Selling papers in the suburbs:
This is the second of two columns focusing on the suburban press in the Chicago area. EXCITED as a child with a new windup toy, Bruce Sagan sits in his command post, a smudgy sand-colored cement block office on South Harlem Ave. that could pass for one of the many neighboring truck dispatchers' stations. Becoming the owner-editor-publisher of Daily Newspaper in Chicago is the realization of a lifelong dream. The Southtown tries When Marshall Field folded the Daily News, Sagan immediately added a South Cook County afternoon daily to this chain of thriving twice-weekly community papers. The suddenness of the move meant that his staff had to learn how to put out a daily on the job, with less than pleasing results. His front pages were a mishmash of wire service news and features at the expense of solid local news, which was always the Southtown's strong suit. Dealing with the distribution middlemen proved painful, as it did with the Daily News and countless other PMs in Chicago. Home-delivered editions of the Southtown are printed at 9 a.m. Sagan won't concede that the time gap has made PMs obsolete in the age of TV. He does admit that his biggest problem "is to be able to say to readers we are the complete newspaper." Not many readers have the time, the interest or the loose change to buy a second newspaper anymore, one of the reasons for the withering away of the Daily News. Can the Southtown make it against both the downtown biggies and the dozens of smaller papers scrambling for a piece of the suburban market? In its present condition, almost certainly not. Given the magnitude of the problems he faces, Sagan might be well-advised to concentrate on a quality bi-weekly operation stressing community news. Charles Williams, president of the competing Star weeklies, offered this observation last summer: "Going daily on the South End was questionable at the time. Paddock, on the other hand, is a special case up there with the carriage trade." Up there in the northwestern suburbs, Stuart Paddock's Daily Herald is indeed a special case on the metropolitan newspaper scene. Paddock has Marshall Field to thank for his entry into the daily field. Ten years ago, Field took a cold plunge into suburban journalism by unwisely calculating that a morning daily could succeed in the northwest suburbs without much effort, forcing Paddock to meet the competition by also going daily with what are now 10 community editions of the Herald, all printed in Arlington Heights. Then this year the scuttling of the Daily News inspired Paddock to launch a less localized regional edition that is sold to area commuters downtown. Paddock breaks loose About two years before, Paddock broke loose from the community newspaper's customary reliance on local news, tackling the Tribune and Sun-Times directly by publishing, according to editor Dan Baumann, "whatever is interesting." The Herald has its own Springfield bureau, its own full-time television critic and travel writer. Staff writers cover the football Bears on the road as well as at home, spring training camps of the Cubs and Sox, floods in Pennsylvania, murders in Indianapolis. This makes for some strange combinations. A staff-written story on the Mardi Gras or the Kentucky Derby may be close by a "police notebook" item that two windows were broken in Arlington Heights High School or a small townish feature about a local couple who share their bedroom with 16 dogs. Instead of concentrating on in-depth reports of how state government affects the lives of suburbanites, Steve Brown, the Springfield correspondent, is expected to develop exposes and other attention-getting exclusives in competition with the downtown dailies. Climbing to the top The danger, of course, is that while demonstrating their ability to swim all the strokes the big fellows do. Herald staffers will drift in over their heads and lose the community identification that made the Paddock papers so successful in the first place. Paddock reporters are not paid nearly as well as their counterparts downtown. Some of them are as good or better, but many of them aren't, and the only advantage of running your own reporter's story of a faraway event in a paper of this size is if it is superior to the wire service version. Also, on the way to the downtown vendors, the Herald acquired an unfortunate taste for sensationalism — because, explains Baumann, "it's interesting." "Escaped Mental Patient Sought," screams a headline across the top of a page Hearst would have appreciated. Most of the 57,000 community-edition circulation is home delivered. The newsstand edition accounts for only about 8,000. Except for the prestige value of showing the flag downtown, only a few blocks away from the Tower, this is a dubious return on the considerable December 1978 /Illinois Issues/33 distribution expense involved. The crucial battleground though is out beyond Des Plaines, where Paddock will either establish its supremacy over the Tribune or likely fall back. The masthead still carries the founding Paddock's credo: "Our aim: to fear God, tell the truth and make money." Profits v. news Profits rank higher in the priorities of many suburban newspaper groups. Charles Hayes, the former Paddock executive who is now editor of the Chicago Tribune's suburban supplements, contends that the area's suburban publishers as a whole are more profit-oriented and less quality-conscious — more likely to be "greedy" than in the 60's. The 18 northern and western weeklies in the Pioneer Press group (a subsidiary of Time, Inc.) are slick, thick and attractive. They are short on news and much of anything sensitive, but long on advertising, circulation (over 100,000) and profitability. Edward F. Carroll, Pioneer editor, moved to Illinois from New Jersey. He has been struck, he says, by the absence of partisan acrimony, the seeming contentment on the North Shore. He assigned a reporter recently to describe litigation in other states challenging private ownership of waterfront land. Instead of being praised for his enterprise, Carroll was criticized by readers for stirring up possible trouble. Is good journalism archaic in the land of contentment? Or is this another of suburbia's many illusions? Either way there is room for a variety of big and little editorial voices. Out of the competition ought to come a more informed and perhaps even a less contented citizenry. December 1978 / Illinois Issues/27
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