A Vision of the Ideal Newspaper
Bass, Paul
A Vision of The Ideal Newspaper By Paul Bass Ralph Ingersoll dreamed of the ideal daily newspaper. It bore little resemblance to The New York Times or The Washington Post. Poets, playwrights,...
...The "women's pages" have given way in all but the most archaic newsrooms to "living" and "style" sections, thanks largely to Ingersoll's judgment that "less timely" social issues can be as important to people as the latest White House press release...
...Mismanagement and the country's political climate contributed to the failure of PM, but Ingersoll's personal shortcomings played a key part, too...
...In addition to his desire to elevate the standards of journalism, Ingersoll told his biographer that he felt he had to "prove his manhood" with PM...
...He paddled off into Long Island Sound in a jealous rage, shaking his fist and resolving to show Hellman what he could do...
...Ingersoll" Like many zealots, Ingersoll crusaded for an intellectual ideal while destroying the lives of those close to him...
...While some people paid 50 cents on the street for a five-cent paper, the charter subscribers never got PM that afternoon...
...He plowed through four marriages and countless traumatic affairs and near-engagements before he died...
...Ingersoll, the paper's principal owner, insisted that his backers guarantee his independence...
...Ingersoll also protected PM from the "baleful" influence of advertisers...
...PM did spark reform in the newspaper business...
...The reporters would pursue and expose "the truth" free of any party line, waging war against "people who push other people around" Ingersoll got a chance to give form to his dream...
...For starters, M would be a "newspaper that read like a magazine...
...empire...
...Ingersoll aimed high—which is precisely why we still should care about him...
...Meanwhile, communists and anticommunists on the staff engaged in ferocious political battles, which were exacerbated by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939...
...It's not surprising that a publisher trying to juggle too many tasks would manage to lose the names of 150,000 subscribers...
...Ingersoll also had something to prove to Henry Luce after Luce refused to hand him the reins of Life magazine, a publication Ingersoll helped develop...
...He later worked for Henry Luce and helped shape the Time, Inc...
...That's an uncomfortable question for those who nurture a belief that the market can reward high standards in journalism...
...Some never saw it on their doorsteps...
...While vacationing on Tavern Island with Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, Ingersoll found himself unable to compete with Hammett's wit...
...But it may also explain why Ingersoll failed at publishing the ideal newspaper: his concern for page design couldn't make up for his lack of concern for the people who wrote his copy...
...Since he had by then abandoned any pretense of being a journalistic reformer, his lack of personal warmth no longer hindered his professional success...
...It was the impossible dream," Hoopes writes of Ingersoll's tabloid...
...The publication he envisioned differed in style and philosophy not just from Hearst's brand of journalism but also fr m today's respectable city dailies...
...Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel...
...The paper was red-baited because Ingersoll, who sympathized with communist theory, refused to bar leftists from his newsroom...
...Then it fell flat on its face...
...so would the quality of paper, photography, and reproduction...
...Paul Bass is comanager of Cooperative News Service, a freelance journalists' network *Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography...
...Roy Hoopes's new biography of Ingersoll* provides—perhaps inadvertently—at least one scapegoat for PM's early death: Ingersoll himself, who died this March at the age of 84...
...Roy Hoopes...
...Writers would have the right not only to think for themselves, but to feel—and to express their feelings despite the journalistic canon of objectivity...
...Poets, playwrights, and inspired reporters would write it, "in English—not Journalese?' The writers, not businessmen, would run the show...
...His ego was so caught up in PM that, by his own admission, he couldn't trust other people to assume much responsibility...
...In the end, Ingersoll comes across as remarkably similar to the publishers and owners he crusaded against: men with a talent for making big bucks in the newspaper biz but not the idealism biz...
...Ingersoll learned how...
...Ingersoll conceded he lacked interest in "human relationships?' To Hoopes, that explains why he failed as a novelist...
...He planned to summarize the advertising "news" from other papers but to refuse to run any paid ads...
...In that short time, PM fell so deeply into debt that Ingersoll had to relinquish control to one of his investors, Marshall Field, who bought out the other backers' shares...
...The newspaper's design would rival that of the classiest magazines...
...He didn't anticipate the problems his literary artists would have meeting deadlines, let alone filing fresh stories on a daily basis...
...Though a champion of the "common man," Ingersoll spoke the language of the CEOs he had buttered up while editing Fortune for Henry Luce and had dined with at the Yale Club while seeking capital for PM...
...Izzy Stone left the paper to launch the fiercely independent and crusading I. F. Stone's Weekly, which, like the early PM, carried no ads...
...After the collapse of PM, Ingersoll began buying up community weekly newspapers...
...He continued as an adult to enjoy the drinking company and business contacts of his family's social circle...
...They ranged from an old friend, who happened to be the heir of the Sears, Roebuck fortune, to Deering Howe, a strident conservative who was a member of the Deering Tractor family...
...Thanks to Ingersoll, consumer issues, health, labor, and the press have become serious "beats," treated as keys to understanding our society...
...He sought to improve not just "the miserable conditions of the U.S...
...No honest, competent newspaperman will deny that the pressure generated by the existing advertising operation in daily journalism works consistently and without interruption against the interest of the reader," he wrote...
...It would carry no ads...
...He called it PM, and the paper hit the streets of New York City in 1940...
...But they were looking for something...
...His upper-class New York rearing never seemed a contradiction in his eyes...
...Ironically, the Ralph Ingersoll whom Hoopes depicts sounds a lot like William Hearst and the other captains of industry who Ingersoll said had no place running newspapers...
...Ingersoll continued working for Field for six years, but PM hardly approached Ingersoll's original ideal, especially as he increasingly lost influence at the paper...
...And it lasted less than three months...
...It works so efficiently, in fact, that publishers and editors and writers censor themselves 100 times for every once their advertisers censor them ." Even editors would have little authority to manipulate reporters' conclusions, Ingersoll proclaimed...
...The object of this demonstration was Lillian Hellman, one of Ingersoll's many paramours...
...Nor is it surprising that Ingersoll talked a better game than he played in allowing writers to think for themselves...
...Ingersoll write this article?' The most commonly mentioned objective on the part of all writers was to interpret the viewpoint of Mr...
...Ingersoll himself experienced frustration as a novelist and nonfiction writer, but in a series of memos, some as long as 60 pages, he honed his ideal newspaper...
...On the financial side, Ingersoll's staff fumbled away early profit opportunities...
...I would prove my manhood by creating a publication of my own...
...But Ingersoll left a more positive legacy...
...Despite a generally fawning tone, Hoopes probes deeply into Ingersoll's motivations and demonstrates that the publisher's personality contradicted his journalistic vision in crucial ways...
...He planned to hire first-class writers, whether or not they knew about the 5 W's...
...A friend of Ingersoll's whom Marshall Field sent in to evaluate PM's problems reported: "Writers do not think 'How should I write this article' but 'How would Mr...
...In fact, Ingersoll came from a long line of "men of property": congressmen, diplomats, a governor, a judge, even a banking tycoon...
...I would work for no other man, except as a means to acquire my own ends," Ingersoll decided...
...Atheneum, $19.95...
...Ingersoll had family ties in the corporate world and raised $1.5 million from 16 different investors...
...Our readers are entitled to that information, freely and frankly given ." Ingersoll argued that a newspaper could scrutinize all sides of an issue with fairness and at the same time crusade...
...PM folded altogether after eight years and many compromises, including the addition of paid advertising...
...The Ralph Ingersoll who launched PM was part of a noble journalistic tradition that continued after the 1940s...
...in the confusion, Ingersoll discovered all 150,000 subscription cards had been thrown out...
...What do we love, and what do we hate...
...Sure, they disappeared within days and went back to reading the Daily News...
...We do not, in fact, believe unbiased journalism exists, feeling rather that claims to emotional disinterest are consciously or unconsciously, fraudulent," he wrote in an essay that debunks a myth still cherished by newspaper editors...
...Like Ingersoll, Hoopes lays most of the blame for PM's demise on forces beyond the pioneering publisher's control...
...Hoopes explains: "Making money, in his view, was usually accomplished by inferior people, and it was easy to do, once you knew how...
...The "New Journalism" of the 1960s made the idea of "a newspaper that reads like a magazine"—and of news conveyed with an explicitly subjective edge—more palatable to legions of talented reporters...
...Why did Ingersoll fail...
...Readers, and only readers, would support PM...
...PM united on a single masthead I. E Stone, James Wechsler, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Hodding Carter, and even Dr...
...Perhaps the most encouraging part of PM's legacy is the fleeting image of crowds mobbing the delivery trucks...
...He had learned firsthand what bad journalism was all about as a cub reporter for William Randolph Hearst's American...
...These writers were to be free from the influence of "men of property," who, Ingersoll wrote, "simply do not understand journalism [and] therefore can hardly be expected to improve its practice...
...press" but of "mankind" as well...
...He was manipulative and ruthless with his associates...
...Today, the newspaper chain he started, Ingersoll Publications, flourishes in mediocrity...
...Ingersoll, for example, had signed up 150,000 charter subscribers, but because of wide publicity surrounding PM's opening, huge crowds intercepted the delivery trucks and bought up all 450,000 copies of the first issue...
Vol. 17 • June 1985 • No. 5
