The Giveaways

When a leggy brunette named Joan Kinney moved west from Chicago last year, she had nothing more adventurous in mind than some postgraduate courses in creative writing at San Fran cisco State College. But Joan soon found something far more exciting. To day, at 25, she publishes the Livermore, Calif., Independent, a weekly newspaper that after only two months in print is already making money. Says Miss Kinney with some surprise: "We've been rather a shocking success."

The shock was felt most keenly by Livermore's other paper, the Herald and News, a triweekly that has been around for 86 years. Some of the Independ ent's sudden growth has come right out of the Herald and News's ad accounts. Says Robert Penland, Herald and News publisher: "We're probably going to have to work a little harder." Even if he does, his new competitor will retain one distinct advantage. Robert Penland sells his paper; Joan Kinney gives her Independent away free.

Facing Facts. presents The fresh--and, Livermore to Inde some observers, disquieting--evidence of the prodigious growth of that semi-demi-newspaper, the giveaway shopping guide. In the last 17 years, according to a survey by the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism, suburban and weekly papers--a. category that includes the giveaways--have gained circulation at 30 times the rate of the metropolitan press. They are proliferating too rapidly for accurate count. Los Angeles alone has 200, Detroit 50, Denver 20--and each figure is constantly subject to revision as the census soars. Much of their enormous growth has been logged at the expense of the paid-circulation press.

The classic example took place in Los Angeles' sprawling San Fernando Valley, a municipal crazy quilt that has managed to absorb almost 1,000,000 densely packed residents without turning into a cohesive city. The Valley's loudest voice is a giveaway newspaper, the Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet, which covers the area as comprehensively as smog. In 1960 the Cowles Newspapers group (eight dailies in three states and Puerto Rico) invaded the Green Sheet's domain. Cowles bought the Valley Times, an undistinguished daily with 50,000 paid circulation, and spent three years trying to boost it into the big time. Circu lation eventually rose a paltry 1,600. In the same period, the Green Sheet's non-paying circulation shot from 115,000 to more than 200,000. In August the Cowles group faced the unhappy facts and sold out.

Telling the Difference. One reason the interloper failed is that the Green Sheet bears a reasonable resemblance to a real newspaper. It hefts like a newspaper--some issues run to 166 pages. It runs news stories and banner headlines. These days, in fact, only the discerning reader can tell the difference between the real thing and most giveaways trying to look like a regular newspaper. Five years ago in California, the Contra Costa Times, a doddering twice-a-weekly with 5,550 paid subscribers, started distributing copies free. Since then, ad revenue has doubled, the pa per has turned profitable and now reaches 51,000 readers.

In Georgia, the Decatur-De Kalb News, which gives away 32,700 copies a week, has its own editorial cartoonist, pays the dues of all reporters who want to join civic clubs--and on rainy days fields as many as 500 telephone complaints from irate "subscribers" who simply cannot understand why delivery has been delayed. In increasing numbers, the giveaways break up the ads with news stories. But their editorial staffs vary widely. The San Francisco Progress, with a city distribution of 181,000--more than any of San Francisco's three big paid-circulation dailies --gets along fine with a staff of two. Joan Kinney in Livermore, on the other hand, pays the salaries of 13 editorial hands.

All Ads. The evolution of the giveaway into a news-bearing paper is by no means total. Many of Florida's entries, for example, are all ads: a typical frontpage banner headline in the Hialeah-Miami Springs News-Shopper (distribution: 101,000) reads BRAKE JOB $27.95. And even where the giveaway paper has turned journalistic, its motives often have little to do with professional dedication. In many cases, the spur has been provided by new postal rates that discriminate against junk mail--the classification that fits free-delivery newspapers. By claiming paid circulation, the giveaways that do not depend solely on carrier-boy delivery can escape into the less confiscatory rate for second-class mail. This takes some doing: the Post Office requires that such a paper sell 65% of its copies and devote 25% of space to editorial matter at least half the time.

$2 Editors. What really accounts for the giveaway's new appetite for news is its hungry reader. Too many metropolitan dailies, striving to be all things to all readers, have turned into a ready-mixed potpourri of syndicated columns, global think pieces, comic strips, canned features and coleslaw recipes. Local news continually comes in last. Without exception, the giveaway newspaper lavishes all its news attention on the local scene, and leaps with alacrity to publish home-town names.

"We would never mention Khrushchev," says Editor Ferdinand Mendenhall of the Valley Green Sheet, "unless he drops a bomb on Van Nuys Boulevard." The Decatur-De Kalb News has some 6,000 "associate editors"--all of whom paid $2 for the title, and many of whom submit stories to the paper. In Topsfield, Mass., the local school bus driver, an energetic amateur photographer, snaps all the pictures for Topsfield's giveaway paper, the Tri-Town Transcript.

Flushed by their cordial reception at the local level, some giveaways have plunged all the way into fulltime newspapering. In Omaha four shopping guides published by David Blacker converted to paid newspaper weeklies beginning in 1958. To Slacker's satisfaction, all but 20,000 of his 60,000 readers submitted to a levy of a nickel; to lis greater satisfaction, all but a handful of those stayed aboard last month when he raised the price to a dime. Although Blacker's papers now carry syndicated columnists, his news approach has remained steadfastly local.

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