A question of survival in Metro East area

By TOM LITTLEWOOD

A SWORD in the hands of the judiciary of Illinois hangs over one of the state's valuable journalistic resources — the Alton Telegraph. If a staggering $9.2 million libel verdict against the Telegraph is left standing on appeal, the Cousley family will probably be forced to sell the newspaper to pay the damages.

Another good locally owned Illinois paper would be lost; another aggressive editorial voice with the courage to be something other than an echo chamber for people and interests on the inside would be silenced. That this could happen in Alton, the city where the brave abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob, magnifies its significance.

Paul and Stephen Cousley — the fourth generation of Cousleys to run the Telegraph — already are being bled dry by legal fees during the appeal of the trial court judgment. The jury award was so large that the defendant company's libel insurance was less than the cash needed to post an appeal bond. Philip Tone, a former federal judge now back with his old Chicago firm of Jenner and Block, is representing the Alton paper on appeal.

The defamation case is unusual because it involves statements never published in the newspaper. Two reporters who were investigating organized crime in Madison County wrote a confidential memo to the Justice Department in 1969 describing "possible links" between the Mafia and a savings and loan association. By not printing it, the reporters were acknowledging the unconfirmed nature of the information. Years later, an area builder whose credit had been cut off by a federal examination of the S & L discovered the existence of the memo and sued to recover what he argued were provable damages.

Last March, when the libel case was on his trial docket. Judge Charles Campbell visited the Telegraph editors to seek their endorsement. He had been appointed to a vacancy and was a candidate in the primary. The "chilling effect" of his visit was enough for the paper to make no editorial endorsement in that judicial race. Defeated in the primary anyhow, Campbell was a lame duck at the time of the trial.

The uncertain future of the Telegraph is the latest unsettling note on the already scrambled newspaper scene in the Metro East region of Illinois across the river from St. Louis. Since the death of the Lindsay-Schaub Metro East Journal in 1979, the chronically troubled city of East St. Louis lives on with as many social problems per capita as any in the nation — and without a daily newspaper. In the words of one resident, there's "a suspicious vacuum; you can only wonder what's going on."

One of the bidders for the bones of the Cousley property would almost certainly be Capital Cities Communications, a New York-based company that acquired the Belleville News-Democrat in St. Clair County eight years ago.

Contrary to the impression that may sometimes be left by this column, the sale of a home-owned Ilinois paper to a national group is not always or automatically bad. The old News-Democrat, unlike the Telegraph, was so tied to local business interests it would not even take advertising from firms outside the city limits. The new managers pumped money into the product, improved the appearance, started a Sunday edition, boosted the news staff from eight to 40, opened a Springfield bureau, and spread its circulation area north to Collinsville, east almost to Carlyle, and south past Red Bud. The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor news services were also added. Although more space is devoted to news now, some of the old Germanic readers complain that proportionally less of it it local news.

Almost unheard of for a corporate operation, the News-Democrat can be jarringly iconoclastic; it is not averse to rocking the boat now and then, Recently, for example, the paper withdrew from the Illinois Press Association (IPA) in protest of the fee-setting provisions of the public notice advertising laws lobbied through the legislature by the IPA. This year the Belleville paper plans to challenge these rate floors, which Editor Joe Weiler calls "a waste of public funds."

While it was fanning out in other directions, the News-Democrat was unable to sell many papers or attract advertisers "below the bluff" in East St. Louis and the other lower-class riverfront communities. As it is, East St. Louis and Granite City are both sizable Illinois cities in which the dominant daily paper is the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, edited in Missouri, though the Telegraph and the News Democrat stay out of each other's way the Globe does compete vigorously for Ilhnois circulation, with almost 20 percent market penetration in Madison County (about 17,000 papers) and 16 percent (15,300) in St. Clair County. Squeezed between Belleville's 42,000 circulation to the south and the Telegraph's 38,600 to the north is the much smaller Edwardsville Intelligencer now owned by the Hearst Corp. with under 8,000 circulation. The Collinsville Herald has faltered since being purchased by a Wisconsin group. The Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the News-Democrat all have made inroads into Colhnsville.

The precarious sense of community existing on the east side of the mighty river can best be nurtured by the continued improvement of a feisty News Democrat and the survival of Telegraph.

February 1981/Illinois Issues/34