Chicago's War of the Losers

In addition to its other distinctions, Chicago has traditionally been a terrific newspaper town, with lively dailies rolling out breathless new editions all day long. As Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur related in The Front Page, competition among Chicago papers in the 1920s was fierce--and sometimes violent. Today's newspaper battle is less bloody but scarcely less frantic. Circulation campaigns are fought with radio and TV spots instead of hired toughs, and an exclusive is more often a series of sober public service articles about mental health than a blaring bannerline scoop about a trunk murder. But Chicago remains the only U.S. city with competing papers in both morning and afternoon.

Elsewhere, inflation and the inroads of TV and magazines have forced 42 daily newspapers to merge since 1960. Chicago, however, still has four major dailies fighting for the readers. In the morning, the Chicago Tribune competes with Field Enterprises' tabloid Sun-Times. In the afternoon, the Tribune's breezy sibling Chicago Today is pitted against Field's Chicago Daily News. The situation may be stimulating for the readers, but it is hard on the papers, particularly the afternoon sheets. Both lose money, and it is largely pride that prevents them from being fused into a single publication that might be profitable.

No Figures. All together, daily circulation of Chicago's papers has declined since 1960 from 2.4 million to 2.2 million, despite a 1% population increase in Cook County. No financial figures are available because both the Chicago Tribune Co. and Field Enterprises are privately owned, but it is known that the two morning papers turn a profit. During the past decade, the Sun-Times circulation has held steady at about 540,000, and is first in the city itself. The Tribune, despite a drop of 100,000 in the same period, maintains a comfortable overall lead at 768,000, due to a large readership in suburbia and surrounding states, and it carries almost half of all the daily ad linage in town.

In the afternoon, however, the picture is grim. Early evening television news programs have hurt afternoon newspaper sales everywhere in the nation. Besides, compared with morning papers, afternoon editions are costlier to put out because they require faster distribution for a big street sale, more labor for heavier press runs, and frequent front-page replates to provide up-to-the-minute, eye-catching headlines. Chicago Today recently passed the Daily News in circulation, 438,000 to 425,000, while the News, thanks to a higher-income readership, carries 72% of all afternoon advertising. But annual losses are nonetheless estimated at about $5,000,000 for Daily News and $7,000,000 for Chicago Today.

Wealthy parent companies can afford to pay the bills. Helped by its highly profitable World Book Encyclopedia and a children's series called Childcraft, Field Enterprises earned about $7,000,000 last year despite the drain of the Daily News. The Tribune Co. is even richer. Among its gilt-edged properties are the New York Daily News,* a string of papers in Florida, and TV stations in Chicago, Denver and Duluth.

For all their resources, neither the Tribune Co. nor Field has produced an outstanding newspaper worthy of a city as big and alert as Chicago. It has no equivalent of a New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, although its papers augment their national and international coverage from all those sources. In the four Chicago papers, day-to-day reporting of topics as varied as business, the arts and social trends seems too often routine.

Farewell to Omniscience. The Tribune, still the self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Newspaper," uses its big editorial staff of 325 and a huge news hole to provide the most thorough coverage, including task-force treatment on how poorly Chicago is served by its nursing homes and courts. The paper is shedding the stodginess that had hung on well beyond the death in 1955 of archconservative Publisher Robert R. McCormick, and it now pays much more attention to the blacks and the poor. Says mild-mannered Clayton Kirkpatrick, 56, who became the Trib's editor in 1969: "If you accept the fact that readers today are better educated and more sophisticated, then you concede that you don't have an exclusive license on omniscience and that you have to accept other points of view." Still, the Trib's outspoken editorial page almost automatically voices a conservative viewpoint on most issues.

The Sun-Times bills itself as "the bright one" and is the most readable paper in town. Aggressive and socially concerned, it has traditionally covered the black community closely and has run series on such important local-interest subjects as welfare, mass transit and the state legislature. But its national and international coverage is sometimes skimpy.

Stepchild Status. In the afternoon, Field's Daily News is still a paper of some substance that can come up with a single-topic blockbuster on short notice. The day after President Nixon announced his proposed China trip, for example, it ran a first-rate roundup of global reaction. The News has a strong Washington bureau headed by Peter Lisagor, who is regarded by many journalists as the capital's best correspondent, but its seven-man foreign staff is smaller and less distinguished than it was a decade and more ago. Editor Daryle Feldmeir, 48, an amiable import from the Minneapolis Tribune, is well respected by his Chicago colleagues but hindered by a tight budget. In sum, the News is no longer the paper that regularly won Pulitzer Prizes. Staffers complain that cost cutting has reduced it to a stepchild of the Sun-Times, and professionals who once prized their jobs on a "writers' paper" gripe about injections of fluff and cheesecake as the News tries to recapture the circulation edge from Chicago Today.

Top draw at the News is Columnist Mike Royko, whose humorous and often devastating putdowns of the pompous are thought to sell as many as 50,000 extra copies a day. Royko carries great clout with management, and drove a hard bargain before signing a new five-year contract reportedly worth $250,000. He won a promise from Field executives that local staff would be increased, and promotion of the paper improved. "I've never heard of a guy going to bat like that for his paper," said a News cartoonist. "Royko is an angel."

Uneven Product. Over at Chicago Today, executives are trying to smile through the red ink. Editor-Publisher Lloyd Wendt, 63, who directed Today's transformation into a tabloid in 1969, is convinced that sluggish ad revenues will strengthen rapidly now that his paper has taken the afternoon circulation lead. Chicagoans' ears are numb from repetitive radio spots that trumpet: "Chicago Today! Writing worth reading ... and repeating!"

Today tries to be a nightly magazine, but is thin on hard news while crammed with columns and features, including a recent series on group sex. Wendt characterizes his tabloid as "a compact" because it is both small in size and short on space. He argues that afternoon audiences are distracted at home by TV, the kids and household chores. "The evening reader doesn't have all night," he says. "We're attempting to get the maximum amount of information into the minimum amount of space, while providing enough facts to satisfy an intelligent reader." The formula has pulled readers, but the product is uneven. On any given day Today can have the top coverage in town, but on a day-to-day basis it is undependable.

Today and the News compete frenetically with each other, adjusting their play of various stories from one edition to the next to upstage, knock down or merely copy the opposition. Occasionally, says a Today staffer, "We've dropped our main story to pick up the Daily News lead story, and we've found in the second edition that they have picked up the story that we have dropped and dropped the story that we have picked up. It's fantastic." On a recent day, Today's first edition front-paged HUNT TWO IN SUBURBAN CRIME SPREE, while the Daily News ran the story for a paltry six paragraphs on page 5. By the time the third edition appeared, the Daily News story was front-paged at three times the original length, while Today had shortened its earlier screamer and dropped it back to page 14.

Playing Brinkmanship. Chicago cannot support two afternoon papers at a profit. Says Emmett Dedmon, 53, editorial director of the Field papers: "Sooner or later, there has to be one afternoon paper." Neither side, however, will let the other have an afternoon monopoly or be the first to fold. Publisher Marshall Field V, at 30 the prime mover of Field Enterprises, admits that "the losses are stupid." He accuses the Tribune Co. of "playing brinkmanship"--stubbornly taking deficits on Today in hopes of forcing the Daily News under. One block away in the Tribune Tower, H.F. Grumhaus, 68, the crusty, reticent chairman of the Tribune Co., will say only, "We are very pleased with the progress of Today." Given that attitude, and the reserves both sides command, the war of money losers could continue for years.

*Which by most measures has been doing better lately than the New York Times. Last year the Tinies's daily circulation declined 6% to 846,000, while the News's rose slightly to 2,130,000.

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