Newspapers: The Spreading Suburban Daily

The plan was neatly and quietly executed. For over a year, Chicago’s Marshall Field Enterprises debated establishing a new paper, but not a word leaked out to the public. Projections and surveys were examined at meetings of the board of directors, then all papers were destroyed before the meetings were ended. An editorial and sales force of 20 was hired and trained without knowing where it was going to work. When the competition began to ask questions about all the Field activity, false rumors were spread to throw them off the scent. Finally, two weeks ago, Field announced that it would start a new suburban daily in Arlington Heights, 23 miles from downtown Chicago. This week the Arlington Day appears on the newsstands.

The first suburban daily ever founded in the U.S. by a metropolitan daily newspaper, the eight-page Day will serve a community that Field executives think is an ideal testing ground. The population of Arlington Heights has quadrupled in the past 15 years to 44,100, four times the average rate of increase in Chicago’s suburbs. Almost half its largely white-collar families earn an income of more than $10,000; retail trade has increased 206% from 1954 to 1963. “A dynamic and expanding community needs a daily voice,” says Day Editor and Publisher John Stanton, 56, who moved over from managing editor of Field’s Chicago Daily News.

The Day, which plans to run mostly local news with a smattering of wire-service copy from U.P.I., faces competition from a weekly, the Arlington Heights Herald, whose editors feel that suburbanites lack the time to read a local daily. The Day thinks otherwise. “A suburban dweller who hears a fire engine in the middle of the night wants to know what has happened right away,” says Stanton. To make sure that other competition does not grow too strong, Field Enterprises has bought up a string of 13 suburban weeklies and a modern offset printing press on which the Day will initially be printed. Field will also distribute a shopper—a throwaway containing mostly ads—in order to soak up any additional advertising in Arlington Heights.

Flight of the Middle Class. Field Enterprises is moving into the suburbs at the right time, for suburban dailies have never been more prosperous. While the circulation of metropolitan dailies rose a scant 1.9% from 1945 to 1962, the circulation of suburban dailies jumped 80.5%. The combined circulation of New York City’s six competing dailies declined in the past decade, while out on Long Island, the nation’s biggest suburban daily, Newsday,* almost doubled its circulation from 239,000 to 400,000.

As the middle classes have fled to the suburbs, they have left the cities largely to the poor. “New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles have had a tremendous Negro migration from the rural South,” says Kenneth Byerly, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina. “And a lot of these Negroes do not read newspapers. This isn’t the only reason for the suburban dailies’ growth, but it is a key factor.” Once they are in the suburbs, former city dwellers develop a new set of interests in local schools, sewers, zoning and taxes. “What it all boils down to,” says R. A. Bean, business manager of the Richmond Independent in suburban San Francisco, “is that if you don’t take the local paper, you can’t be informed about your community.”

Suburbanites who once read two metropolitan dailies—morning and afternoon—now tend to drop the afternoon in favor of the suburban daily. In fast-growing Cobb County, 15 miles northwest of Atlanta, people often bypass the afternoon Atlanta Journal for the local Marietta Journal, which generally runs as much national and international news as the Atlanta paper does, and much more Cobb County news. “We try to assume there are no Detroit papers,” says Mark McKee, vice president of the suburban Macomb Daily, which enjoyed a circulation jump from 15,000 to 40,000 during the 134-day Detroit newspaper strike in 1964, and has hung on to its new readers. The suburban dailies ringing New York often carry more news than the city’s three afternoon papers combined.

Costly Competition. Metropolitan dailies are fighting the spreading suburbanite press by running zoned editions —special news and advertising supplements for the various suburbs. The powerful Los Angeles Times, with a circulation that is rising within the city limits, has virtually given up trying to compete for local news with 18 suburban dailies in a city of sprawling suburbs. “They serve one purpose,” says Los Angeles Times Vice President and General Manager Robert Nelson. “We serve another.”

Perhaps the only sure way for a metropolitan paper to compete with the suburban press is to start a suburban paper of its own, as Field Enterprises has done. “The growth of the suburban dailies is getting into full swing,” says Professor Byerly. “Their momentum is not going to be slowed down.”

* Founded in 1940 by Alicia Patterson, the daughter of New York Daily News Founder Joe Patterson. Captain Joe gave his daughter no help; she started Newsday with a gift of $70,000 from her husband Harry Guggenheim, who thought that “everybody ought to have a job”—even his wife.