This Week

This Week, distributed in New York by the Herald Tribune and largely written by the newspaper’s staff was the main national Sunday supplement competitor to American Weekly. The Herald Trib appealed to much the same audience as the larger circulation New York Times, which made it a perennial also ran in daily advertising dollars. This Week was its ad revenue powerhouse.

It was lighter in tone than The Times Sunday magazine, with fiction and copious women’s interest features in the mix, but it eschewed the sensationalism of its main national competitor. In a 1949 Time magazine interview following the report that This Week had the highest ad revenues of any magazine in 1948 despite a slightly smaller circulation than American Weekly, editor William Nichols said,” "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.” A Harvard man and former Rhodes Scholar, Nichols took over editorship of the magazine in 1943, four years after joining the staff.

Joe DiMaggio was on the cover . Inside were current events features on Truman's first year in office and on America's relationship with China, but most of the stories were on the lighter side, including a profile of actor Robert Walker and an excerpt from journalist William Allen White's best-selling, posthumously published autobiography. The supplement carried a lot of ads, much of them for food products and household items.