In 1922, Joseph Pulitzer II, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asked his business manager A.G. Lincoln to approach E. Lansing Ray, publisher of the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat, with a confidential proposition: agree to cut the number of comic pages to four in both Sunday papers.
Pulitzer, vacationing at his Chatwold estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, told Lincoln to make the appeal “in the interest of ordinarily sane economy and to avoid waste.”
In other words, save a buck by providing less to readers.
Ray was out of town, so Pulitzer didn’t get a response until 10 days later. And it wasn’t positive.
Lincoln wrote, “Ray is not willing to agree …”
“‘Our people,’ he said, ‘are of the opinion that our big comic has been largely responsible for the increase in the sale of the Sunday Globe-Democrat. We look upon it as our biggest feature.’”
Lincoln continued: “When I told him that if he were not willing to agree to a limitation that it might lead to a waste of paper, Ray urged that the Post-Dispatch had plenty of room for the saving of paper, that it was every day printing many columns more of news and features than the Globe-Democrat, which statement of course is true, except on Sunday.”
Both Pulitzer and Ray, cordial competitors, died in 1955. Before his death, Ray sold the Globe-Democrat to Samuel I. Newhouse. In 1959, Pulitzer’s successor, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., and Newhouse agreed to a profit-sharing agreement that lasted until 2000 – 14 years after the Globe-Democrat closed for good.
Roland Klose 