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The Media
By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Elegy for the Daily News

NEWSPAPERS have died or been swallowed up before in Chicago. Journalism's boneyard is littered with forgotten mastheads and the faded memories of glory years. And now the Chicago Daily News has passed to its eternal reward far from the roar of the presses and the fickle vicissitudes of the counting room.

That public loss has been appropriately mourned these last few weeks. The lingering final illness which this once proud institution was made to suffer through before the corporate life-givers turned off the breathing apparatus, lends a doubly disgraceful note to the death of the Daily News.

For Illinoisans who are interested in public affairs, the closing down of CDN is no routine event. In the 1920's and on into the mid-1950's it was the best newsspaper in Chicago and one of the best in the U.S., a lively well-written sheet that its editor Henry Justin Smith thought of a daily novel put together by "a score of Balzacs." His paper was careful to keep in touch with the lusty community is served.

When John S. Knight sold his new-paper to Marshall Field IV, the owner of the less prestigious Sun-Times, Daily News staffers were a sensitive but cocky crew, chips poised on their shoulders, anxious to adopt the role of abused stepchild in the Field empire.

Already there were demographic difficulties afflicting all the Chicago dailies. Suburban population was booming, but the combined circulation of the downtown papers dropped. Big-city afternoon papers everywhere were being hurt by the competition from television. A few securely established PMs-- the Philadelphia Bulletin and the St., Louis Post-Dispatch for example --have been able to weather the storm. But Daily News could not attract the " new chicagoans" — blacks and Hispanics — and sales continued to fall.

Young Marshall Field V, who inherited control of Field Enterprises, never pretended that he was interested in anything but the profit margins of newspapering. Built on encyclopedias, the corporation diversified into cosmetics, coal mines, apartment buildings and mail-order life insurance. Any Balzacs around stood aside while commercial market research analysts tried to define the "identity" that would make the Daily News click again. Editors whirled through a revolving door as the paper tried first the serious and then the sleazy route to profitability, all the while losing millions of dollars a year.

Then the final indignity. The witch doctors were called in to tend the wheezing patient. Design specialists introduced "modular news pockets" with heavy black rules. The "look of elegance and integrity with a dash of excitement," as it was called, was a typographical monstrosity.

It is ironic, but the Sun- Times venture into the journalism of saloon management may help to explain the demise of the Daily News. Succeeding generations need to be reminded how "The Arrangement" works in Chicago. The Sun-Times did that in an enterprising fashion by deviously acquiring a rundown bar and then waiting for its operators to be shaken down by sundry governmental representatives. The January series portrayed the payoff in action.

Purists may complain of unseemly entrapment, but it was an appealing example of vigorous, imaginative journalism Chicago style, which is to say in the style of Henry Justin Smith and Clem Lane and countless others associated with the "old" CDN. Newspaper investigators must substitute guile for the subpoena power. One shudders at the thought of what Chicago would be like if that city were left with a single newspaper company which then became part of The Arrangement itself, as it very well might.

Chicagoans have always liked gusto in their newspapers as well as their beer. The bar series was the kind of gusty (and gutsy) enterprise for which the Daily News was famous in the old days. With the loss of that spirit went much of the Daily News' reason to live.

Now the battle for domination of the metropolitan market begins in earnest between the Tribune and the restaffed Sun-Times. Strong in the central city, the Sun-Times has always been weak in the suburbs, which is where the contest will be won. Advertisers put their big dollars where the big spenders are — and the well-educated, print-oriented consumers are in the suburbs. Even there, more readers are making do with one paper, so the more than 200 suburban newspapers are in the race too.

Afterword: There are some encouraging signs for downstate readers who want localized Washington news. The Associated Press transferred its state editor, Mike Robinson, from Chicago to Washington, where he is covering the Illinois angle. Springfield, meanwhile, can boast of a rare phenomenon — a weekly newspaper with a Washington correspondent. Illinois Times buys the Capitol Hill News Service and gives prominent display to the reports filed by Illinois specialist Michael Isikoff. The Waukegan News-Sun, one of the delinquents singled out for criticism here in December, did in fact engage a Washington "stringer," Kenneth R. Allen, in mid-1977. By contrast with Isikoff, however, Allen's work thus far has not provided the depth treatment of regional Illinois topics that Lake County readers deserve.

April 1978/Illinois Issues/33


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Sam S. Manivong, Illinois Periodicals Online Coordinator