The International Herald Tribune (IHT) was a daily English-language newspaper published in Paris, France, for international English-speaking readers. It published under the name International Herald Tribune starting in 1967, but its origins as an international newspaper trace back to 1887. Sold in over 160 countries, the International Herald Tribune produced a large amount of content until it became the second incarnation of The International New York Times in 2013, 10 years after The New York Times Company became its sole owner.
Contents
Early years
In 1887, James Gordon Bennett Jr. created a Paris edition of his newspaper the New York Herald 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. 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.
The International Herald Tribune years
The first issue of the International Herald Tribune was published on May 22, 1967. It continued the practices that had endeared it to American emigrants and travelers, such as carrying baseball scores and stock prices.
At the start, the paper maintained the offices it inherited from the Herald Tribune European Edition – that dated to 1931 – at 21 Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées. Columnist Art Buchwald recalled them as being "grubby" and antiquated but "the perfect location for an American newspaper abroad." Then in 1978, the paper moved its facilities to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
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. This was followed by a printing site in Zurich in 1977. 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. 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).
Additional printing locations followed, including Rome and Tokyo 1987; and Frankfurt 1989. By 1985, the International Herald Tribune had a circulation of 160,000, and was profitable with annual revenues of around $40 million. At the time of the paper's centennial in 1987, the IHT was opening a new print site on average each year.
By the early 1990s, the paper was printed concurrently around the globe, with seven sites in Europe, three in Asia, and one in the US, allowing day-of-publication availability in all major cities worldwide. 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. (Several editions were published of each day's paper, however, and sometimes particular regions saw revisions that other regions might not.) Nearly 200,000 copies were sold per day, including 50,000 in Asia and 45,000 copies to airlines flying international routes. 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. Marking a departure from its origins as a paper mostly read by the American diaspora in Europe, by this point the majority of its readers were non-American.
Writers and journalists
Throughout its history the Paris-based paper had a renowned stable of writers and journalists. Among the most well-known were the humorist Art Buchwald, the fashion editor Suzy Menkes, jazz critic Mike Zwerin and food writers Waverly Root and Patricia Wells. Former executive editors include Philip Manning Foisie, John Vinocur, David Ignatius and Michael Getler.
The final years
In 2013, the New York Times Company announced that the International Herald Tribune was being renamed The International New York Times. The last edition under ther IHT brand was published on Monday October 14 of that year.
In 2016, the Paris offices, acquired from the IHT, closed amid massive layoffs at NYT. The National Book Review called it "end of a romantic era in international journalism".
Archives
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.
This material is not available from any New York Times archive. The New York Times website does, however, host a very limited selection of "retrospective" stories from the 1887–2013 years, a collection that became available in 2017, the same year that the full archives became available on Gale.