Farewell to the International Herald Tribune

10/15/2013

Check the guy smoking behind Seberg.

I understand branding and consolidation in the new electronic age. Still, allow me some nostalgia over the change from the International Herald Tribune to the International New York Times, effective Tuesday.

The Tribune was itself a landmark brand, descended from the original New York Herald Tribune, hawked on a Paris boule-vard by Jean Seberg in the movie Breathless. “Hey, get your Tribune! Get your New York Herald Tribune!” is the way I remember her spiel, in her corn-fed Iowa accent.

Young Americans traveled to Paris, to Europe, and needed to catch up on the ball scores, or something less important, so we bought the Tribune for news of home. But the Tribune aimed at an international readership with serious articles about politics and finance. Undoubtedly the Times is doing it bigger and better.

But an institution is gone. I used to drop in to the Tribune office from time to time, vaguely hoping somebody would offer me a job so I could live in Paris. It was a raffish ex-pat world, three or four decades ago, when the Tribune was in the Rue de Berri -- sort of Rick’s Café Américain, with typewriters.

In the last hours of the IHT, I called somebody who used to work there – Corinna V. Wilson, now the vice president of programming and on-air interviewer at PCN, based in Harrisburg, Pa., but for much of her junior year abroad a copy girl at the IHT. Also, our daughter.

“It was not an American work place,” she said with evident fondness. “There was an international zeitgeist to it.” She would hustle from classes to the office in Neuilly, often jollying up the union members in the composing room, inasmuch as she spoke French. She speaks with great respect for the editors and reporters on the small staff. They were serious people, with great backgrounds, she said, and the mood was “collegial,” at the very French mandatory dinner hour and after-hours excursions to Les Halles.

As a lawyer who was previously the chief operating officer of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, Wilson understands the need to synchronize resources.

“It’s a good move, I get it,” she said, but she had advice for the ambassadors from the home office: “They’ll have to listen. It’s different.”

Back in the day, the Tribune was partly owned by the Times, but it was not the Times, bien sûr. Now you can get ball scores on line, any time of day. No more hustling down to the kiosk to buy the Tribune to find out how the Red Sox and Yankees did in their playoff game. It’s a new world, and an evolving product, in good hands. Bonne chance.

* * *

I wrote my piece before discovering Hendrik Hertzberg had done a riff for the New Yorker in March, using the same Seberg photo. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2013/03/adieu-international-herald-tribune.html

This is the New York Times article on the turnover:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/business/media/a-leaner-times-aims-for-global-growth.html?ref=christinehaughney

Marty Levine

10/15/2013 09:58:21 am

Dear Mr Vecsey,

I too harbored ambitions to join the staff of the IHT back in the day (in my next life I will pay proper attention in French class) and deeply respected the Tribune going back to my youth when I chose to read the New York Herald Tribune over the New York Times. Those in my elementary school class who read the Times clearly did not appreciate what was perhaps the best writing and editing staff in the history of New York newspapers.

It has been good to see the Times evolve over the years to emphasize punchy, elegant writing the equal of its muscular reporting. And I hope that the International New York Times will similarly uphold the IHT's tradition as a writer's newspaper.

My confidence in that prospect will, of course, be heartened should the INT continue to carry Calvin & Hobbes -- the surest evidence I know that the new management team will have its priorities straight.

Sincerely,

Marty Levine
Vancouver, BC

George Vecsey

10/16/2013 02:47:03 pm

The Trib had its own style but economics got to it.
Did you know that the NYT picture and paper files (the Morgue) are stored in the old Trib building on W. 41 st, down the block from the new NYT building, which was not built for heavy machinery and therefore cannot bear the load of decades of files. I was in the Trib building for the first time a few weeks ago...tried to conjure up the great writers of the past. GV

Marty Levine

10/16/2013 03:13:18 pm

I did not know that, but that is somehow comforting. I know Red Smith wrote for the Trib. Didn't Kempton work there as well?

George Vecsey

10/17/2013 01:34:27 am

He worked for the old NY Post before it was taken over by the Murdochites and then for the late lamented New York Newsday before Newsday retrenched. He was a giant. And he rode a bicycle through the streets of New York (in a suit) before the current Bloombergian era. What a sight, to see Murray Kempton heading for city hall or some court room. My favorite columnist, all time. GV

Charlie Accetta link

10/15/2013 06:11:12 pm

GV - I have learned to live without the slippery feel of newsprint in the morning. Things change. When I was growing up, The Bronx Home News was still published, as was the Suffolk Sun. Those papers served a much narrower readership, both in terms of demographics and philosophy, than did (and does) the newly minted INYT. But narrow as they were, their shadows crossed my doorstep regularly until they disappeared like gangland victims. We're talking about a name change in an era that saw so many great papers absorbed and dissolved. There are no major editorial changes in store at the International. Do we mourn the name even if the thing it represents goes on? I learned to live without the Journal-American Sunday funnies and the Long Island Press sports page because they were gone. Most of the comics migrated to the Daily News and Newsday, most of the sportswriters landed jobs elsewhere, but the thing was gone and truly missed. I don't see the big deal here. It's like complaining about an ingrown toenail the day after 9/11.

George Vecsey

10/16/2013 04:36:07 am

Charlie, I think it's a valid function of my old age to miss certain things. I'm still getting over Ebbets Field -- but also miss L'Angolo Cafe in Greenwich Village, and Murray Kempton's presence in public life, and, for that matter, a rational center of Congress, too. Fortunately, the NYT has a grip on its transitions, but that doesn't mean I don't miss that odd bird known as the IHT. GV

Charlie Accetta

10/16/2013 05:14:32 am

Okay, but if I have to keep making allowances for people older than I, it's going to get to a point where I'm holding doors open while clinging to my walker.

Alan Rubin link

10/15/2013 08:37:06 pm

George

This "country dropper" was fortunate to purchase the final edition of the International Herald Tribune the other day. It had a wonderful retrospective supplement of great articles from the past, which we intend to keep.

Gene Palumbo

10/16/2013 02:19:16 pm

Surely there are many of us who envy Alan Rubin because, unlike him, we weren’t able to buy a copy of the IHT on its last day. But there’s good news: the NYTimes ran a special feature which included a lot (maybe all?) of material from the supplement Alan refers to. True, it’s not the same as holding the hard copy in your hands, and then putting it in a special place on your bookshelf; but it’s a lot better than nothing. Here’s the link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/14/business/media/turning-the-page.html

Lew Freifeld

10/17/2013 12:50:04 am

George
When I ran WTNH TV in New Haven it was owned in part by Whitcom, a NY venture capital company that was also a 1/3 owner of the Int'l Herald Tribune.(1/3 Washington Post+1/3 NY Times) I had the good fortune of visiting the Paris headquarters sometime in the late 1980's and actually wrote a paper in my EMBA program about putting together a worldwide News service(delivered over the air) utilizing the IHT,much like CNN does today(without the print).
In any event it was in a great place at the time but like a lot of businesses I guess, didn't keep up with technology!

George Vecsey

10/17/2013 12:21:00 pm

Lew: Nice to hear from an all-city guard. I'm not an expert, but I think the home office has recognized the need for one system. It's complicated because the actual start of the newspaper cycle is in Asia. I don't know much about what they are doing, but it makes me feel good as an NYT lifer to see a marshaling of forces...and yet I lament the individuality of the IHT. See you soon, GV

Thor A. Larsen

10/19/2013 01:06:26 pm

Wow! The International Herald Tribune is shutting down is very sad to me due to the vivid memories of the paper I had living in Europe on two occasions, a summer n Norway right after high school and a two-year stint in Southern England in late 1970's. In the first case, before TV, IHT was my daily connection to US, especially the baseball scores of the Yankees, the great summer of 1956. TV in England in the 1970's did not include CNN yet, so life with BBC was limited, and again, we needed frequent IHT to feel connected to the USA, again, especially the US perspective of the troubling times in the late 1970's, President Carter etal, and of course, sport results which the Guardian etc did not provide except in very limited basis. IHT was also vastly superior to USA Today in content in later years. I suppose the Internet helped kill this fine publication.

George Vecsey

10/20/2013 04:04:35 am

Thor, it's been re-branded as the International New York TImes, a process over recent years, but effective this month. I don't know the fine points of the turnover, but I do know it's a serious journalistic step for the future. For all that, I miss the quirky IHT, the hybrid. Would the IHT pick up Dave Anderson's column or Tom Boswell's from the Post? The line scores of ball games played a day or two earlier. But it was also a mirror into politics and art of Europe. Now the day begins in Asia. What would Jean Seberg's character think? (Did she read the product she was hawking?)
GV

http://international.nytimes.com

Thor A. Larsen

10/20/2013 11:00:20 am

Thanks for the update George on International New York Times as the replacement. Will try to follow this new paper presuming I can get access online since I am a NY Times subscriber.
BTW: You and your Blog friends' interest in local and international soccer has stimulated my renewed interest in the sport, which I followed closely when living in England and attending matches in Southampton.

Ed Martin

10/20/2013 02:07:25 pm

Art Buchwald.

Before the Washington Post, was the IHT.

Frank Barning

11/4/2013 03:43:13 am

Bernie Kirsch wrote sports for Newsday in the late 1960s, for just a few years. He left to become sports editor of the IHT. Vivian and I were in Paris for a few glorious weeks in 1971 and got together with Bernie a couple of times.

Your story mentions Rue de Berri and Les Halles. One night we met Bernie after work outside the office on Rue de Berri and he took us to Les Halles for onion soup. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with French cuisine,. Recently I saw Breathless and Jean Seberg's shirt reminded me of our adventures in Paris and Bernie Kirsch. I have no idea where his career took him after The Trib.

George Vecsey

11/7/2013 05:36:44 am

Frank, I think Bernie still lives in NYC...he was a wine expert for the NYT, but haven't seen his name in a year or so.
He lent us a car to drive to Normandy in the mid-70's...
GV

bernard kirsch

11/13/2013 01:48:19 am

to george and frank, mes amis

would love to see you both.
the far west village has replaced the left bank.
all goes well here and hope all is well with both of you and vivian and maryann, and hope you get to see this note.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Farewell to the International Herald Tribune

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