The Press: Good Neighbor

For nine years, Publisher Samuel Emory Thomason of Chicago’s tabloid Daily Times (p.m.) was Vice-President and Business Manager of the Chicago Tribune (a.m.), published by his Northwestern Law School classmate and former law partner, Robert Rutherford McCormick. The Daily Times is the closest imitation in U. S. journalism of New York’s tabloid Daily News, published by ”Bertie” Mc-Cormick’s cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson.* The Chicago Times, like the New York Daily News, is a gay and vigorous supporter of the New Deal. Nothing delights the Times more than baiting solemn Colonel McCormick’s morbidly anti-New Deal Tribune, self-styled “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” During the 1936 Presidential campaign, the Tribune each morning grimly tolled off the number of days remaining in which ”to save your country” at the polls. On election “day, the Times, only important Chicago daily supporting Roosevelt, impudently ridiculed the Tribune’?, predictions of doom with a gigantic front-page headline: 52 DAYS TO XMAS!

Despite this sniping, Classmate Bertie demonstrated last week that he still had the old school spirit. Early one morning, a fire started among the newsprint rolls in the basement of the Times plant, crippling the presses. Promptly, the Tribune offered its presses. Promptly, the Times accepted the Tribune”?, “good neighbor” offer and, missing but one edition, managed to run off 250,000 of its normal 380,000 daily print order. Fun-loving Times Managing Editor Louis Ruppel, onetime Washington correspondent of the New York Daily News, put a picture of his smoking plant on the front page with a series of wisecracking banner headlines for his “Fire Editions.” The headlines:

ARE WE BURNED UP!

HOT OFF THE PRESS! (The Tribune’s)

FIRE IS OUT, SO IS TIMES

By week’s end, the Times was printing most of its full run on its own presses, the rest on the Tribune’s.

* The nineteen-year-old Daily News, 1,738,667 daily and 3,233,407 Sunday readers, has the biggest circulation in the U. S. In a modest way, Publisher Thomason has also emulated this kind of success. In four years, the Times’s circulation has grown from 152,813 to 349,855, passing Hearst’s morning Herald & Examiner and lacking about 80,000 to equal Hearst’s evening American and Colonel Frank Knox’s evening News. The Tribune, with a daily circulation of over 825,000, remains Chicago’s biggest paper.