December 28, 1992

In an unusual collaboration between two communications giants that may signal a new trend in magazine publishing, Dow Jones & Company and the Hearst Corporation will begin bimonthly publication this week of their magazine, Smart Money. The personal finance magazine, which tested two issues in 1992, combines the editorial expertise of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and the publishing experience of Hearst, generally acknowledged as the best in the industry at starting magazines. Each partner was able to supply what the other lacked. In what is sure to be a model for the future, the parentage of Dow Jones and Hearst represents the magazine industry's first in-vitro fertilization in this country.

His home has been called overcrowded and dangerous, but Hilton Smith had few complaints. On Christmas Eve, he watched television and heated chicken soup on a hot plate in the Franklin Avenue Armory in the Bronx. The black suit he bought for his brother's funeral hung by a window, unmolested in a homeless shelter where almost anything can be traded eventually for crack. Mr. Smith's accommodations -- a small, neat 18-bed dormitory room on the fourth floor -- are not the sort usually associated with New York City's large shelters for homeless men. Most of the shelter is another world: three stories below, 394 cots were locked into a tight grid of fear, violence and despair. Men stumbled around their cots, some between drug fixes, some chatting when no one else was near.

International Japan's low-cost health-care system faces a crisis: the rapid growth in retirees. The proportion of Japan's total medical costs for the aged, just 17.8 percent in 1980, will rise to 37 percent by the year 2000. [ Page A1. ] Europe's consumers eagerly await the single market that officially begins on Friday. "We firmly believe we're getting ripped off on a lot of things at home," says one Briton, who prefers to shop in France. [ A10. ]

Even before the holiday shopping season, America's mighty army of retail consumers had begun to loosen its grip on purse strings and wallets -- parting with $165 billion in November alone. But as merchants bask in what for many was the best Christmas in several years, economists are still trying to piece together just where these shoppers are getting the money: from higher incomes, by borrowing or by drawing from savings or other assets. The answer could well determine the health of the economy in the months to come.

The Washington Redskins, who wound up the season with consecutive losses, avoided becoming another Super Bowl champion to miss the playoffs the next season. Although the Redskins were upset in their regular-season finale Saturday, by the Los Angeles Raiders, they backed into the playoffs yesterday as the National Conference's final wild-card team when Green Bay was eliminated by losing to Minnesota.