A Whole New Game

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The National is meant to convey the immediacy of a tabloid and the permanence of a magazine. It is printed on a heavier-weight newsprint. The brightness factor -- contrast between type and page -- is more than 70%, while the typical newspaper falls somewhere in the 55% to 58% range. About one-third of its pages are in color. The black ink is low rub, designed not to come off on your hands or the inside of your raincoat pocket.

By the end of its first year The National hopes to have added as many as another dozen bureaus to its initial three, reaching audiences in the 15 largest markets in the country. By the end of the second year, coverage and availability will peak at 25 markets, comprising about 85% of the national market.

One key element in The National's strategy hinges on Peter Price's belief that "Sports is like entertainment. It requires some stars." The National has put together a firmament's worth, a number of whom are pulling down six-figure salaries. Besides Deford, these include John Feinstein, author of the basketball best-seller A Season on the Brink. Then there are Scott Ostler and Dave Kindred, prized and prize-winning columnists from The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, respectively. The paper's executive editor, Vince Doria, came from The Boston Globe, whose sports section is often considered the country's best. The best paid in this highly regarded bunch is Mike Lupica, a sports columnist who had a wide following at The New York Daily News. He is making a reported $300,000 a year, putting him right up there with your basic journeyman infielder hitting .235, lifetime.

So who will buy The National? The company has done scant market research, but Peter Price nonetheless has a vision of his archetypal reader. That person is likely a man, an avid and learned follower of the sporting scene, a connoisseur of sorts. (The National's radio spots have run, among other places, on classical music stations.) Conversely, Price asserts: "The hard-core sports fan is not our audience. The fan is a junkie. The fan buys USA Today for the stats because he must have them. He eats them for breakfast."

Price hopes for a daily audience of some 1 million readers within about four years. "At that level we're making money," he says. "And we're also the fourth-largest daily newspaper in the United States of the some 1,800 out there."

But how exactly does Price intend to make this leap of more than faith? In projecting readership, says Price, "we've tried to be very conservative." In its first year The National expects daily circulation of about 200,000 in its three markets (100,000 in New York, 50,000 in Chicago, and 50,000 in Los Angeles). Those three markets comprise about 15% of the national market. Thus, extrapolating from that, once The National goes truly national it will be read by about 6.6 times more readers, or some 1.3 million.

What's the logic behind those numbers? Price bases his conservatism on the New York metro market, where 5 million papers are sold daily, and The National need capture only a 2% share. Some of these 100,000 readers will replace their daily paper with The National. Most will buy it in addition to their daily paper.

But is the typical National reader really a diehard, a six-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year buyer? No, says Diane Morgenthaler, the paper's circulation director.

How often then?

"I don't know, but the less frequent buyer, the guy who reads us two or three times a week, will make or break us."

So how many of those readers are there?

"I don't know. That's a multimillion-dollar question."

The National's conservative numbers begin to look less so when the scene shifts to Los Angeles, where people commute by car and the old-fashioned newsstand is as rare as snow. Add to that the substantially lower circulation base of daily papers than New York's (2 million versus 5 million), high ratio of home delivery versus single-copy sales, and the Sunbelt fact of life that people have less time for the newspaper and more for TV.

Frank Herrera, vice-president of Hearst Magazines, considers The National's circulation figures "wildly optimistic." He points out that there are 3,000 magazine titles muscling one another for space on the nation's newsstands. Of those, only 40 circulate more than 1 million copies. Most of these titles have built readership slowly over the years and are backed by huge promotion budgets. Herrera also notes that pro football, for example, has a huge TV audience -- and no widely circulating publication to match.

Another skeptic is Glenn Guzzo, former executive sports editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, now assistant to the vice-presidents for news at Knight-Ridder Inc., the Inquirer's parent company. He says that for The National to reach its projected circulation figures in cities like Los Angeles it may have to go to home delivery. "That's extremely expensive and a tremendous administrative burden. If the demand [on the street] in Los Angeles is 20,000, would that encourage them to take on the cost of home delivery [to sell the additional 30,000 copies]? That's a decision a lot of big corporations wouldn't want to have to make."

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