The Press: Marsh Moves In

On the masthead of Publisher Marshall Field’s Chicago Sun-Times (circ. 630,000) appeared a new name last week: “Marshall Field Jr., assistant publisher and associate editor.” After a 3½-year apprenticeship, young (33) “Marsh” Field had taken over the dominant editorial role in the round-the-clock tabloid that some day he will own.

The editor was still grey-haired Richard J. Finnegan, 65, onetime publisher of the Times, but in the day-to-day job of putting out the paper, Marsh Field would make the decisions from now on. As one of the first changes in the new regime, veteran Managing Editor Marvin McCarthy, who did not agree with Field on how the news should be played, resigned. Into his shoes stepped a man with whom Marsh Field sees eye to eye—Milburn P. Akers, 49, Sun-Times political columnist and executive.

Actually, for the past month, young Field and “Pete” Akers had been acting as top dogs without benefit of top titles. Field had long fretted that the morning and evening editions of the Sun-Times looked too much alike: there was little reason for anyone to buy both. Now he had started out to make them look as different as possible.

Morning Menu. Gone from Page One of the morning edition, which competes with Bertie McCormick’s Tribune (circ. 955,000), was the banner-and-big-pictures treatment of the standard tabloid. In its place, readers got smaller cuts and news stories. The new Sun-times team gave most of the Page One play to national and international news instead of local stories.

In the evening editions, which compete chiefly with Hearst’s Herald-American, young Field stuck to the old formula: readers got the tabloid mixture as before, with the big play on crime, sex and sensation.

Supper Menu. To prepare for his boss job, urbane, unpretentious Field touched most of the bases from driver’s helper on a delivery truck to classified-ad salesman, police reporter and editorial writer. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School and a wartime Navy officer in the South Pacific, he is a bit to the right of his newspaper’s longtime stand in politics. A Democrat but no rooting-tooting Fair Dealer (“I’m a liberal conservative”), he thinks that “welfare capitalism” is a better answer than the “welfare state,” believes that if capitalism ignores its responsibilities, “we’ll get the welfare state by default.”

Field’s new toned-down look for the morning Sun-Times has already kicked up an office gag: “Now we won’t have rape for breakfast any more. Just for supper.”