family cartoon a few years ago signed a million-dollar contract, and his newspaper celebrated the event by presenting him with the most expensive imported limousine on the market.
Both the Gumps and Gasoline Alley appeared in the Chicago Tribune for some time before they were sold to other papers. Both have the same basic idea, the daily adventures of ordinary Americans, each strip featuring various grown-ups and at least one youngster. The artist who creates a newspaper comic must not only be an expert cartoonist but a man with plenty of ideas. He plans his work weeks in advance, creates new situations, and then follows them along for days, and sometimes even for months. In a presidential election year Andy Gump ran for chief executive on an independent ticket and burlesqued the issues of the day.The comics follow the seasons and their holidays, and, despite the fact that they must be planned days in advance, often mirror the news of the world.
It is customary to have two separate stories running through the cartoons, one in the daily strips and another for the full pages on Sunday, which appear in colors in the comic sections. The reason is that the papers which use the daily strip do not all have Sunday editions using comics, and some of those using the full page on Sunday do not use the daily strip. addition, the artist, from time to time, must prepare extra strips and pages introducing the characters and giving a synopsis of their lives, to be used by new members of the syndicate as they are added.
When the artist sits down at his desk each morning, he may have an idea in his mind, or may turn to the daily papers for one from the latest news, or, if everything else fails, he looks out of the window until an idea comes. The idea is then roughly sketched with pencil on a strip of white cardboard, and put in final form with pen and ink, the larger black parts being filled in with a brush. The title may come first, or follow completion of the strip.
From the artist the strip or page goes to the engraving department, is photographed on a copper plate, engraved and prepared for the mechanical department.
The next step is to transfer the engraving to a paper mold in which type metal is poured to produce the printing plate. A machine carrying rolls of blotting paper and other rolls of a special tissue paper automatically cuts off sheets somewhat larger than a newspaper page, pastes them together -four sheets of the blotting paper with tissue between and on one outer surface-sends the completed “mat” or matrix through rollers which press out the excess paste and bind the parts firmly together, and finally delivers the completed sheet to the drier. There are two processes of stamping the impression in the mat. In one the dampened matrix is placed over the engraved plate, rolled in until it fills every indentation, then covered with moistened blankets and placed in a steam-heated press to dry the impression in place. A faster process uses a drier mat and heavier rolling pressure, shortening the steaming process from several minutes to a matter almost of seconds
The cartoonist delivers a full week’s supply of strips at one time, and all are reproduced on one matrix, which is then clipped apart for convenience in mailing
At the newspaper plant the process is reversed. The mat is placed in a casting box, surrounded by containing walls just type-high, and molten type metal poured in. The casting boxes are water-cooled, and the hot metal chills so quickly that the tissue surface of the mat is hardly browned.
The casting, after being sawed to the proper size, is placed in the page form and made up along with the newspaper type. The page form then goes to the stereotyping machine, and a mat is made of it in the same way the original comic-strip matrix was produced. The page mat is bent into a half-circle and placed in a large casting box, and the entire page cast in this form, ready for the circular roll of the high-speed presses which print the daily papers.
Being a friend or neighbor of one of the newspaper cartoonists is a precarious. occupation unless one likes to see himself in print, for frequently the they use their friends, not only for characters, but sometimes even by name. Walt, the leading man of Frank King’s Gasoline-Alley bunch, is pictured as a large and carefree bachelor, who lately has been on the verge of marrying the widow Blossom, a comely addition to the ranks of those whose garages abut on the alley. Few who have followed his adventures however, know that Walt in private life is Walter Drew, long suffering brother-in-law of the artist. It was on a Sunday visit-to Drew several years ago that King got the idea for the cartoon strip, which, incidentally, started out not as a strip, but as a rectangle, a three-column-deep cartoon for the sporting pages. Drew had an alley garage back of his home and King accompanied him there to watch him tinker with his car. Several neighbors were doing likewise, and out of their alley friendship grew the idea. Bill, another of the Gasoline Alley characters is taken from real life, being a locomotive engineer. The doctor, known as “Doc,” is a composite, according to King, of several characters.
The artists are flooded with ideas and suggestions from readers, most of them impractical for one reason or another, but Mrs. Blossom, the widow, grew out of one such letter. The writer explained that she was a widow and had few friends until she bought a small coupe and rented an alley garage. Then the neighboring garage occupants offered their advice and assistance and frequently took her riding in their larger cars. King introduced widow to the alley, with the same results Skeezix, a foundling left on the doorstep of the bachelor Walt, on St. Valentine’s day, 1921, and since adopted and raised by him, is modeled after the artist’s own son, is modeled after the artist’s own son, who happens to be five years older than the cartoon youngster. King, however, explains that he went back in his memory and has reproduced many of the experiences and sayings of his own boy, attributing them to the comic-strip child.
Public taste and desires frequently shape the future for the comic-strip characters. Recently one paper, which features a cartoon built around a little orphan girl, thought she might be losing her popularity because her creator had had her adopted in a rich household. So, for an experiment, the strip was omitted one morning. The result was a flood of telephone calls, personal visits and letters, all demanding to know what had happened to Orphan Annie. The newspaper restored the cartoon next day, explained the omission, and invited suggestions from readers as to Annie’s future adventures. Hundreds of letters resulted, opinion being well divided as to whether she should remain the ward of a rich family, return to a previous home with a poor farmer or some other station in life.
Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1947
The story behind the development of The Chicago Tribune’s comic strips will be unfolded on the third installment of “On Special Assignment,” the radio series marking The Tribune’s centennial observation, over W-G-N at 8:30 tonight. Besides appearing in The Tribune, the comics are distributed to many other newspapers thru the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, and it is estimated that nearly three-fourths of the pwople of America come under the spell of their humor.
Tonight’s drama will recall how these cartoon characters with their shrewd portrayal of human nature, and their reflection of real life came into being and grew to enormous popularity.
Among the subjects to be covered tonight will be the story of “Orphan Annie,” whose financial ups and downs have fostered her independent philosophy; “Gasoline Alley” and the adventures of Skeezix, the first comic strip character to grow up; “Harold Teen” and his reflections on the high school crowd’s way of life, and the gifts received for the B. O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie wedding in “Dick Tracy.”
Chicago Tribune, May 29, 2022
By Rick Kogan
In 1924, a man named Harold Gray walked into the offices of Joseph Medill Patterson, the co-editor of the Chicago Tribune and the co-editor, publisher and founder of the New York Daily News. He carried with him a number of drawings, samples for his proposal for a comic strip he wanted to call “Little Orphan Otto.”
Patterson looked over the drawings and sat back in his chair. “He looks like a pansy,” he said, using derogatory language common at the time. “Put a skirt on the kid and call him Annie.” Thus was born one of the most enduring and distinctly American comic strip characters.
A vintage “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip from 1926.
Near the end of the 19th century, many newspapers featured drawings and cartoons but these did not feature recurring characters. The first such American newspaper comic strip characters were born in 1895 when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published “Hogan’s Alley,” which featured a character named “The Yellow Kid,” a gap-toothed, jug-eared urchin dressed in a nightshirt.
He became an instant sensation, spawning a raft of products and stunning the industry. It had been Pulitzer’s intention to use the recently developed four-color printing press to bring fine art to the masses. But attempts to reproduce paintings resulted in murky images. Comics, on the other hand, proved terrific on newsprint.
William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the rival New York Journal, stole “The Yellow Kid’’ from the World and presented him as the star of a Sunday package touted later in 1896 as “Eight Pages of Iridescent Polychromous Effulgence That Make the Rainbow Look Like a Lead Pipe!”
The Tribune had been running four pages of Sunday comics since 1895 but not in color and with no continuing characters. In time the Tribune and Daily News got serious, with Patterson leading the way.
Artist Sidney Smith, shown in 1919, drew the comic strip “The Gumps,” from 1917 until he was killed in an auto accident in 1935. The strip, which told the story of characters who mirrored the lives of Tribune readers, lasted until 1959.
Patterson helped create and nourish, among many other strips, “The Gumps,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Terry and the Pirates.” He was energetically hands-on, offering advice, coaching artists and coming up with ideas to promote the strips. He would regularly assemble his cartoonists to discuss characters and storylines.
“The Gumps” helped to lay the foundation for the Chicago Tribune syndicate which, under various names, was a money-making endeavor that would spread comic strips and other editorial products to newspapers across the world.
As Stephen Becker wrote in his marvelous 1959 book “Comic Art in America:”
- It is probably true that no other publisher in history … took as much interest in the comics he published as Patterson did … The Tribune and the News did not dominate the twenties; yet of the dozen enduring strips created in that decade, half are their products. (They were) essential in the transition from comics as an adjunct to journalism to comics as a profession in itself.
Tribune cartoonist Chester Gould drawing his Dick Tracy Sunday episode to be published November 27, 1938.
Here’s another notable Tribune comic story.
When a man named Chester Gould arrived in Chicago in 1921, he found it “exhilarating” and decided to stay. He attended Northwestern University where he studied business and commerce. He married, started a family. He took classes at the Art Institute.
And he created comic strips for the city’s newspapers, focusing on the Tribune. He spent a decade unsuccessfully submitting ideas and drawings to its editors. And then he walked in with drawings of a detective he called “Plainclothes Tracy.” Patterson shortened that to “Dick” and the strip was launched on Oct. 4, 1931.
Chester Gould, left, creator of “Dick Tracy,” with Mary Pat McCormick, 10, and her brother Michael McCormick in Gould’s office in Tribune Tower in 1962 trying new two-way wrist radios.
It was an immediate hit. Gould and his family settled onto a farm in Woodstock and he commuted six days a week to Tribune Tower and, rarely taking a vacation, created in both places for half a century a vast array of bizarre characters and plots and technological gizmos that fascinated the reading public.
Comics were born of a simple time, in an era when a trip to a flea circus or the nickelodeon were among but a few entertainment options for most people. The appeal is easy to figure out. Reading is work. Seeing is automatic. We meet the world primarily on a visual level, which explains primitive cave drawings, religious icons and images, movie posters. And comics.
The impact of an image is immediate and often more lyrical than a 1,000 words.
It may be difficult now to fathom the impact that comics once had. They were displayed in larger form and were intricately drawn. Characters became national symbols. Before television came along, comics were king for a brief window of time in which their substance and style, observations and satire, had a major cultural impact unimaginable today.
Newspaper buyers often referred to the paper not by its name but asked for “the Andy Gump paper.” And in 1923, when the death of one of that strip’s characters was foretold, as Lloyd Wendt detailed in his “Chicago Tribune” book, “hundreds of readers appeared in front of the Tribune building to protest, and thousands of calls jammed the switchboards, so that extra operators had to be brought in.”
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Television put an end to most of the story strips that dominated the pages a few decades ago, replaced by gag-a-day strips. Most kids, awash in videos, are no longer drawn to the simplicity of ink on paper and so it is that fewer new strips are appearing, and surveys indicate that Sunday comics are losing readership.
Still, some comic characters seem assured of immortality, existing in films, TV, video, toys and the public consciousness. Think of that little orphan girl. Or those beguiling folks named Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the Red Baron of the “Peanuts” world.
As Rick Marschall, author of “America’s Great Comic Strip Artists,” has written, “The comic strip and jazz are the only two American art forms.”
Mort Walker, creator of “Beetle Bailey” and founder of the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida, told me, “Comics will always be with us because we need a release from the tragedies on the earlier (news) pages. They have meaning for our lives.”
But let’s give Patterson the final word. He said this before his death in 1946:
- (Comics need) youngsters for kid appeal, a handsome guy for muscle work and love interest, a succession of pretty girls, a mysterious locale or a totally familiar one.
New York Daily News, May 27, 1946
Joseph Medill Patterson once wrote the obituary of his best friend. It was a three-line “Memo to Max Annenberg” which said in part:
- Good-by. I am going to miss you a lot.
…Hope to be seeing you some day. J. M. Patterson.
It was a simple message. But it touched the hearts of millions who read it and mourned with the man who had lost his friend Max Annenberg, circulation director of The News. Perhaps he would have liked some unpretentious farewell written to him now. It was typical of the man who, to himself, was a humble person. To others he was a genius who possessed and used the magic gift of human understanding.
Founder of The News.
It was this rare attribute which won for Patterson, founder and president of The News, enduring rank among American publishers of his era.
He knew about and liked people—his companions and friends, from copy boys to world leaders, his employes and associates, and the legions of readers whose lives he touched and influenced through the printed page. In an uncanny way he found out why they laugh, sheer, hiss and cry. He applied that knowledge in creating and shaping the newspaper, the most extraordinary exploit in the 20th century.
Patterson, in a long and eventful life, achieved recognition as a novelist, playwright, legislator, administrator, war correspondent, editor and soldier.
But his name will live with that of The News, the final monumant wrought with his own hand as a publisher of and for the people.
“Can’t Last”—But It Did.
On June 26, 1919, after his return from France, where he was a captain of artillery in the Rainbow Division, Patterson, previously co-editor of the Chicago Tribune, brought The News into being. It was America’s first picture tabloid. Bravely it sought a little room on the newsstands.
Skeptics scoffed at such a pitiful sheet. They said:
- It can’t last six months.
Twenty-one years later, in 1940, when The News attained its majority, its tremendous circulation was twice that of any other daily in the United States. It has continued to hold this commanding position since that date.
Seldom, if ever did Patterson who performed this near-miracle, boast of it. He let others explain and few could do so better than by pointing to the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, a Patterson idol, the last six words of which are chiseled across the front of The News Building:
- God must have loved the common people because HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM.
A noted member of a noted publishing family—the Medills, McCormicks and Pattersons—the “Captain” or “J.M.P.” or plain “Mr. Patterson,” as he was known to his employes, won his spurs with the Tribune long before his triumph with The News. Prior to and during his Tribune days he struck out into the literary, political and military fields, each time with success.
A Publishing Triumvirate.
However, tradition, temperament and talent drew him back to his destiny as the most phenomenal and probably the ablest publisher of the last quarter century.
Patterson, of Scotch-Irish descent, was born in Chicago, Jan. 6, 1879, a son of Robert W. and Elinor Medill Patterson. He was the eldest of a publishing triumvirate. His sister, Eleanor M. is publisher of the Washington Times-Herald and his cousin, Col. Robert R. McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune.
The newsprint-and-ink saga of the Pattersons and McCormicks had started a half century earlier with the founding of the Tribune by Joseph Medill, whose paper came to prominence while battling in support of Lincoln in the Civil War.
The heritage of the elder Medill passed through his two daughters, Elinor and Katherine, to their children. The latter was the mother of Robert R. and of the late Medill McCormick, who left a newspaper career to become a United States Senator.
The future publisher of The News entered Groton in 1890 and was graduated in 1896. He entered Yale in 1897 and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1901. In 1900 he left Yale during his junior year to be a war correspondent in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion but returned in time to be graduated with his class.
A year later he married Alice Higinbotham of Chicago. They were divorced in Waukegan, Ill., June 10, 1938.
On July 5, 1938, Patterson married Miss Mary King, women’s editor of the Chicago Tribune-N.Y. News Syndicate. She survives him, as do four children: Mrs. Donald W. Baker, Mrs. Harry Guggenheim, Mrs. Joseph Patterson Reeve and James, a West Point graduate now 1st lieutenant of infantry.
Shortly after leaving Yale Patterson went to work for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter, His starting salary was $15 a week.
From 1901 to 1905 Patterson worked with the Tribune. During the Winter of 1906-07 he took a short course in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin.
After serving a term in the Illinois House of Representatives to which he was elected in 1903, Patterson became Chicago’s Commissioner of Public Works, holding office during 1905-1907.
Success as Playwright.
In the 1907-14 years, he wrote two successful novels and three plays. The most outstanding play was “The Fourth Estate,” written in collaboration with James Keeley and Harriet Ford, which appeared on Broadway in 1909. Two other Broadway productions were dramatized versions of his books, “Rebellion,” staged the same year and “Little Brother of the Rich,” in 1911.
Early in 1914 the young newspaperman went to Mexico as a Tribune correspondent and covered the United States occupation of Vera Cruz in the trouble between the two countries. From that assignment he hurried the same year to Europe at the outbreak of World War I, and served as his paper’s correspondent in Germany, France and Belgium.
In 1916, he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard and served on the Texas border, as a non-commissioned officer, in the field artillery. He went overseas with the famous Rainbow Division as a lieutenant. He was promoted to captain, and commanded Battery B, of the 49th Field Artillery.
Brilliant War Record.
Capt. Peterson achieved a brilliant military record during the ensuing campaign. He participated in the second Battle of the Marne St. Mihiel, the Argonne, the defense of Champagne and operations in the Lorraine sector. After the war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur his former division commander, referred to Patterson as “the most brilliant, natural born soldier that ever served under me.” Meanwhile, McCormick also had volunteered and was making an excellent record overseas.
Shortly before the armistice, the two soldier-publishers met for a visit at a ruined French farm near the front, where Patterson was quartered with his regiment. There the cousins discussed their future plans. Patterson, who had been studying the success of tabloid newspapers in London, confided he would like to start a similar publication in New York after the war.
When Col. McCormick returned to the United States, he told Patterson’s plans to William H. Field, who had been in charge of the Tribune while the editors were at war. In September, 1918, Field started preparations for the tabloid which was to become The News.
On his way home, via London, Patterson called on Lord Northcliffe, who foresaw newspapers of the future as tabloids. Six months later The News, then the Illustrated Daily News, made its debut.
Later the Patterson-McCormick interests ventured into other publication fields. They founded Liberty magazine, sold in 1931, to Bernarr MacFadden. In turn, they took over MacFadden’s Detroit paper, renamed The Mirror, which was suspended Aug. 5, 1932.
How He Built The News.
It was on The News, however, that Patterson lavished his attention. He guided it from tottering steps as an infant with 57,000 circulation its first year to mighty manhood with more than 2,500,000 readers daily and 4,500,000 Sunday.
Today The News is a vast and complex institution, employing more than 3,200 persons.
Its editorial and business offices are housed in a 36-story skyscraper at 220 E. 42d St. Additional mechanical departments are in a plant at 700 Pacific St., Brooklyn.
The original formula for The News produced by Patterson was the smaller format and use of the camera as a reporter, the photograph as a news vehicle. The News never abandoned these fundamentals.
First Million Readers.
During the roaring ’20s, Patterson’s tabloid set the pace for that flapper-bathtub, gin-easy money decade. It played the whoopee stuff and the crowd loved it. Daily readers went over the million mark in 1926. Only one other American daily, the Chicago Tribune, has as yet its first million readers.
Then something happened. The market crashed. One day, as the depression set in, Patterson walked into the editorial department and announced:
- We’re missing the bus. People don’t care so much about playboys, Broadway and divorces. They want to know how they’re going to eat. From now on we’ll pay more attention to the average man and his family.
While one tabloid competitor plunged into its death, The News turned a corner. Patterson moved it again with the masses and it kept leading the parade.
Never, however, did he permit the paper to lose its lighter vein. It continued to remember fun, romance and adventure, to amuse and entertain. It told men and women about their jobs and welfare but it served more bread, not less ice cream and cake.
During this period the Patterson genius blazed at its brightest. Swiftly and deftly he spun out the ideas that made The News tick.
He built newspaper, peculiarly American, with pictures, short, breezily written stories, down-to-earth editorials, the best of comics and features.. He personally started the Gumps, Winnie Winkle, Gasoline Alley and Dick Tracy on their way; he developed the rotogravure section and later the color studio, encouraged r=the careful selection of first-run fiction, and made the editorial page the most popular in America.
Around him he assembled some of the brainiest men in the business, but all recognized Patterson as the mainspring of the machine.
Kindly, warm-hearted, informal and democratic, he nevertheless delivered his orders bluntly and decisively. It became a rule in the organization:
- Don’t argue with J.M.P. unless you’re sure of your facts. Never argue with him after he makes a decision.
Spent to Get Results.
Once Patterson told a desk man:
- Don’t ever forget that I want results on this paper and I don’t care what it costs to get them. Any time you think you might get results go after them and don’t worry about the cost.
He learned to fly his own plane and toured the West Indies on a pathfinding trip. He flew to San Francisco during the 1934 shoremen’s strike. The next year he spent a week talking to Dust Bowl farmers. In 1939 he toured Europe and filed his own stories to The News.
He found the time to take his office boy to ball games, to drop into movies, to go on trips with his reporters and to tramp from door to door collecting straw votes.
Always he chatted with and listened to people. After an excursion among them, his editorials often voiced their views in their language so forcefully that the jaws of many a somebody dropped in dismay while millions jubilantly cheered and told the neighbors.
In October, 1932, in an announced move to make more jobs, Patterson instituted a 5-day, 35-hour week for all editorial workers on The News. This then revolutionary step was taken, as he explained editorially, after he had tried in vain to persuade other New York publishers to do the same. Ten months later, he declared the shortened work week, while expensive to the management, had been an unqualified success and would be continued permanently.
First NRA Paper.
In 1933 The News was the first paper to get the NRA (National Recovery Administration) Blue Eagle. Patterson agreed to and did support President Roosevelt’s policies for a year and generally, on domestic issues, throughout the recovery era.
Patterson contributions to journalism continued to come thick and fast. For example, in the 1936 campaign he introduced the Presidential Battle Page and donated equal space to the contending parties. This idea developed into Mayoral, Senatorial and Economical Battle Pages.
The News contests—Goldeb Gloves, Silver Skates and Harvest Moon Ball—expanded into huge enterprises.
With the approach of World War II, The News opposed intervention, but, as it had for years under Patterson, fought for preparedness. Almost every Monday from 1934 on, he ordered or wrote an editorial on the theme, “Two Ships for One,” in the Pacific. He boldly urged a blockade of Japan for years before Pearl Harbor.
Saw Hawaii at War.
When the United States entered the war, in December, 1941, Patterson enlisted The News in the supreme effort to win the conflict.
Sixty-three years old, but with the same thirst for first-hand facts that marked his entire life, Patterson, in February, 1942, went to Hawaii for a close-up look at the Pacific war zone.
Last July and August, at the invitation of Gen. MacArthur, he made another extended tour by air of U.S. Army and Navy establishments in the Western Pacific.
Patterson was president of The News Syndicate Co., which publishes The News, and of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, which distributes features appearing in the two papers. He had a deep interest in radio and in the building, newsprint and shipping companies, which are parts of the vast publishing enterprise.
The Problems of the People.
His titles and duties—his business position and financial success—in themselves meant little to Patterson. He valued and used them only as tools enabling him, as a publisher, to find, interpret and illuminate the problems of the people. To the end of his life he played this role—modestly and much of the time anonymously, but so well that many who knew him, in one way or another, echoed this spontaneous remark of one News employe:
- He was the most human great man I’ve ever known.
If they could write a “Memo to Joseph Medill Patterson,” it would read something like this:
- Good-by. I am going to miss you a lot.
…Hope to be seeing you some day.
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