No Competition

A year-end study of the roster of U.S. daily newspapers provided the American Newspaper Publishers Association with an unexpected surprise: 18 new dailies were born in 1961, and only 13 disappeared. Exulting that a list which had been dwindling for years was suddenly showing signs of growth, A.N.P.A. General Manager Stanford Smith predicted that "the future trend will be toward more dailies to serve the public." The A.N.P.A. did not mention two far less encouraging trends:

.THE DECLINE OF COMPETITION. Since 1945, overall daily circulation has boomed from 46 million to 60 million, but in the same period the number of U.S. cities with competitive dailies has shrunk from 117 to 60. There are now 1,382 towns with newspaper monopolies.

While suburban and rural dailies multiply, an acid bath of high production costs and TV competition is corroding the strength and numbers of the metropolitan press. The attrition is so great that newsrooms often buzz with rumors about what paper will be next to go. One such tale got out of hand last week in Detroit, where, ever since 1932, John S. Knight's morning Free Press (circ. 550,000) has had no rival at the city's breakfast tables. Detroit buzzed with so many stories about the Free Press being on the block that Publisher Knight finally felt obliged to publicly brand them as lies. He ran a full-page ad: THE DETROIT FREE PRESS IS NOT FOR SALE.

City Sickness. Even the A.N.P.A.'s proud list of newcomers served as added proof that the nation's bigger cities do not nourish its healthiest newspapers. The 1961 crop of new dailies sprouted in such towns as Chesterton, Ind. (1960 pop. 4,335), Napoleon. Ohio (6,739), and Princeton, W. Va. (8,393). But in a city the size of Boston (697,197), Hearst's cost accountants found it expedient to merge the empire's morning and afternoon papers into a single tabloid, the Record-American.

Biggest of the .new dailies was founded in Portland, Ore., where striking newsmen from the city's two papers started the Reporter, enlisted relatives to sell subscriptions to sympathetic union families, now claim a circulation of 52,734. But the Reporter has been having its troubles, despite generous help from the International Typographical Union, which supplied cut-rate equipment, and now ladles out weekly "strike" payments of as much as $77.10 to editorial hands.

In the Red. If the A.N.P.A. was inclined to gloat over 1961's showing, it had little time to do so. Scarcely had the new year begun when two Los Angeles dailies --Hearst's Examiner and Norman Chandler's Mirror (TIME, Jan. 12)--died, leaving America's third largest city with only one morning paper and one in the afternoon. Last week a group headed by Marvin J. McConnell, who puts out a western twice-monthly trade paper (Small Busi ness News), announced plans to start an independent, five-day-a-week afternoon tabloid called the Post to challenge Hearst's consolidated Herald-Examiner.

But the Post's target circulation, 1,000,000, is only a shade of what Los Angeles' newest newspaper corpses boasted just before they died--and both were deep in the red. In a single day the Examiner and the Mirror used to sell more newspapers (682,919) than there are people in all 18 towns and cities where new papers began publishing last year (650.000).

*THE WEAKNESS OF BIG-CITY PAPERS.

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