Carlo Vittorini, Publisher Who Lifted Parade Magazine, Dies at 94

Carlo Vittorini, who as writer guided Parade journal, the almost ubiquitous weekly Sunday newspaper complement, to income and circulation heights, died on June 25 at his summer time dwelling in Nantucket, Mass. He was 94.

His spouse, Nancy Vittorini, mentioned the trigger was congestive coronary heart failure.

Mr. Vittorini spent 50 years within the journal enterprise, almost all of it when it was nonetheless thriving. In 1992, when Parade’s circulation was hovering, he confidently instructed The St. Joseph News-Press/Gazette of Missouri: “Nobody can get a message out as quickly as we can. Even Time and Newsweek can’t reach the spectrum of people we can.”

In 1979, he was employed by S.I. Newhouse Jr., the chairman of Advance Publications, as Parade’s writer, president and chief government.

Parade’s promoting revenues had been $140 million when Mr. Vittorini took over; he pushed that quantity to almost $450 million in 1994, when a full-page commercial value $640,000 (the equal of about $1.3 million at the moment), similar to the value paid for TV commercials.

“We’re the equivalent of what Ed Sullivan used to be,” he instructed Bloomberg Business News in 1995, referring to the host of the Sunday-night tv selection present that provided leisure for the plenty for 23 years earlier than going off the air in 1971. “But our ratings are more stable and our show every week more predictable.”

By 1998, Parade was distributed in some 330 newspapers, giving it a circulation of 37.5 million. Its circulation had been 21.5 million when Mr. Vittorini was employed.

By then, Parade was providing a well-recognized product that slipped out of Sunday papers that had been nonetheless fats: Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, a web page of questions and solutions about celebrities; the previous New York journal editor James Brady’s interviews with Hollywood stars; columns by Marilyn vos Savant, who was billed by the journal as having the very best recorded I.Q.; and adverts from the Franklin Mint, tobacco firms and “as seen on TV” merchandise just like the Thighmaster.

Parade had competitors from one other Sunday complement, Family Weekly, which was renamed USA Weekend after its acquisition by the Gannett Company, the writer of USA Today, in 1985. After that acquisition, 123 papers switched to Parade and 13 others, owned by Gannett, switched to USA Weekend.

In the San Diego market, the afternoon paper, The San Diego Tribune, determined to distribute USA Weekend, whereas the morning paper, The San Diego Union, continued to take Parade. Mr. Vittorini recalled assembly with Helen Copley, the papers’ proprietor, and telling her that he most popular that Parade be unique in all its markets. He warned her that he would cease distribution of it in The Union if she didn’t drop USA Weekend from The Tribune.

“Somewhat haughtily, she said to me, ‘Young man, how dare you tell me how to run my newspaper!’” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “And politely as possible, I replied, ‘Mrs. Copley, I promise I won’t tell you how to run your newspaper if you don’t tell me how to run my magazine.’ Success: USA Weekend was dropped.”

Carlo Vittorini was born on Feb. 28, 1929, in Philadelphia and grew up in Haverford, Pa. His father, Domenico, an Italian immigrant, was a professor of Romance languages on the University of Pennsylvania; his mom, Helen (Whitney) Vittorini, a homemaker, had met her future husband when she took one in every of his courses.

Carlo graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 with a bachelor’s diploma in English. He started his profession in promotion work, then turned a merchandising supervisor at The Saturday Evening Post in 1956 and a gross sales consultant at Look journal in 1958. For a dozen years, beginning in 1965, he labored at Redbook journal, the place he rose to writer and president.

In 1977, he was appointed the president of the Charter Company’s journal group, which included Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal and Sport journal. A 12 months later, he was employed to start out a brand new journal division on the Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises, which is finest recognized for publishing romance novels.

After barely a 12 months at Harlequin, Mr. Vittorini was provided the job at Parade by Mr. Newhouse, whose firm additionally revealed Vogue, Glamour, House & Garden and different magazines. Mr. Vittorini recalled that Mr. Newhouse handed him a three-ring binder of notes he had made about Parade over the three years since Advance Publications had acquired it.

“That evening, as I read his remarks,” Mr. Vittorini mentioned in his memoir, “I realized that despite his acumen in the traditional magazine field, though he knew there was a problem, he was missing the solution for this nontraditional circulated magazine.”

He mentioned that Parade’s unspectacular outcomes improved rapidly, partly as a result of he bought extra newspapers to distribute the journal, which helped increase advert charges.

He instructed Editor & Publisher in 1999: “We had some very basic goals, and it began with improving the product, intellectually and physically. There was a need to improve newspaper relations, and we did. The ad revenue came with it.”

In addition to his spouse, who was Nancy Coleman when he married her, Mr. Vittorini is survived by his son, Stephen; his daughter, Lynn Vaughan; his stepdaughter, Ashley Frisbie; his stepson, Frank Coleman; and 5 grandchildren. His marriage to Alice Hellerman led to divorce.