The Media

By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Comic clout

"ANN LANDERS" belongs to the Sun-Times. The Tribune has a lock on "Dear Abby." David Broder is in the Sun-Times and so are all the vast recycled reportorial fruits of the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post supplemental news service. But the Tribune enjoys exclusive access throughout the Chicago metropolitan area to the two top comic strips — "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury."

Readers may not be aware that comics, columnists and other syndicated features are sold to newspapers with the promise of territorial exclusivity. Because there aren't many overlapping territorial claims by competing papers downstate anymore, that doesn't mean much in the rest of the state. On the fringes of the metropolitan area, though, the arrangements mean that a suburban or outlying daily newspaper cannot publish a feature without the acquiescence of the two Chicago dailies.

Paul Zilly, publisher of the Crystal Lake Morning Herald in McHenry County, is desperate for an advice column. "Every time we take a survey," he said, "the readers want either 'Ann Landers' or 'Dear Abby.' It bugs me that we can't get 'Dear Abby' because we're too close to Tribune Tower."

Robert Duffy, national sales director of the syndicate that peddles "Dear Abby" — Universal Press Service — said the Tribune stakes out territorial rights for all of McHenry County, all the way to the Wisconsin border.

At one time the Tribune considered all or parts of five states within its "Chicagoland" orbit for syndication marketing purposes. In 1967, however, the Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against the three leading feature syndicates and the Boston Globe, which then claimed most of New England as its exclusive territory. That suit was settled by a federal court consent decree in 1975. The parties agreed to a 20 percent market penetration benchmark for syndication territories. Thus, if the circulation of a central city daily is equal to 20 percent or more of the households in a particular outlying county, features it buys can be denied papers based in that county. The Tribune's penetration is about 27 percent in McHenry County.

Duffy's description of Tribune territory ("a radius of about 50 miles") includes two collar counties in which its penetration is under 20 percent — Kane (19) and Will (a little over 13).

Another editor of a new suburban daily which has had problems with the feature syndicates — Gerald Kern, metro editor of the Arlington Heights Daily Herald — said there are no hard rules to live by. "It's very fast and loose," he explained. "If you're big and powerful like the Tribune, you can write your own ticket. It makes our job more difficult." When the Paddock-owned northwest suburban operation went daily in 1978, the editors wanted a supplemental news service, only to find LAT-WP cornered by the Sun-Times and the New York Times service contracted for (but seldom used) by the Tribune. All that was available was the Christian Science Monitor service.

Most of the nation's most influential papers have formed combinations to package and sell their reports to non-competing papers. Unlike the basic news wire services, AP and UPI, which must, under a Supreme Court decision of 37 years ago, be available to all news media, the supplemental are sold under syndicate-like exclusivity agreements.

The Daily Courier News in Elgin, which is closer to the Loop than Crystal Lake, has "Dear Abby" but not "Peanuts" or "Doonesbury." Executive Editor LeRoy Clemens said Abby was acquired before she switched from another syndicate to UPS. "We were told then that if we threatened suit in a letter [to the syndicate], things could be worked out," he recalled. Comic strips remain "a serious problem for us," Clemens said. "There are a lot of them we would use if we could."

There can be little question that all this has helped to prop up established central city dailies and inhibit the starting of new suburban dailies. "We're dealing here with the perceptions of readers," said one suburban publisher. "If you have 'Ann Landers' and 'Peanuts,' you are considered a legitimate daily paper. You're not just a pretender, but the real thing."

Although there now are some 200 syndicates, the big newspapers (which pay considerably higher rates) get first crack at the choice offerings. For the new boys on the block, and for those in the outer areas of heaviest population growth, there are the leftovers.

"It's a fight between the big papers and the small ones," summed up syndicate executive Duffy. "We're in the middle. The big ones say we pay you an awful lot of money, and we want what we want.'"

With the popularity of television, editors of older papers in older cities place greater value on the exclusivity of their wares. No one should want to add to the woes of what is in many big cities an endangered species — the downtown daily. There is, however, a certain irony noticed by Arlington Heights' Kern: "people from the Tribune going around the country talking up freedom of information while engaging in this glaring restraint [of information]."

June 1982 | Illinois Issues | 37