Death in Newark

Newspaper competition in large cities has been shrinking steadily since World War II. Urban blight and the middle-class flight to the suburbs have dispersed both readership and retail advertising. Rising production costs are also forcing newspapers to merge with rivals or quit altogether. Already this year, Boston's Herald Traveler has been absorbed by the Record American and Washington's Daily News by the Evening Star. Last week it was the turn of the venerable Newark Evening News, for decades the biggest and best paper in New Jersey. Its death left Newark (pop. 382,000) the largest U.S. city with only a single newspaper, the morning Star-Ledger (circ. 344,000).

Though it operated in the shadow of the more prestigious New York City papers, the News sometimes rivaled them in its heyday. In 1932 its city editor, Henry Coit, was the first to report that Charles Lindbergh had paid a ransom to the kidnaper of his son. News Correspondent Cecil I. Dorrian was the first woman to file dispatches from the front lines in World War I. Correspondent Arthur J. Sinnott had such a pipeline to President Woodrow Wilson that the capital press corps formally protested the long string of major exclusives. The paper's coverage of state and local affairs was tough and thoroughly competent. It staffed national and foreign stones with distinction. Editorials focused with equal eloquence on disarmament or local garbage contracts.

The News was both proudly paternal and fiercely independent. When its aviation editor died the News kept sending his paycheck to his widow for nearly ten years, until their twin sons finished college. Nobody intimidated the News; when an advertiser once demanded a picture spread on his Christmas display window, the paper responded by running a friendly story on his chief competitor.

But the News fell victim to a common phenomenon in newspapering, the failure of heirs to build on the founder's achievements. Wallace Scudder started the paper in 1883, and before his death in 1931, he had raised it to excellence. By the late 1950s, two grandsons, President Edward Scudder and Publisher Richard Scudder, began to branch out into other business interests. Editorially, the paper began to lose its zeal when the decaying, racially troubled city most needed leadership. During the bloody Newark ghetto riots of 1967, News coverage was more conventional than courageous.

When Media General, Inc. bought out the Scudders for $24 million in 1970, it found the News overstaffed and losing money. Media General sought to fire 50 editorial employees for economy reasons, and the newly organized Newspaper Guild unit at the News called a strike in May 1971. It was the following April before the company could resume publication.

By then, readers and advertisers had drifted away in droves, never to return. Post-strike press runs of 138,000 were barely half the earlier circulation (267,000), and News staffers said that only about 70,000 copies a day were actually being sold. Losses were running at the rate of $8,000,000 a year, and Media General had no alternative but to close down. It was a sad end for what had come to be known affectionately as "the old lady of Market Street"--just one day short of her 89th birthday.

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