Newspapers: The Blooming Desert

These days, starting a new big-city daily takes more money than most men have or care to risk. The mortality rate reaches perilously close to 100%, and even if the tender seedling manages somehow to sprout, it must struggle for growth in the sun-robbing shadow of sturdy old plants—well-rooted dailies that have been around long enough to become a habit. These difficulties seem particularly obvious in Phoenix, Ariz., which already has two papers—Eugene Pulliam’s Republic and Gazette—and has indicated no crying need for another. Yet last week the city was alive with journalistic nurserymen:

> JAMES M. SMITH, a leathery, 70-year-old cattleman was well into his second week of publishing the Arizona Journal. Phoenix has seen this masthead before. It was flown for a year by onetime Arizona Attorney General Bob Morrison, but last winter, after the U.S. Government demanded payment of some $200,000 in delinquent taxes, Morrison hauled his ensign down (TIME, Feb. 15). To run it up again, Cattleman Smith acquired the handful of assets left by the Journal—principally the empty plant, some office furniture and Bob Morrison, who still has accounts to settle with assorted creditors. Smith has pledged a chunk of his personal fortune to tide his nursling through the months ahead.

> EVAN MECHAM, 39, another Arizonan, operating largely on nerve, got into print this week with the first issue of the Phoenix Evening American. To get even this far, Mecham had to cannibalize the corpse of the Arizona Journal—by buying its offset presses right out from under Cattleman Smith’s nose, and leaving Smith to scrabble for new presses.

> HANK GREENSPUN, a blustering, cantankerous sometime politician and newsman, came down from Nevada last January to pick the bones of the Arizona Journal and, failing in that mission, bought a successful shopping throwaway, the Phoenix Sun, as a kind of consolation prize. Greenspun, who also publishes the Las Vegas Sun, hopes to have his Phoenix Sun rising daily before the end of the year.

All this interest in publishing seems inspired by something other than the ambition to add a mite to the measure of the U.S. press. Of the three men, only Greenspun can claim any newspaper experience. But all three are disappointed politicians. Republican Hank Greenspun took a flyer at the governorship of Nevada in 1962 and was ignominiously shot down in flames. In 1948 and again in 1950, Cattleman Smith unsuccessfully sought the nomination as Democratic candidate for Arizona Governor—and in neither case did he get any help from Phoenix’s two Republican papers. Last year Mecham, running against Arizona’s patriarchal U.S. Senator, Democrat Carl Hayden, was the only Republican on the ticket that the two papers did not endorse. Mecham lost.

In trying a hand at newspapering, Arizonans Mecham and Smith are both probably burning to get even with Gene Pulliam, the aggressive, conservative proprietor of the Republic and the Gazette—although, of course, neither puts it quite that way. “What Gene Pulliam has done with his newspapers,” said Jim Smith, “has destroyed the two-party system in the state of Arizona.” Mecham has recruited some of his key editorial help by raids on Gene Pulliam’s ranks. If any of these efforts at competition bothered Gene Pulliam, he was successfully keeping his worries a secret. Even as the first of the newcomers reared its timid and tender shoot, he flew off for a holiday in Europe.