The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [83]
Among the eighteen ScrippsHoward newspapers, aside from the WorldTelegram, are the Cleveland Press, Pittsburgh Press, Cincinnati Post, Memphis Commercial Appeal, San Francisco News, Washington News, and papers in Birmingham, Indianapolis, and Columbus. Of these, the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Memphis papers are believed in newspaper circles to be extremely profitable and the others less so. The combined circulation of the nineteen papers is about 1,500,000, which is around three quarters that of the New York Daily News and approximately three times that of the New York Times. Howard and Hawkins have said repeatedly that the profits of the WorldTelegram, despite its 400,000 circulation, have been negligible. On one occasion in 1935, Howard, addressing a group of editorial employees, said that Heywood Broun's salary of approximately forty thousand dollars was larger than the profits of the newspaper in the previous year. The United Press, a newsgathering organization that sells its news to 1460 papers in the United States, South America, and Japan, as well as to five hundred radio stations, has been said to earn a million dollars a year. There are also complementary organizations, like the Newspaper Enterprise Association, or N.E.A., a syndicate which sells newspaper features; the Acme picture service, which sells news pictures, and the United Feature Syndicate. Every ScrippsHoward paper pays a fee to the central office for “national management.” Sometimes a paper which, considered as a single corporate enterprise, is just breaking even is actually a profitable ScrippsHoward property because of this fee and the fees it pays as a customer of the ScrippsHoward syndicates.
Howard says that he has not been in an office of the United Press for years and that its policy is controlled entirely by Hugh Baillie, its president, who has a much larger financial interest in that organization than either Howard or Hawkins. The E. W. Scripps Company, which Howard runs as an officer and trustee, although he owns only about thirteen per cent of its stock, holds over half of the stock in the United Press. Baillie has worked for the United Press for thirty years. It now has fifteen hundred fulltime correspondents and fiftyfive thousand contributing parttime correspondents. The subscribers include a hundred and fiftyone papers in twentyone LatinAmerican countries, the Japanesegovernment news agency, the Osaka Mainichi and Tokio NichiNichi, which are two of the most widely circulated newspapers in the world, and a cluster of customers in Europe, including thirtythree papers in Germany.
Howard and Hawkins are less inseparable in social life. This may be because Howard tries to regulate the bigbodied Hawkins' intake of food and drink for what he considers Hawkins' own good. He takes a maternal interest in the private life of everybody he knows. A United Press correspondent, explaining a fondness of his employer's for Orientals, once said, “Roy likes to teach them how to use chopsticks.” Another time, when Howard was on a cruise ship, the vessel's social director fell ill, and the publisher spent a satisfying week introducing apathetic men to patently antagonistic women and making people play deck tennis when they didn't want to. Not long afterward he bought the Jamaroy, on which he could be social director officially. He is never happier than when he has guests on his yacht to organize. Merlin H. Aylesworth, former president of the National Broadcasting Company, who was an important ScrippsHoward official for about two years after he left the radio corporation, says he once saved a leading Howard columnist from being killed by the publisher's solicitude. “Roy wanted him to go on the wagon,” Aylesworth says, “and I told him, 'Roy, if that fellow goes on the wagon,