Shocker! Tabloid Wants Respect : The sassy New York Post, once known as ‘Dracula’s coffin,’ is trying to tone things down. Advertisers like it; readers aren’t sure.

NEW YORK — The kidnap and assault trial of Manhattan art dealer Andrew Crispo had kinky sex, violence, glitz--ingredients that once seemed to guarantee a story a full, front-page splash in the brassy New York Post.

But when other New York tabloids and local TV stations were trumpeting Crispo’s tale day after day in October, the Post was folding its few stories on the trial discreetly inside.

Last September, when a naked, deranged man clubbed an usher at elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the New York Daily News, New York Newsday and even the decorous New York Times jolted readers with front-page headlines on the rampage of the “naked killer.” But the New York paper best known for shock headlines settled for a sedate “Murder at St. Pat’s.”

The New York Post, long the standard bearer for the most outrageous kind of tabloid journalism, is trying to go straight.

For 12 years, former owner Rupert Murdoch fought to reverse the losses of New York City’s No. 3 daily by dishing readers a British-style diet of sex, mayhem and miracles. But this strategy failed even in the hands of the masterful media tycoon, and last March, after sustaining $150 million in losses, Murdoch sold the Post for $36.7 million to Peter S. Kalikow, a shy New York real estate man.

Very Tough Competition

Kalikow is betting that he can restore the glory of a paper founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton by improving news coverage, cutting out its most lurid and gory stories but keeping the paper’s hard tabloid edge. The goal is to hang onto Murdoch’s core of working-class readers, add more affluent ones and draw in advertisers who have shunned the paper for fear it would sully their image.

Against long odds, Kalikow seems so far to have had a measure of success. The Post has drawn in new advertisers and Kalikow maintains it has also improved circulation and cut its losses from the former $36 million a year to a “minor fraction” of that.

But the new regime walks a razor’s edge with its strategy, say many in the newspaper business. If it surrenders its niche as the city’s raciest tabloid, the Post risks becoming just another player in a market that already has two well-written, respectable tabloids, the New York Daily News and New York Newsday. (New York Newsday is the 2-year-old sister paper of Newsday of Long Island, which, like the Los Angeles Times, is published by Times Mirror Co.)

Some admirers of the old Post fear that the craziness they loved may soon be just a memory. “The Post has good gossip, sexy front page headlines,” said Susan Mulcahy, a former Post reporter who is now a gossip columnist at New York Newsday. “I just hope they don’t go too far and lose the old outrageousness.”

Said a veteran Post reporter: “I think some of the old electricity, the pizazz, is gone.”

Electricity the old Post surely had, sometimes because it didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

When the Soviet nuclear plant near Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the Post rushed to print with news that 10,000 had perished. In fact, about 25 were killed in the first days after the explosion; the Post had used an unverified account from a tiny emigre paper in New Jersey.

Hyperbole and Lies

In the early days of Murdoch’s ownership, readers were startled to see shock headlines carrying news of a tidal wave that had carried a group of tots out to sea. “It was scary--I picked up the paper and thought this had happened down on Coney Island (in Brooklyn),” said one reader. But when he opened the paper, he found that the wave had struck on the Pacific Coast, near Seattle.

The Post’s headline writers could wring maximum sensation from any development, including their own goofs.

In January, 1985, the paper’s early edition reported: “Seven Feared Dead in Brooklyn Fire.” The editors made the most of the situation in a later edition, when they learned that they had overestimated the death toll: “Firemen Bring Back 4 from Dead . . . But 3 Others Perish in Brooklyn Blaze.”

Fatal fires were big news in the Post’s pages, as were grisly murders, often illustrated with photos that seemed to be straight out of the coroner’s report. Alexander Cockburn, a writer for the Nation magazine, last year tagged the paper, “Dracula’s coffin.”

“ ‘Horror,’ ‘terror’ and ‘shocker’--they were always our favorite words,” says Vincent Musetto, the master headline writer who was celebrated on TV talk shows for such Post classics as “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and “Granny Executed in Pink Pajamas.” Now, he says, the Post is trying to keep its headlines the most eye-popping in town while cutting back on the old standbys.

Indeed, the Post’s brass wince at any suggestions that it is trying to tone down coverage or appeal to more affluent readers at the exclusion of its old core audience.

“This paper may have done some gratuitous things with sex and violence to grab attention,” says Peter Price, the former Time Inc. executive whom Kalikow recruited as publisher. But if the Post now hesitates to put bloody corpses on the front page, “murder is still big news around here.”

No Regrets

“This paper will be as rascally, as sassy as ever,” insists Post Editor Jane Amsterdam, who was founding editor of the New York business monthly Manhattan, inc. and was also an editor at New York magazine and the Washington Post.

That means, she says, that the Post would have no qualms about repeating its coverage of the murder of accused mob bagman Irwin Schiff, rubbed out in August, 1987, in a tony Upper East Side restaurant. The Post tagged the 400-pound-plus Schiff “the Fat Man,” and, in story after story, made a big deal of his big girth.

To illustrate his bulk, the paper ran a front-page photo of Schiff diving into his Long Island swimming pool, with a caption observing that the deceased “always made a big splash.” Another photo showed a bare-bellied Schiff asleep on a couch, “no doubt dreaming of big deals.”

The Post also chronicled Schiff’s active romantic life, referring to him as a “Ton Juan.”

Amsterdam acknowledges that some people might object to coverage that mocks a fat person. But if the paper had it to do over, she says, “we’d do it just the same.”

Columnists Changed

The new Post is capable of mocking the tabloid sensibility. Reporting the recent death of National Enquirer owner Generoso Pope, whose supermarket tabloid often featured stories on Elvis Presley, the Post headline writers offered: “Enquirer Owner Goes to Meet Elvis.”

The new Post is sharply different from Murdoch’s paper in its political coverage. Although Kalikow, like Murdoch, is a staunch conservative, the paper is not inclined to launch crusades against its political adversaries, as Murdoch did.

In 1980, when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) ran for President, a Post team spent weeks assembling and writing a lengthy series on Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick accident, though the team uncovered no major new facts.

This election year, while the Post endorsed George Bush, it also endorsed Democrats, including Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and U.S. senatorial candidate Joseph Lieberman, who ran successfully in Connecticut. In New York-area congressional races, the paper picked five Democrats in nine contests.

One of Kalikow’s first moves was to moderate the paper’s strident conservative columnists with new columnists with liberal and middle-of-the-road views.

Other moves seem clearly designed to bring in a more upscale audience. A Sunday edition that the Post plans to start in March will include a book review. The paper recently hired a movie critic, Harvard grad David Edelstein, whose reviews seem addressed to a more sophisticated audience than were those of syndicated reviewer Roger Ebert, whom he replaced.

Attracting Advertisers

The new Post has an enormous real estate section, sometimes running 20 pages in length and flush with ads for expensive luxury high-rise cooperative apartments. To edit the section, Kalikow hired a former New York Times writer, Carter B. Horsley.

“This isn’t aimed at our working-class black and Hispanic readers, you can bet,” says a Post staff member.

The changes have won points with some advertisers, including several big department stores. In September, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, B. Altman and Bergdorf-Goodman announced that they would buy advertising space on the page across from the Post’s well-read gossip column, Page Six.

The decision was an important symbolic victory, since the stores’ lack of interest in the old Post was legendary.

“They’ve softened the headlines, taken a more intelligent approach to the news, and our sensitivity to the Post has increased,” says Lester Gribetz, Bloomingdale’s executive vice president. “I’ve noticed that a lot of my friends won’t admit to reading the Post, but secretly they do. And I think a lot of other people are the same way.”

The new era has been largely a hit with the news staff, which includes a sizable contingent from earlier Post eras as well as a generation of younger editors and reporters. “In March, we were one step away from buried, and now this is a vibrant newspaper,” says David Ng, the Post’s day city editor and an eight-year veteran.

Kalikow Loves Role

Negotiations between Murdoch and Kalikow nearly broke down several times, and the new owner took over amid speculation that he might be planning to resell the paper soon or try to turn some clever real estate deal with its Lower Manhattan building. But that speculation has subsided as Kalikow has shown that he relishes his role as press lord and continues to pour money into the operation.

Kalikow’s purchase of the paper stirred some speculation that the Post might go easy on his friends in the New York real estate business, which has long been an important source of villains for the tabloid press. So far, those worries appear to have been without foundation.

The Post, which first alleged that real estate royalty Harry and Leona Helmsley were ducking their taxes, has continued to hammer away at the story. Last month the Post ran a picture of a smiling Harry Helmsley dancing at a company Christmas party, even as Helmsley’s lawyers were trying to convince a judge that their client was too ill to stand trial.

Kalikow’s delight with his new role is plainly visible. He sits in on meetings of the Post’s editorial board as it chews over the cosmic issues with such guests as Gov. Mario Cuomo and Manhattan U.S. Atty. Rudolph W. Giuliani. During last summer’s political conventions, he was host at receptions sponsored by the newspaper.

The paper plans to spend $25 million on the new Sunday edition and enlarge its news staff to about 330 from 300. Although such changes will sharply increase expenses, Price predicts the paper will be profitable by the end of 1989.

Competitors scoff at that, and others in the business are yet to be convinced. The competition maintains that the Sunday edition may prove to be an expensive fiasco and contends that the big department stores may be buying Post ads just to depress ad rates at the other papers.

“A paper like this can eat through a bankroll pretty quick--even the bankroll of a rich real estate man,” said John Morton, a publishing industry analyst in Washington. Forbes magazine’s tally of the richest people in America puts Kalikow’s personal net worth at about $400 million.

Survival Questioned

Figures from outside sources don’t yet show a turnaround. The Audit Bureau of Circulations says the paper’s average daily circulation for the six months ended Sept. 30 was 550,000, compared to 555,000 for the period that ended in March and 691,000 for the period that ended in September, 1987, when circulation was inflated by Murdoch’s use of a lottery game called Wingo.

An advertising analysis by the consulting firm Media Records showed that the paper had 6.7% of New York City newspaper advertising for the 10-month period ended in October, compared to a 8.4% share for the same period of 1987. (This tally doesn’t include advertising in New York Newsday, because a portion of its ads are considered to be from the Long Island market.)

And knowledgeable observers still wonder how the Post’s new push for respectability will affect the bottom line.

Some remember the regime of Dorothy Schiff, who owned the paper before Murdoch. The paper then was the most liberal in town, a well-written, respectable paper that had something for every class--and, at the end, couldn’t earn a dollar.

Clay Felker, editor-in-chief of Manhattan, inc. and a longtime New York newspaper and magazine editor, says that if people are now less ashamed to admit that they read the Post, “the question becomes, will enough of them want to?”