THE new National Observer is obviously taking dead aim at the "family" market. On its first front page, for instance, the Observer ran a great big rocket picture for Junior, a story about a tough general and guerilla warfare for Dad, a fashion article for Mom and Sis, and a piece on what's happening to city churches for dear old Grandma.

Inside the Feb. 4 issue, there were more devices to attract the "family" reader--cartoons, a picture page, a "Current Events Classroom," a "Scrapbook" column which included Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie," recipes, and advice on how to play bridge.

Besides all this, the new venture of Dow Jones and Co., publishers of the Wall Street Journal, included long and detailed coverage of most of the major news events of the week. Its mission, apparently, was to make world news palatable to the man in the street and his family, after softening them with the side-shows mentioned above.

After two issues, however, it is by no means assured that the National Observer will succeed in its goals. The combination of unattractive layout, overpowering volume, bad writing, and a general lack of journalistic know-how seem ail too likely to repel newsstand browsers. And the National Observer can not count on the patronage of the intellectual upper class; members of the Harvard community, for example, will find upon inspection that very few articles in the first two numbers tell them anything new.

"First of all, this is a newspaper," the National Observer said in its inaugural editorial. The editorial goes on to emphasize that the Observer is "a newspaper and not a magazine," and to enumerate the advantages of its chosen format, such as the wide pages and big headlines.

BUT if the National Observer is to be a newspaper, it is going to have to act like one. A newspaper generally puts its most important, most newsworthy story in the upper right hand corner of page one. In Vol. 1. No. 1, the story in this position is a rather untimely discussion of police scandals in American cities that begins, "It was just about two years ago, in January 1960, that Chicago, a city not easily shocked, got a jolt that shook it thoroughly." The story is actually interesting and informative, but it hardly rates being treated as the feature attraction of the issue. In general, the National Observer could do with a more thoughtful layout. Since it is a newspaper and not a magazine, it does not have to order its stories according to subject, a la Time or Newsweek; but it badly needs some organizing principle, and for most newspapers this has been the relative importance of the articles.

Although the front pages have been attractive, the make-up has not been consistently good. Occasional inside pages present the unrelieved gray of long banks of type, without pictures, charts, or anything else to encourage the reader. When the National Observer uses pictures, it uses them well; the page-long photograph of the Saturn rocket on the front of the first issue is striking, as is a huge shot of the Matterhorn in the second. But there still remain long stretches of unbroken type, which simply will not be read.

Poor Technique

In part, this difficulty is due to the great size of the National Observer, and its six-column format. (Most newspapers have eight columns.) The page is as long as the New York Times, and about an inch and a half wider, which means the reader practically has to spread the paper out on the floor to be able to handle it. The columns, therefore, are unusually wide, with two results: the type is hard to read, and pictures, if used at all, almost have to be on the gigantic side.

There are other examples of poor technical journalism. For instance, the page-one article on religion in the first issue is headlined, "The Travail of Rev. Kean--Like Many Another City Minister He Copes With Shifting Population." Yet one must wade through 14 inches of front page copy, and another 18 inches under a similar headline on page 22, before reaching the first mention of Rev. Kean. This sort of thing can be annoying.

THE writing in the National Observer, while clear, is uneven. Lead paragraphs, in particular, vary from sharp, direct statements to uninteresting, left-field approaches. A typical lead of the first type was, "The U.S. is becoming more deeply involved in a fierce, undeclared war in southeast Asia." This is not wildly exciting, but it sums up a long story in a sentence and is at least moderately eye-catching.

Unfortunately, however, National Observer leads often consist merely of the first fact in a chronological recital, and indicate only indirectly what the story is about. In an article about the indictment of former Sister Kenny fund raisers, the first paragraph says, "Since its organization 17 years ago as a nonprofit organization corporation [????] for treatment of polio victims, the Sister Kenny Foundation of Minneapolis has always fared well in fund raising campaigns." Perhaps this is barely permissible in a magazine, but by its own admission, the National Observer is playing newspaper.

The following typifies another variety of bad lead the Observer employs frequently:

"Feathers, opium, castor oil, talc, sapphire, iodine, raw silk, and whale oil.

"These are some of the 98 items...