Ogden Mills Reid was an American newspaper publisher who was president of the New York Herald Tribune.
Background
Ogden Mills Reid was born on May 16, 1882 in New York City, the older of two surviving children and only son of Whitelaw Reid, editor and publisher of the New York Tribune, and Elisabeth (Mills) Reid. He grew up in an atmosphere of affluence and achievement. His maternal grandfather was the philanthropist Darius Ogden Mills; his cousin Ogden Mills became secretary of the treasury under Herbert Hoover.
Education
After graduating from the Browning School in New York City, Reid briefly attended the University of Bonn in Germany (1899 - 1900) and then Yale, from which he received the B. A. degree in 1904 and the LL. B. in 1907.
Career
After receiving his law degree, Reid worked for a time in a law office and was admitted to the New York bar in 1908. That fall, however, he began his real career when he joined the staff of his father's newspaper, the Tribune. Working as reporter, copy reader, and assistant night editor, he became managing editor and president of the Tribune Association in January 1912.
Early the following year, after the death of his father, he was named editor, a post he retained until his own death. Reid chose to concentrate on news and editorial policies, and gradually turned the business responsibilities over to his wife, Helen Rogers Reid, who joined the Tribune staff in 1918 as advertising director.
He worked with his staff to increase the Tribune's coverage of European news and improve its criticism of art, music, and drama. He attempted to overcome the paper's reputation for dryness by hiring colorful reporters like Richard Harding Davis and Will Irwin.
The Tribune scored during World War I with Davis' account of the entry of the German army into Brussels, Irwin's news beat on the battle of Ypres, the military criticism of Frank H. Simonds, and the war reporting of Heywood Broun and other young staff members. Mark Sullivan became a political columnist in 1923.
Franklin P. Adams' "Conning Tower" became a Tribune feature in 1914; equally delightful were the columns of H. I. Phillips and the cartoons of Clare Briggs and H. T. Webster. The Tribune began to set its headlines in graceful Bodoni type in 1918, and under Reid's guidance the paper subsequently won two Ayer cups for typographical excellence.
So successful was Reid's management that the Tribune increased in circulation from 50, 000 in 1912 to 142, 000 in 1921. Yet the morning newspaper field in New York was overcrowded.
Frank Munsey, the new owner of the Bennett family's illustrious Herald, attempted to buy the Tribune; when the Reids refused, he sold them the Herald in 1924 for $5 million. Included in the deal was the Paris Herald, the paper's European edition. The new Herald Tribune successfully met the competitive challenge. It achieved a circulation of 275, 000 by 1925 and became the principal competitor of the New York Times.
Reid increased the coverage of local news under city editor Stanley Walker, and during the 1930's and 1940's the paper was able to boast a distinguished assortment of reporters and columnists, including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, Homer Bigart, and Alva Johnston, with Geoffrey Parsons as chief editorial writer. Eight Pulitzer prizes were awarded to Herald Tribune staff members during these years.
By 1947 circulation had reached 358, 000 daily and 700, 000 on Sunday. An internationalist in outlook, Reid took a personal interest in the Paris edition, developing it into the leading American newspaper in Europe.
At the age of sixty-four, Reid died of bronchial pneumonia at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, while undergoing treatment for an ulcerous throat. Funeral services were held at St. Thomas's Church (Episcopal), and he was buried in the family vault at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York.
The Herald Tribune continued in family hands until 1958, when a controlling interest was sold to John Hay Whitney. A citywide newspaper strike impelled the new owner to close down the paper in 1966, leaving only the International Herald Tribune in Paris to carry on the traditions of the Herald of James Gordon Bennett and the Tribune of Horace Greeley and the Reids.
Achievements
Politics
Although an active Republican, Ogden Reid was markedly more moderate and democratic in nature than his father.
Reid was an independent Republican in politics, an attitude reflected by his paper, which supported most of the foreign policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt but backed Wendell Willkie in 1940.
Connections
On March 14, 1911, he married Helen Miles Rogers of Racine, Wisconsin, a Barnard graduate who had been his mother's social secretary. They had three children.