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This Week was a nationally syndicated Sunday magazine

Sunday magazine

A Sunday magazine is a publication inserted into a Sunday newspaper. It also has been known as a Sunday supplement, Sunday newspaper magazine or Sunday magazine section...

 supplement that was included in American newspapers between 1935 and 1969. At its peak in 1963, This Week was distributed with the Sunday editions of 42 newspapers having a total circulation of 14.6 million.

When it went out of business in 1969 it was the oldest syndicated newspaper supplement in the United States. The newspapers it was distributed with include the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

, the Dallas News, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...

), and the Boston Herald

Boston Herald

The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...

. Magazine historian Phil Stephensen-Payne noted, "It grew from a circulation of four million in 1935 to nearly 12 million in 1957, far outstripping other fiction-carrying weeklies such as Collier's

Collier's Weekly

Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's....

, Liberty and even The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...

(all of which eventually folded)."

Syndication

This Week was being published as the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine when publisher Joseph P. Knapp

Joseph P. Knapp

Joseph Palmer Knapp was a U.S. publisher and philanthropist. He was the son of Joseph Fairchild and Phoebe Palmer Knapp...

 changed its name and began to syndicate

Print syndication

Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. They offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own/represent copyrights....

 it to other newspapers. The first issue appeared on February 24, 1935. The magazine's editor at the time was Marie Mattingly "Missy" Meloney

Marie Mattingly Meloney

Marie Mattingly Meloney , who used Mrs. William B. Meloney as her professional and social name, was "one of the leading woman journalists of the United States," a magazine editor and a socialite who in the 1920s organized a fund drive to buy radium for Marie Curie and began a movement for better...

, who used the professional name Mrs. William Brown Meloney; she had been editing the Herald Tribune

New York Herald Tribune

The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...

's Sunday magazine since 1926. In The New York Times, Henry Raymont wrote:

During the early years, This Week's editorial content was made up mainly of fiction articles by such major writers as Sax Rohmer

Sax Rohmer

Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward , better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr...

, Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories, best known for the Perry Mason series, he also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J...

, Pearl Buck, P.G.Wodehouse and Bruce Catton

Bruce Catton

Charles Bruce Catton was an American historian and journalist, best known for his books on the American Civil War. Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular histories that emphasized colorful characters and historical vignettes, in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses...

. It also published articles on national affairs by such major writers as former President Herbert H. Hoover, Adlai E. Stevenson, Richard M. Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller

Nelson Rockefeller

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...

.

Peak

In 1942, This Week cut its size down and eliminated run-overs to back pages. It also changed to including 52 percent articles and 48 percent fiction; at one time it had contained 80 percent fiction.

William I. Nichols became editor of the magazine in June 1943, just before the death of Meloney the same month, and a year later the magazine started to turn a profit. In 1948, This Week surpassed the American Weekly as the top American newspaper supplement in terms of advertising revenue. Nichols turned the financial fortunes of This Week around by "shun[ning] anything controversial": "I'm neither pious nor preachy but my first principle is success and [decency] has paid off in success. You can bore a mass audience to death with acres of flesh. Why did burlesque die?"

By 1963, This Week reached its peak in circulation.

Demise

Later, This Week was owned by Publication Corporation, which was taken over by Crowell, Collier & Macmillan

Macmillan Publishers (United States)

Macmillan Publishers USA, also known as Macmillan Publishing, is a privately held American publishing company owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than 30 others....

 in a January 1968 merger, but the magazine was "already fighting for survival." William Woestendiek, former editor of IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's Think magazine and former city editor of The Houston Post, was brought in to revamp the editorial format. "We tried hard to turn out a better editorial product," an unnamed Crowell, Coller executive told The New York Times. "We succeeded in doing it, but nobody wanted it."

The merged company "began to subsidize the magazine last May [1969] in the hope of restoring circulation, build advertising and make it a self-sustaining enterprise by Aug. 1." That effort was unsuccessful, and subscribing newspapers, with the then-total circulation of 9.9 million, were offered the opportunity to keep the supplement going by paying about $5 for each 1,000 copies. The attempt was fruitless, said Fred H. Stapleford, president and publisher of United Newspaper Corporation, and he announced that the last number would be issued on November 2, 1969. In a letter to the subscriber newspapers, he said:

I deeply regret having to advise you that the necessary circulation commitment cannot be attained. It is a pity that This Week, so long a distinguished member of the newspaper family, evidently has outlasted its economic usefulness to news papers and advertisers... we believe it would be foolhardy to continue publishing when all the vital signs are negative.

A memorandum to the 160 This Week employees pledged that "every effort would be made to find them jobs in other publications of Crowell, Collier, one of the nation's largest book publishing and educational business concerns."