Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond Page A

argues, plausibly enough, that the
Times
produced a superior newspaper as a result of that decision and began luring readers away from the
Herald Tribune
; these readers stayed with the
Times
after the war and into the 1950s and 1960s, while the
Herald Tribune
continued to lose circulation. In this accounting, the
Times’
farsightedness extended to the paper’s relations with advertisers: The paper rationed advertising space so that its customers among the smaller stores would not be crowded out of the tighter papers, while the
Herald Tribune
“fattened up” on the big retail-store ads that couldn’t be accommodated in the
Times.
    Such tales of the
Times’
selfless wartime service were neatly debunked by Richard Kluger, in his memoir of the
Herald Tribune.
Kluger showed that the
Herald Tribune
never carried a higher proportion of advertising than the
Times
during the war. Nor did the
Herald Tribune
profit from opportunistic policies; during those years its earnings remained less than half of the
Times’
earnings. Most important of all, the evidence of the defection of
Herald Tribune
readers to the
Times
during and after the war seems, at best, ambiguous. The papers’ relative fortunes did shift, in 1947, well after the war and the end of newsprint rationing. In the immediate postwar period, the
Herald Tribune
’s daily and Sunday circulation was about two-thirds that of the
Times.
The numbers were: for the daily papers,
Herald Tribune
, 348,000,
Times
, 538,000; for Sunday,
Herald Tribune
708,000,
Times
, 1 million.
    These figures did change, and dramatically, but for a much more mundane reason than the rewards and punishments of wartime duty. At the end of 1946, the
Herald Tribune
raised its newsstand price from three cents to five cents. The
Times
, with more ads and more news, stayed at three cents for three more years. The
Herald Tribune
suffered a 30,000 loss in circulation immediately after the price hike. The price rise was a “major blunder” on the part of the Reids, Kluger concluded; at three cents, the bigger, newsier
Times
was a better bargain.
    The decision to raise its prices was only one of the many business mistakes the
Herald Tribune
made. The paper’s moderate Republicanism and thoughtful news coverage between the wars found a natural constituency in the leafy, upper-middle-class towns outside New York. But when the great postwar migration from the city began to swell, the paper failed to move fast enough to engage the new residents of tract-house suburbia. When the
Herald Tribune
dropped its practice of including free introductory copies of the paper in the Welcome Wagons that greeted families newly arrived in Roslyn or Englewood or White Plains, the
Times
took its rival’s place on the Wagon. The
Times’
circulation department also grasped the idea that home deliverywas the most efficient long-term way to build readership: Regular subscribers took much of the guesswork out of determining the size of nightly press runs (and helped avoid costly returns from dealers).
    No one contributed more to this postwar strategy than Nathan W. Goldstein, the
Times’
circulation manager from 1948 to 1974. Nat Goldstein knew the city and suburban delivery routes as well as the back of his hand. He developed close working relations with the forces that controlled the nighttime streets: the police, wherein nominal legal authority resided, and the newspaper drivers and deliverers union (its unsavory leadership tied to organized crime, usually just one step ahead of the antiracketeering laws).
    Goldstein’s connections benefited the
Times
in a number of ways. Papers delivered at 3:00 A.M. to still-shut newsstands did not “disappear” the way the deliveries of the other papers sometimes did, especially in those periods when managements were not on the best of terms with their union drivers. Friendly police officials shared helpful information with Goldstein. In 1968, when New York City police were about to