International Herald Tribune

This article is about the paper that existed 1967–2013. For its predecessors, see New York Herald Tribune § European edition, and New York Herald § European edition.

The International Herald Tribune (IHT) was a daily English-language newspaper published in Paris, France for international English-speaking readers. It had the aim of becoming "the world's first global newspaper" and could fairly be said to have met that goal.^[2] It published under the name International Herald Tribune starting in 1967, but its origins as an international newspaper trace back to 1887.^[3] Sold in over 160 countries, the International Herald Tribune was an innovative newspaper that continued to produce a large amount of unique content until its closure in 2013.^[4]

International Herald Tribune

The August 26, 2013 front page of the International Herald Tribune
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Whitney Communications, The Washington Post and The New York Times Company ^[1]
Founder(s)	James Gordon Bennett Jr.
Founded	1887
Language	English
Ceased publication	October 14, 2013
City	Paris
Country	France
Sister newspapers	The New York Times (1967–2013) The Washington Post (1967–2003)
ISSN	0294-8052
Website	gale.com/intl/herald-tribune
Media of France List of newspapers

Early years

In 1887, James Gordon Bennett Jr. created a Paris edition of his newspaper the New York Herald^[5] with offices at 49, avenue de l'Opéra. He called it the Paris Herald. When Bennett Jr. died, the Herald and its Paris edition came under the control of Frank Munsey.^[6] In 1924, Munsey sold the paper to the family of Ogden Reid, owners of the New-York Tribune, creating the New York Herald Tribune, while the Paris edition became the Paris Herald Tribune. By 1967, the paper was owned jointly by Whitney Communications, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and became known as the International Herald Tribune, or IHT.^[7]

The International Herald Tribune years

The first issue of the International Herald Tribune was published on May 22, 1967.^[8] It continued the practices that had endeared it to American expatriates and travelers, such as carrying baseball scores and stock prices.^[9]

At the start, the paper maintained the offices it inherited from the Herald Tribune European Edition – that dated to 1931^[10] – at 21 Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées.^[11] Columnist Art Buchwald recalled them as being "grubby" and antiquated but "the perfect location for an American newspaper abroad."^[10] Then in 1978, the paper moved its facilities to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.^[10]

 

The International Herald Tribune started out at 21 Rue de Berri in central Paris, visible here as the fifth building on the left (as seen in 2021)

In 1974, the paper pioneered the innovation of doing electronic transmission of facsimile pages across borders, when it opened a remote printing facility in London.^[12] This was followed by a printing site in Zurich in 1977.^[12] The International Herald Tribune began transmitting electronic images of newspaper pages from Paris to Hong Kong via satellite in 1980, making the paper simultaneously available on opposite sides of the planet.^[13] This was the first such intercontinental transmission of an English-language daily newspaper and followed the pioneering efforts of the Chinese-language newspaper Sing Tao Daily (星島日報).^{[citation needed]}

Additional printing locations followed, including Rome and Tokyo 1987; and Frankfurt 1989.^[14] By 1985, the International Herald Tribune had a circulation of 160,000, and was profitable with annual revenues of around $40 million.^[15] At the time of the paper's centennial in 1987, the IHT was opening a new print site on average each year.^[16]

 

From 1978 on, the headquarters facility for the paper was in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine

By the early 1990s, the paper was printed concurrently around the globe, with seven sites in Europe, three in Asia, and one in America, allowing day-of-publication availability in all major cities worldwide.^[14] Notably, every region received the same editorial content, and even most of the advertising ran across all areas; by comparison, the international edition of The Wall Street Journal was heavily regionalized.^[14] (Several editions were published of each day's paper, however, and sometimes particular regions saw revisions that other regions might not.^[17]) Nearly 200,000 copies were sold per day, including 50,000 in Asia and 45,000 copies to airlines flying international routes.^[14] Despite the technology, however, in practice stories often appeared in the International Herald Tribune a day after they appeared in either of the parent papers.^[18][19] Marking a departure from its origins as a paper mostly read by American expatriates and travelers in Europe,^[12] by this point the majority of its readers were non-American.^[14]

The International Herald Tribune's main editorial team was based in Paris, and while content for the paper largely consisted of stories, columns, and editorials from the two parent papers,^[19] the paper reported from many news sources, including its own corps of correspondents and columnists.^[16] In any case, all of the final editing was done by the Paris staff.^[19] By 2002, the International Herald Tribune had some 335 employees.^[19] Some columnists from the parent papers, such as Flora Lewis and Art Buchwald, kept publishing columns in the International Herald Tribune even after their work no longer appeared in the parent publications.^[18]

 

The International Herald Tribune on sale at a newsstand in Valencia, Spain in 2007

Over the years, the International Herald Tribune faced increasing newsstand competition from the international editions of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Financial Times.^[19] Furthermore, the advent of the internationally available cable news network CNN, and later the Internet, gave Americans more readily available ways to keep up on sports scores and the like.^[18] As the 21st century dawned, there were divided opinions regarding the International Herald Tribune's place in the media world, with for instance James Ledbetter of Slate pronouncing it a relic of a by-gone era but Peter Osnos of The Atlantic believing it still had a role to play.^[11]

In October 2002, it was announced that the Times would buy out the Post's interest, for an amount of around $70 million.^[19] The Times thereby became the sole owner of the International Herald Tribune.^[20] The change became effective with the edition published on January 2, 2003.^[19] The headquarters for the paper remained at its site in Neuilly-sur-Seine.^[19] The Times subsequently folded the International Herald Tribune website into its own website during 2009.^[21]

 

An International Herald Tribune-branded newsstand in Hong Kong, 2012

In 2005 the paper opened its Asia newsroom in Hong Kong.^[13] In April 2001, the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun (朝日新聞) tied up with the International Herald Tribune and published an English-language newspaper, the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun.^[22] After the Washington Post sold its stake in the International Herald Tribune, it continued being published under the name International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, but it was discontinued in February 2011.^[22]

By 2008, the circulation of the paper was over 240,000.^[12] By the early 2010s, the Internet edition of the paper was receiving some seven million visitors per month, and overall the IHT represented one of the biggest global media entities.^[13]

Writers and journalists

Throughout its history the Paris-based paper had a glittering stable of writers and journalists.^[23] Among the most well-known were the humorist Art Buchwald,^[24] the fashion editor Suzy Menkes,^[25] jazz critic Mike Zwerin^[26] and food writers Waverly Root^[27] and Patricia Wells.^[28] Former executive editors include John Vinocur,^[29] David Ignatius^[30] and Michael Getler.^[31]

The final years

In 2013, the New York Times Company announced that the International Herald Tribune was being renamed The International New York Times.^[32]

On October 14, 2013, a Monday,^[9] the International Herald Tribune appeared on newsstands for the last time and ceased publication under that name.^[33][7]

In 2016 the Paris offices closed amid massive layoffs.^[34] The National Book Review called it "end of a romantic era in international journalism".^[35]

Archives

 

A plaque in Paris commemorates the history of the Paris edition of the New York Herald and notes that it became the International Herald Tribune

The archives of the International Herald Tribune, all the articles from 1887 until 2013, were sold or licensed to the Gale company, where they began appearing in 2017.^[36][37]

This material is not available from any New York Times archive.^[38] The New York Times website does, however, host a very limited selection of "retrospective" stories from the 1887–2013 years,^[39] a collection that became available in 2017, the same year that the full archives became available on Gale.^[40]

References

1. Cody, Edward (October 3, 1987). "Le Centennial". Washington Post.
2. Huebner, Lee W. (2009). "International Herald Tribune". Encyclopedia of Journalism. doi:10.4135/9781412972048.n199. ISBN 9780761929574.
3. "International Herald Tribune (Paris; New York, Ny) 1967-2013 [Microfilm Reel]". Library of Congress. from the original on March 19, 2022. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
4. "International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013". February 15, 2021. from the original on January 15, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
5. Gordon, John Steele. "The Last Trace of a Great Newspaper". online.barrons.com. from the original on August 6, 2013. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
6. "International New York Times (newspaper)". Encyclopedia Britannica. from the original on March 19, 2022. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
7. "Post to Sell Stake In Herald Tribune". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
8. "New Herald Tribune Makes Paris Debut Merged With Times". The New York Times. May 23, 1967. p. 94.
9. Chappell, Bill (October 14, 2013). "Today Is The Last Day For The 'International Herald Tribune'". NPR. from the original on February 6, 2023. Retrieved February 6, 2023.
10. Buchwald, Art (March 26, 1978). "The Paris Herald Tribune Is Alive and Well and Living in Neuilly". The Washington Post.
11. Osnos, Peter (March 2, 2010). "Newspapers: Who Still Needs the Venerable IHT?". The Atlantic.
12. "François Desmaisons, former IHT circulation director". The New York Times. September 3, 2008.
13. Biagi, Shirley (2014). Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media (Eleventh ed.). Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning. pp. 359–360. ISBN 9781305162808.
14. Huebner, Lee W. (Winter 1993–1994). "The Revolution in Global Communications". The Brown Journal of Foreign Affairs. 1 (1): 189–195. JSTOR 24589648.
15. Kluger, Richard (1986). The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 742. ISBN 0-394-50877-7. OCLC 13643103.
16. Sterling, Christopher H. (2009). Encyclopedia of Journalism, International Herald Tribune, page 763. ISBN 9781452261522.
17. See for example this correction notice from 2004.
18. Ledbetter, James (June 4, 2002). "The Trouble With the Trib". Slate. from the original on February 6, 2023. Retrieved February 6, 2023.
19. Kirkpatrick, David D. (January 2, 2003). "International Herald Tribune Now Run Solely by The Times". The New York Times. from the original on August 9, 2021. Retrieved February 6, 2023.
20. Beardsley, Eleanor (October 14, 2013). "Readers Lament 'International Herald Tribune' Name Change". Morning Edition. NPR. from the original on January 17, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
21. Pérez-Peña, Richard (May 17, 2009). "The Case of the Vanishing Herald Tribune Files, Now Solved". The New York Times. from the original on March 27, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
22. The Diplomat TOKYO NOTES (December 7, 2010). Asahi to Drop English Daily June 27, 2022, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
23. Kluger, Richard; Phyllis Kluger (1986). The paper: the life and death of the New York Herald Tribune (1st ed.). New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-50877-7. OCLC 13643103.
24. France-Amérique (November 16, 2018). "Turkey With a French Dressing: The Gentle Art (Buchwald) of Humor". France-Amérique. from the original on October 24, 2020. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
25. "Suzy Menkes is part of the BoF 500". The Business of Fashion. from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
26. Campbell, James (April 18, 2010). "Mike Zwerin obituary: A jazz trombonist, journalist and author, he was given his big break by Miles Davis". The Guardian.
27. Richard Pearson (November 1, 1982). "Waverley Lewis Root, Journalist and Expert On French Food, Dies". The Washington Post. from the original on August 28, 2017. Retrieved March 6, 2022.
28. Yonan, Joe (March 13, 2014). "Paris with Patricia Wells: Eating up the city with the 'Food Lover's Guide' author". Washington Post. from the original on July 6, 2022. Retrieved March 5, 2022.
29. Daniszewski, John (February 8, 2022). "John Vinocur, Paris-Based Columnist and Editor, Dies at 81". Associated Press. from the original on August 22, 2023. Retrieved March 5, 2022.
30. Kurtz, Howard (April 4, 2000). "Ignatius Named Editor of International Herald Tribune". Washington Post. from the original on August 28, 2017. Retrieved August 25, 2022.
31. Cody, Edward (October 3, 1987). "Le Centennial". Washington Post.
32. "No more IHT as International New York Times debuts". Deutsche Welle. from the original on March 19, 2022.
33. "International New York Times closes in Paris". rfi.fr. September 29, 2016. from the original on February 27, 2018. Retrieved March 25, 2018.
34. "International New York Times closes in Paris". RFI. September 29, 2016. from the original on November 12, 2020. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
35. "NEWS: New York Times Closing its Paris-Based Editing Offices, Ending a Journalism Era". The National Book Review. from the original on October 19, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
36. "International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887–2013". Gale. from the original on January 28, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
37. "A Beautiful 1898 Easter Supplement from the International Herald Tribune". Gale. April 14, 2017. from the original on April 4, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
38. "International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013" (PDF). Gale. (PDF) from the original on March 1, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
39. "International Herald Tribune". The New York Times. from the original on March 27, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
40. "Retrospective: The International Herald Tribune". The New York Times Company. December 18, 2017. from the original on March 27, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.