Subsidized Press

The "house organs" with which big & little business tunes up, informs and serenades its employees, stockholders and customers have become pretty big business themselves. Just how big was measured for the first time last week by the International Council of Industrial Editors. It reported that industry is spending $108,849,752 a year on some' 6,000 big & little magazines. Their subsidized circulation totals a whopping 49,282,900 a month, more than double the circulation of the free press's four leading magazines combined.

In subject and size, the house organs range from Sulka Shirt Tales, which goes chiefly to several hundred dapper New Yorkers, to the digest-sized Ford Times, which plugs travel--in Ford cars--to 1,500,000 Ford fans. In approach, they range from out & out product brochures to International Business Machines' ad-less Think, which runs weighty pieces by such guest byliners as Secretary of State George Marshall. There are some big chains in the house-organ field: Du Pont has 40-odd periodicals, the Borden Co. 35, International Harvester 23.

Slicks. The best of them look as well on a library table as Town & Country. Except for its Chevrolet ads, General Motors' slick Friends (1,400,000 a month) could pass as a regular picture magazine. Restyled three years ago by the Standard Oil Co. (NJ.) as a luxury magazine, The Lamp, which goes to 255,000 readers, pays up to $2,500 for articles. Chrysler's Overseas Graphic is exported (in English and Spanish) to 20,500 foreigners.

Not content with 23 publications (and three comic books besides), Ford is planning another (Ford Truck Times) with a starting circulation of 2,000,000. Hollywood is getting into the act with one called Close-Up. But Selznick Studio, its publisher, sees no reason to give away what it can sell. In several hundred movie houses and at newsstands, fans last week were forking over a quarter for a copy of Close-Up filled with little more than publicity puffs for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Before his death (TIME, May 10), radio's Tom (Breakfast in Hollywood) Breneman built up a 500,000 monthly circulation for his 25-c- Tom Breneman's Magazine, whose editors intend to continue it under a new name.

Slacks. The I.C.I.E. survey did not try to measure the effectiveness of such house organs. But on that score, one critic last fortnight had some harsh words. Said Dr. Vergil D. Reed, a J. Walter Thompson Co. research executive: many business magazines are poorly edited, misguided publications that exist only because it's fashionable for industry to have them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.