New owner, editor plan fresh direction for 'Post' By Hanna Liebma

NEW YORK--The New York Post will be moving away from the slashing sensationalism that has been the paper's hallmark since it was bought by Rupert M

“It’11 be a different paper in a month,” said Hamill. The Post will become a “tabloid-plus that will retain all the great classic slam-bang tabloid spirit.” The aim, he added, will be to move Post outside the stereotypical tabloid image and turn it into “a writer’s paper, with richer, more ironic, hipper writing that reflects the attitudes New Yorkers have.”
Hamill is planning a 12-page feature section that will give the paper more flexibility to do profiles, series and the like. It will be edited by Patrick Farrely, who came from the Irish Voice and Pucci Meyer, who edited the Daily News Sunday magazine for several years.
The paper will have more female voices, from the front page to the sports section, and women will be targeted without just slapping a title on a food and fashion page, said Hamill.
There will also be a computer column, which Hamill hopes will bring in more advertisers. “There’s no reason 47th Street Photo shouldn’t be advertising in the Post,” said Hamill.
And the paper will pick up Farrely’s “The Green Card” column, begun in the Irish Voice, which deals with concerns of immigrants. “They have to be welcome in the Post,” Hamill said. ‘They’re the future of the city.”
Some buyers are wary of the changes. “I still think the Post needs to retain some of that edge–its readership has become comfortable with it, interested in it,” said Steve Greenberger, vp director of print media at Grey Advertising. “I don’t know if there’s any justification that it (the old formula) wasn’t working.”
But Larry Cole, U.S. media director at Ogilvy & Mather, is more enthusiastic: “I think they could do a terrific job if they carved out a particular niche.”
The changes outlined by Hamill are the first sign of the direction new Post owner Steven Hoffenberg plans for the paper.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)