Paper Attempts to Broaden Weekend Readership
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, beginning on March 12 [1950], will include in its Sunday editions, besides “This Week,” a new type, “local,” color roto magazine to be called “Tempo.” Several reader preference studies have shown that this type of roto magazine section reaches 90% to 95% of the readers of a Sunday newspaper.
“Tempo,” according to its publishers, will concentrate its editorial and pictorial content on local subjects, with local people, local scenes and backgrounds being used to illuminate articles on a wide variety of topics from gardening to fashions; sports to interior decorations; personalities to home-building; beauty and health to food.
A special department has been organized at the Globe-Democrat with a staff of local writers, artists and photographers available for gathering local “slant” articles, stories and illustrations.
It is the consensus of manufacturers, advertisers and agencies who had a preview of the first edition of “Tempo” that this type of roto magazine section keeps the reader’s interest and attention much longer than the straight news “picture” roto section, and that many more metropolitan Sunday newspapers will develop local type magazines as a means of giving their readers more nearly what they want. The Globe-Democrat’s initial issue of “Tempo” will contain forty pages.
(Originally published in the St. Louis Advertising Club Weekly 3/6/1950).