Word: supplementals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Goddard edited the Hearst supplement according to his conviction that readers' tastes were not much above Pithecanthropus level: "The habits of savagery have been welded into the mind and body of man for ten thousand centuries, while it is only sixty centuries that he has had more or less leisure and opportunity to develop the finer things of life." Asking himself what a literate Neanderthal might enjoy, Goddard answered the question every Sunday, with stories about sex ("The Outrageous French Bathing Suits"), sex cum science ("Science Explains Why Chorus Girls Are Suffering from a Love Famine"), sex cum violence...
Hearst himself loved the American Weekly more than its readers did. It was his pet. Not until 1917, when an underling suggested that Hearst was missing a large source of revenue, did the supplement begin to carry advertising. And when non-Hearst newspapers begged the Chief to let them carry the Weekly too, Hearst turned them all down. His selfishness turned out to be a serious mistake...
Numbers Game. In 1935 a group of 21 independent newspapers decided that if they couldn't join Hearst they would lick him. This Week, their competitive supplement, began life with 4,293,000 circulation-about two-thirds of American Weekly's-and has been growing sturdily ever since. Other national supplements came along: Parade in 1941, Family Weekly in 1953, Suburbia Today in 1959. What had been a comfortable 40-year monopoly for American Weekly turned abruptly into a survival fight...
...fight that American Weekly could only lose. Unnoticed by Hearst, the U.S. newspaper reader had crawled out of the jungle and was demanding more edifying fare than the Weekly supplied. By comparison, the new supplements seemed positively intellectual, and as the Weekly declined, they thrived. The Weekly's descent was greased by Hearst's stubborn insistence on staying first at any cost. "It was an obsession," says Arthur H. Motley, 61, publisher of the supplement Parade...
...Hearst played the numbers game, gathering circulation wherever he could, even in markets where his supplement didn't belong." The first non-Hearst paper was admitted to the fold in 1938, and after that the Weekly sued wildly for nearly any outsider's hand...