The Press: Life After Death?

With editorial staffers gathered uneasily around him, Managing Editor Ted Brooks of the Wichita, Kans. Beacon (circ. 94,434) in one sentence passed on the unhappy news: “We’ve had it.”

Thus last week ended one of the least glorious competitions in newspaper history. When three brothers, Max, John and Louis Levand, took over the Beacon in 1928, they introduced a style of journalistic alley fighting that the rival Eagle had never seen before. Goaded to fury, Eagle Publisher Marcellus M. Murdock replied in kind. The contest quickly degenerated into a nasty feud waged in the pages of the Beacon and Eagle with such bitterness that there rarely seemed room for legitimate news. The Eagle squandered news columns on insinuations that the Levands were chiselers; the Levands, who are Jewish, periodically took to print in the Beacon to accuse the Eagle of antiSemitism. Inevitably, good newspapering all but disappeared from Wichita.

For a while the Beacon, which publishes afternoons and Sundays, seemed to be closing in on the more substantial Eagle, which prints both morning and afternoon editions as well as a Sunday paper. But the Eagle began making up its lost ground, now has a combined daily circulation of 183,191. In recent years, the Beacon has lost money steadily, and at last the surviving Levand brother, John, 69, let it be known that the paper was for sale. Among the buyers attracted was Eagle Publisher Marcellus Murdock, 77. Last week Murdock acquired the Beacon for $900,000 cash and assumption of the Beacon’s debts—about $1,600,000.

The extinguished Beacon might wind up behind a hyphen on the masthead of the Eagle’s afternoon edition, and room may be found for a few Beacon editorial hands on the Eagle’s staff. But what really interested the city, after 32 years on a starvation newspaper diet, was a possibility raised by the dying Beacon itself in a farewell editorial: “It may be that Wichitans will read better newspapers than they have seen yet.”