1955 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The Brooklyn Eagle that began in 1841 suspends publication January 28 as Newspaper Guild employees strike the paper. Its assets are sold at auction March 16.

Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick undergoes abdominal surgery for adhesions January 19 and dies April 1 at age 74 on the 500-acre Wheaton, Ill., estate Cantigny built by his late grandfather Joseph Medill in 1896. McCormick spent 30 years as sole editor and publisher, increasing circulation from 200,000 to 892,058 while acquiring forest lands and paper mills in Canada, hydroelectric installations, shipping companies, radio and television stations, and publishing houses.

"Ann Landers Says" debuts in the Chicago Sun-Times. Sioux City, Iowa-born journalist Esther Lederer (née Friedman), 37, has acquired a name used by a previous columnist for a confidential column that will be syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, as will that of her twin sister Pauline, who will write the "Dear Abby" column under the name Abigail Van Buren. Lederer's salesman husband, Jules, will found Budget Rent-a-Car and prosper (see transportation, 1958), but she will divorce him for infidelity in 1975 after 36 years of marriage.

The Village Voice begins publication at New York in October. Daniel Wolf, 40, and Edward Fancher have started the 12-page 5¢ weekly with $15,000, its initial circulation is 2,500, but Wolf and Fancher will increase circulation to 56,00 by 1966 and have a readership of about 150,000 by 1970 when they will sell the Voice for $3 million.

Cartoonist Hammond E. "Ham" Fisher dies of a deliberate sleeping-pill overdose at New York December 27 at age 54, having got into a feud with "L'il Abner" creator Al Capp and been suspended by the National Cartoonists Society for "conduct unbecoming to a member." Nearly 1,000 newspapers now carry Fisher's 25-year-old "Joe Palooka" comic strip; other cartoonists will continue it until 1984.

The National Review begins publication at New York November 19. William F. Buckley Jr. edits and publishes the biweekly journal of political opinion with help from Russell Kirk, whose 1953 book The Conservative Mind has inspired it, but opinion makers in the aftermath of McCarthyism are distorting the word conservative to camouflage radical right-wing ideas (e.g., repealing the progressive income tax and Social Security) that are anything but conservative.

The Reader's Digest abandons its 33-year-old position against running ads but will not accept cigarette advertising.

The first Japanese transistor radios are introduced by the Japanese company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (Totsuko) (see 1954). It sells its pocket-size TR-55 under the name Sony; by next year the company will have 483 employees and sales of $3.35 million (see Sony TV, 1959).

ITV (Independent Television) begins broadcasting in Britain September 22 with U.S.-style commercials, giving BBC its first competition. Impresario Lew Grade, now 49, has founded Associated Television and will produce a string of popular TV shows. The British Post Office has increased the hours of TV broadcasting from 41 to 50, with evening programs beginning at 7 o'clock instead of 7:30. By August 1958 about 80 percent of Britons will be able to receive ITV, and BBC's audience will have dropped.