Suburban papers competing PUBLIC NOTICE advertising is life's blood economically to many smaller suburban and community newspapers in Illinois. The Springfield lobbyist for the Illinois Press Association (IPA) is kept busy protecting the statutory principle that the notices must appear in a paper published locally. The most powerful single newspaper in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune, challenged this territorial understanding in 1976 by claiming a share of this revenue for its suburban supplements. Nine zoned editions of the supplement — called the Suburban Trib — are printed in Hinsdale, near the DuPage-Cook county line, and inserted three or four days a week in 375,000 copies of the regular Tribune sold in the suburbs. Regional newspapers The local publishers sued in the state courts, objecting to the Cook County (assessor's award to the Suburban Trib of the annual tax assessment lists for three suburban townships. One of the protesting litigants was the Paddock Corp., whose Daily Herald is locked in a battle with the Tribune for morning paper supremacy in the upper income northwest suburban region. Donald Reuben, the lawyer who has operated for so many years as the Tribune's fabled Mr. Clout, argued before the Illinois Supreme Court that the township publication requirement violated freedom of the press. The court held to the contrary that the legislature acted within its constitutional power and the Suburban Trib did not qualify. Earlier, when the IPA entered the case on the side of the smaller publishers, the Tribune withdrew from the association. The issue is likely to move now into the state legislature, where the Tribune's statewide influence will be pitted against that of the community newspapers. The dispute can be viewed too as one political-legal manifestation of the intense struggle for newspaper domination in the lucrative suburban field. Movement of people — and more particularly of people who still read words on paper — and of jobs and economic activity out of the central city and into the suburbs changed the nature of metropolitan newspapering everywhere. Print advertisers can be expected to put their dollars where the affluent, better educated readers-consumers are, and the buying power of Chicago's suburbs now exceeds that of 40 of the 50 states. "That's where the action is today," says Charles Hayes, who led Paddock's pioneering venture into solid suburban journalism in the 1950's and is now editor of the rival Suburban Trib. "People no longer buy a newspaper to get the hot spot news. From their newspaper they want local news, local information, local service, and local leadership." There are more than 200 newspapers in the metro area — ranging from dailies to weeklies, from quite good to abysmal. The proliferation of incorporated areas, all with their separate community papers, the overlapping of once clearly staked-out territories, and the introduction of regional dailies means the competition will be spirited and unpredictable. Tribune v. Sun-Times Now that the afternoon underbrush is cleared away, the Tribune and Sun-Times are primed to go head-to-head in the morning. Historically weak in all but the blue-collar suburbs, the Sun-Times will have to devise something better than its Suburban Week supplement to attract suburban advertising. Sun-Times circulation is just under 200,000 in the zones where 375,000 copies of the Suburban Trib are distributed. Whatever happens, it won't be a private duel. Already two experienced suburban publishers are putting out regional dailies in competition with the "big boys" downtown. Paddock dailies One of these is Stuart R. Paddock, Jr., whose family-owned company now distributes 11 daily editions, including a downtown newsstand edition aimed at commuters from the northwest suburbs, plus a new Sunday edition. The Arlington Heights edition of Paddock's Herald sells 54,200 papers, which is almost as many as the Suburban Trib's comparable northwest Cook edition. Paddock and the Suburban Trib both support editorial staffs of about one hundred with budgets of over $2 million — an impressive ratio of reporters-to-readers anywhere. Sagan's papers The other major challenger is Bruce Sagan, whose Southtown Economist hastened into the afternoon void left by the scuttling of the Chicago Daily News. No sooner did the Daily News slip under the waves than "the Southtown" went daily with separate afternoon editions for South Chicago, South and South-west Cook County, and for downtown commuter stations serving Southsiders. By mid-summer about 30,000 papers were being distributed daily, only about half of them paid circulation. The daily was being kept afloat by the profits from Sagan's weeklies and printing business, a subsidy he said couldn't continue longer than two years at the most. Farther out, in McHenry County, the Crystal Lake Herald recently accelerated
October 1978/Illinois Issues/33 to daily operation. Waiting in the wings with vast financial resources and watching how Paddock and Sagan fare against the downtown giants, are some of the nation's best known communications conglomerates. Other potential dailies Time, Inc. purchased a chain of prosperous North Shore weeklies (Pioneer Press), expanded into the western suburbs, absorbed some competitors and is the most likely candidate to start a North Shore daily someday. At the other end of the county, Panax Corp. publishes the south suburban Daily Calumet and is thinking about another regional daily that would span the Indiana border. Yet another group, the California-based Copley newspapers, were positioned strategically in the path of metropolitan growth, with thriving existing papers in Joliet, Aurora, Elgin and Wheaton. But Copley blew its golden opportunity, primarily because of a reluctance to risk the large investment. Finally there are several well-established, regionally formidable weekly groups fighting hard for readers and revenue in the suburban market, but they are unlikely to go daily. Among these are the Lerner newspapers (circ. 3 12,000), the 15 Star newspapers printed in Chicago Heights (91,000) and the Life newspapers in the near western suburbs (129,000). There are more editorial voices, more diversity, more competition. But is the suburban reader better informed by the regional papers? In the next "Media" column in December we will examine the quality of the "new" suburban press. October 1978/Illinois Issues/27
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