For Tonight, No More Tomorrows

By B.J. Phillips

The Daily News cuts back to stay alive

The grim dispatches have come one after another, like casualty reports from the front lines. First the Washington Star announced it was closing. A few days later, the Philadelphia Bulletin gave its unions until this week to accept $5 million in contract concessions; otherwise it, too, would shut down. Now the New York Daily News has announced that its year-old afternoon paper, Tonight, will stop publication on Aug. 28. Thus was written the latest chapter in a two-decade-old story of failure in the afternoon, this time with the loss of 320 jobs on the nation's largest metropolitan newspaper. But the significance of the Daily News decision went beyond its ill-fated evening edition. In explaining Tonight's demise, News officials also acknowledged that the once invincible morning paper was in serious trouble.

Long the bible of New York's ethnic and blue-collar communities, the News started to slip as its traditional audience moved to the suburbs. Circulation dropped from 1.9 million in 1975 to 1.5 million last spring. To stanch the flow, the News and the parent Chicago Tribune Co. decided to seek a new readership among New York commuters and affluent Manhattan residents. They launched Tonight as a sophisticated answer to Rupert Murdoch's sensation-mongering New York Post, which had the afternoon market all to itself. Clay Felker, who had founded New York magazine, was brought in as editor, and scores of new writers, editors and graphics artists were recruited.

With plenty of bravado but little foresight, the News tried to navigate the shoals that had caused evening papers elsewhere to founder: distribution delays in city traffic snarls and competition from suburban newspapers and local television news. Those hurdles proved insurmountable. Tonight received a huge injection from a $20 million News revitalization fund, but its circulation, headily projected at 300,000, finally slumped to 70,000. The News's profits gave way to a torrent of red ink: even with Tonight folded, the paper expects to lose $11 million this year. Said Publisher Robert Hunt: "We went all out to produce the liveliest, most interesting editorial package we could and, damn it, it didn't work. It was a bad marketing plan. We made a mistake and we're going to correct it." He said a year's experience was a "fair test," but many staffers disagreed. Said Edwin Diamond, former associate editor of Tonight: "Management did not give it enough time. 60 Minutes was given ten years to find its audience."

The evening edition never hit a consistent editorial stride; at first it was so badly organized that it was hard to find regular features. Says one former staffer: "They started Tonight on Aug. 18. By Labor Day it was clear that management was already uncomfortable with the paper." Tonight underwent a major cutback and editorial overhaul in June, when Felker departed. Some of the paper's special sections were cut in half and distribution to outlying suburban areas was curtailed. As Hunt put it later: "Storm clouds were coming up in the financial numbers." In recent weeks Tonight staffers who queried editors about the paper's future were advised to look for other jobs. The only question remaining was how deep the cuts would go. Of the 320 slated to get the ax, 63 were in the editorial department (including virtually all the staff hired for Tonight) and the rest in advertising, circulation, administration and the paper's blue-collar crafts. Said one News editor: "It was like a Thanksgiving meal.

It takes days to prepare and 20 minutes to eat. They ate 320 people in a 20-minute press conference today."

Still, if the retrenchment had not been made, the entire Daily News might have found itself sitting down to a final meal.

With 4,000 employees, more than triple the number at the Post (circ. 730,000), and an aging plant, the News is saddled with high overhead. Inflation has sent the paper's expenses soaring just when readership began to decline sharply, cutting into circulation and advertising revenues.

Only six years ago, the Daily News had profits of $10 million. Hunt met with union leaders before making his announcement to seek their help in holding down costs. Though he promised that the newspaper would live up to its contracts, further retrenchment seems inevitable.

Salaries for nonunion middle-management employees will be frozen at 1981 levels, and top executives will take a 10% pay cut.

After a year trying to put a Brooks Brothers cravat on its blue-collar audience, Daily News officials are convinced that they have rediscovered their market.

Says Hunt: "We think we now have a mission that we understand. We're going to let the Post have the bottom and we're going to try to keep the New York Times from coming down on us and we're going after that group in the middle." He added: "I'm not going to let this paper fail."

But to one editor fired during last week's shakeup, the News's revamped strategy was just another example of the editorial schizophrenia that destroyed Tonight. "They are trying to go back downscale now," said she. "But they forget the reason we went upscale is that downscale wasn't working." --By BJ. Phillips. Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by Janice C Simpson

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