Youth Kick in Cleveland

Last Tuesday the Cleveland Press car ried on its masthead the slogan: "Ohio's largest daily newspaper."On Wednesday it read instead: Ohio's largest evening newspaper. "In the slight shift of words lay a significant story. For the first time in nine years, the circulation of the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer had surpassed that of the afternoon Press, 396,931 to 394,763.

The victory was largely a personal one for Plain Dealer Publisher Thomas Vail, 41. A great grandson of the paper's founder, he has been the last remaining member of his family to show much interest in the daily. From the time he joined the paper in 1957, he has worked in all departments; when he became editor in 1963, he phased out oldtimers whose pace had faltered and went on a youth kick. He increased the edit staff to 50, most of them reporters in their 20s. More important, he infected them with his own enthusiasm for their paper and their city.

Grooming Babushkas. They were soon turning Cleveland upside down, each hoping to win the impulsive Vail reaction to a story well done: "Terrific, just terrific!" Investigative reporting became the order of the day. Lawyers were shown to be collecting large fees from estates without heirs. Wretched conditions at children's welfare homes were exposed. One reporter posed as a Skid Row bum in order to find out who was stealing food from state-supported shelters. Vail created a department of urban affairs, sent its editor to study at Northwestern University for three months. He hired a fashion reporter from the defunct New York World Journal Tribune to "dress up Cleveland's women," as he put it, and end their reputation for being the "babushka set."

When the paper was sold to Sam Newhouse last year for $50 million, there was worry that Vail's stride would be broken by the press lord's well-known preoccupation with the balance sheet. But that has not happened. Newhouse has appeared at the Plain Dealer only once since he bought it and has not followed his usual practice of holding down editorial staff. He obviously has no fault to find with a paper that has been increasing its circulation about 10,000 a year.

Yet the Plain Dealer has not necessarily been making its gains at the expense of the competition; the Press, too, is gaining circulation, if at a somewhat slower pace. To be sure, the Press is not quite the paper it was under its longtime editor, Louis Seltzer, who retired in 1966. An unabashed sentimentalist where Cleveland was concerned, Seltzer did his best to identify the paper with the town, to such an extent that it often dictated the choice of candidates for public office. That is a role the present management has chosen to forgo. "By playing kingmaker," says Editor Thomas L. Boardman, 48, "we were weakening the role of the parties and the democratic process." So, by choice, the Press delayed its endorsement for mayor last year while Vail became chief supporter of the victorious Negro candidate, Carl Stokes.

Boardman, who first joined the Press in 1939, also tends to leave investigative reporting to the Plain Dealer. "You don't spend the resources of money, talent and readers' time going after every small wrongdoing," he says. "You don't use a fire hose to put out a match." Like Vail, however, he has put together a more youthful staff, hiring 19 reporters in their 20s. The Press still performs its customary services for Cleveland's powerful ethnic groups. A reporter annually tours Eastern Europe, relaying news of relatives back home. At the same time, he is instructed by Boardman to give more attention to ethnic customs and history than to mere social notes.

In the heat of competition, the makeup of both papers shows more excitement than judgment: a clutter of stories thrown together without much sense of proportion. But at the same time, fewer Cleveland stories than ever before are escaping the watchful eye of the two papers. No matter which one wins the circulation battle, the ultimate winners are Cleveland's readers.

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