Death of the News

For 55 years, the Cleveland News (circ. 124,697) tried to prove that Cleveland was a three-paper town. Always sickly, it survived against the other afternoon paper, Scripps-Howard sturdy Press (circ. 304,074), only through the pump priming of its owner since 1932, the Forest City Publishing Co., which also prints Cleveland's morning paper, the healthy Plain Dealer (circ. 305.291). But last week the News was dead: tired of pouring Plain Dealer profits into the News, Forest City's President Sterling E. Graham had announced the sale of the News to Scripps-Howard's Press for an estimated $1,250,000. The last surviving trace of the paper will be in the title of Cleveland's new afternoon combination, the Cleveland Press and News.

Like a Corpse. The death of the News was inevitable. Though its metropolitan population hovers around a million and a half, Cleveland essentially is a noncommuter city, and therefore one with a home-delivery market. In such a market, a third paper is a luxury. As the News ran a bad last in the circulation race, advertisers passed it up to reach the wider audiences "of the Press and Plain Dealer, and frequently the 32-page News looked starved against its fat, 84-page afternoon opposition.

But however inevitable its death, the News had its mourners--especially among the 130 editorial staffers faced with the necessity of finding new jobs. Last week a sense of unreality hung over the once-busy city room, which had been turned into a sort of employment agency to help ex-staffers get jobs. On one side of the newsroom a bulletin board listed some 200 job offers in Cleveland industry, but few newspaper openings. Out-of-town papers, e.g., the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, sent personnel representatives to interview ex-News reporters, many of whom discovered that they were considered too old to pick up good newspaper jobs. Said one ex-Newswoman: "I feel like a corpse who can hear, and is lying listening to everybody say how good you were."

According to Taste. Cleveland's two remaining papers cater to both the cautious and flamboyant tastes of the city. The perky Press and News, under Editor Louis Seltzer, leans heavily on exposees (example: policemen eating their meals in local brothels) and promotions (example: annual parties for Clevelanders celebrating golden wedding anniversaries), occasionally irritates Scripps-Howard brass by passing up the chain's canned editorials and features. Against the Press and News, the Plain Dealer is solid and conservative, gives complete and accurate, but low-key, coverage to the news.

With the News gone, Cleveland last week buzzed with rumors that the Plain Dealer too was up for grabs, and that Chain Publisher John S. (Detroit Free Press) Knight was interested. Although the deal was denied on all sides, the reports got so much circulation that Forest City's President Graham felt it necessary to take a full-page ad in the Plain Dealer threatening to sue "any competing medium" that "continues to spread [the rumor], by printed word or on the air."

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