Colossus in the Making

Marshall Field's first newspaper was five years old this week--and paying its own way. Proudly Manhattan's loud, leftist tabloid PM announced that it has now completed a full year in the black, just from the nickels it picks up on newsstands and without taking a single baited dollar from advertisers.

It had proved its thesis: that an adless paper could pay (if the proprietor is rich enough and patient enough to take years of losses). It had not proved, even to the proprietor's satisfaction, that advertising does a paper any special harm. Last week, in his 20th-floor paneled Park Avenue office suite, Publisher Field admitted that his adless daily may start to run ads as soon as paper is plentiful again. Said he musingly: "I think readers like ads."

No Hidden Babies. While adless PM was off running itself, and Field's ad-loving Chicago Sun was held in by its paper quota, Tycoon Field at 51 was already off on new ways of spending some of the $168 million he inherited from his storekeeping grandfather. His most ambitious postwar project: a mass-circulation magazine, described by its friends as a kind of New-Dealing Saturday Evening Post or Collier's. Field already has the Saturday Review of Literature's Editor Norman Cousins at work pasting up dummies. So far, says Cousins, everything "is purely exploratory. We are not trying to hide a new baby. If it comes along it will be plenty visible--as is generally the case." Passes have already been made at several major and minor leftwing journalists (including Jonathan Daniels, President Roosevelt's express secretary). Field said his first step was to try to buy Liberty magazine, grab its paper and circulation, and change it radically, but "that's all over. We found that Liberty* wasn't for sale."

Field has another, equally hush-hush, plan: to inject a bit of fresh, leftish air into rural weeklies. His partner in this project (incorporated as Cross Country Reports) is Banker-Economist James Paul Warburg, an early New Dealer, then a fervent anti (Hell Bent for Election) and finally, in 1944, a doorbell-ringer for Sidney Hillman's P.A.C. Field and Warburg's ambition is to set up as a rival to powerful Western Newspaper Union which sends boiler-plate material ("pretty reactionary") to U.S. weeklies. Says Field, grinning: "I don't think I'll make my fortune here."

Marshall Field, who owned no publishing property at all a half dozen years ago, is on the verge of becoming a journalistic colossus. Besides papers in the nation's two largest cities, and his explorations into the magazine and country weekly fields, he now owns a Cincinnati radio station (WSAI), a syndicated Sunday supplement (Parade), and parts of two big book-publishing companies (Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books, Inc.--TIME, Nov. 13). But reports that he is about to set up a newspaper shop in Philadelphia and Denver are false, he says: "I don't think I believe in chain newspaper publishing."

* Having lost a million dollars in 1942, Liberty, under new editorship, claims to be making a million-dollar profit this year.

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