August 15, 1966: The New York Herald Tribune Folds

The Trib's May 7, 1937 edition,

featuring the Hindenburg Disaster

August 15, 1966: The New York Herald Tribune publishes its last edition, ending a great tradition of journalism.

New York had been a newspaper city for over 100 years. Even the growth of radio hadn't stopped that. Nor had the 1924 merger of the Herald, once the paper of James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr., with the Tribune, once the paper of Horace Greeley and the leading voice of the drive to abolish slavery in America prior to the Civil War.

Nor had the merger of the morning American and the afternoon Journal, both owned by William Randolph Hearst's company, in 1937. Nor had the merger of the World, once the paper of Joseph Pulitzer and the publisher of The World Almanac, with the Telegram in 1931, or the 1950 merger of the combined "World-Telly" with The Sun, the paper that declared in an 1897 editorial, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Nor had radio really hurt the newspaper business. Quite the contrary: Many of the early radio stations were founded by newspapers, and provided a great new source of revenue for them. Indeed, Chicago's best-known radio station, WGN, was founded by The Chicago Tribune, which named the station for the nickname it had chosen for itself: "The World's Greatest Newspaper."

But what radio didn't do, or even try to do, television, however inadvertently, did: It killed the institutions of the afternoon newspaper and the evening newspaper. It was bad enough for papers that there was a 6:00 news broadcast on local TV stations every night. But with the addition of an 11:00 news for when people were going to bed, and the promos throughout prime-time programming of a story they could watch on the news, with the tagline, "Film at 11," the need for an afternoon or an evening paper was gone.

Then came the newspaper strike of late 1962 and early 1963. New York has had newspaper strikes since, but no strike in the history of the American labor movement has hurt an industry more than this one. Several of the papers never recovered. The Mirror published its last edition on October 16, 1963.

The remaining papers did whatever they could to survive, from cutting costs by laying off famous columnists to appealing to the rising Baby Boom generation. The Journal American, in particular, had gambled on gaining younger readers with heavy coverage of The Beatles' visits in 1964 and 1965, something you wouldn't expect a conservative broadsheet to do.

They even hired the famed "pop psychologist," Dr. Joyce Brothers, to analyze the Beatles from a distance. And they had the top entertainment columnist in New York, Dorothy Kilgallen, "The Voice of Broadway" and one of the panelists on CBS' What's My Line?, write about rock and roll for the first time.

But they lost their biggest asset on November 8, 1965, when Kilgallen died. The next year, a long-running power struggle between Hearst company CEO Richard Berlin and the Hearst family did the paper in. The paper's last edition was published on April 24, 1966.

The E.W. Scripps Company gave up on the World-Telegram & Sun the day before, April 23, 1966. The Daily News bought the rights to The World Almanac, and its parent company still publishes it today, although it's really a waste of money, given how easy it is to look things up on the Internet.

The Herald Tribune, long the beacon of America's "liberal Republicans," with one of the finest sports sections in the country, hung on a little longer, until August 15, 1966. It was the most direct competitor to The New York Times, which eulogized:

The death of The New York Herald Tribune stills a voice that for a century and a quarter exerted a powerful influence in the affairs of nation, state and city. It was a competitor of ours, but a competitor that sought survival on the basis of quality, originality and integrity, rather than sensationalism or doctrinaire partisanship.

For a while, the 3 papers that failed that year tried to band together: The World Journal Tribune began publishing on September 12, 1966. But instead of combining the best aspects of all 3 papers, it seemed to combine the worst ones, and the money problems of all 3. The WJT, or "Widget," never caught on, and Scripps (W-T&S) and Hearst (J-A) pulled the plug on May 5, 1967.

And so, New York City, which had 10 daily newspapers as recently as 1924, and 7 as recently as the Summer of 1963, was down to 3: The Times, the Daily News and the Post. The Daily News and the Post have each survived 2 existential crises since then, as well as their ideological flip-flop of 1976: Rupert Murdoch bought the Post, turning it from a paper for liberal intellectuals, especially Jewish ones, to a populist conservative paper, as the Daily News had been; and the News then became a liberal paper, though still taking conservative positions on crime in New York (helping Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani get elected Mayor), the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Cuba.

*

August 15, 1966 was a Monday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 6-5 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Mickey Lolich outpitched Mel Stottlemyre. Norm Cash hit a home run, and Al Kaline went 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI. For the Yankees, Bobby Richardson went 4-for-5 with a home run, and Mickey Mantle went 1-for-4.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Boston Red Sox, 4-2 at Fenway Park in Boston. Boog Powell went 4-for-5 with 3 home runs and 4 RBIs, including a home run to win the game in the top of the 11th inning. Brooks Robinson went 0-for-5. Frank Robinson went 1-for-4. Carl Yastrzemski did not start the game, but entered halfway through, and went 1-for-2.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs, 11-5 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Ernie Banks did not play.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 4-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 4-3 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Don Buford singled home Gary Peters, a pitcher being used as a pinch-runner, with the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning. Two New York baseball stars hit home runs for the Pale Hose: Former Yankee 1st baseman Bill "Moose" Skowron, and future Met center fielder Tommie Agee.

* The Minnesota Twins beat the California Angels, 5-3 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* The Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros, 4-2 at the Astrodome in Houston. Hank Aaron went 1-for-5, and Eddie Mathews hit a home run.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Pete Rose went 3-for-5 with an RBI.

 

* And the New York Mets, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants were not scheduled.