Duking It Out   

Competition among daily papers has returned, at least in two cities.

AFTER LITERALLY DECADES of writing about the decline in the number of cities with commercially competitive newspapers, I am suddenly confronted with an actual increase.
Does this signal a new trend that will restore competition to the heady levels of earlier decades? Well, probably not. But recent developments do provide an interesting twist on history.
The cities that recently joined the ranks of those with head-to-head commercial competition--San Francisco and Honolulu--involve newspapers that previously had been in joint operating agencies with stronger partners. By legal definition, they had been labeled newspapers unable to stand on their own.
The history of newspapers coming out of joint agencies and trying to continue publishing is brief. The Anchorage Daily News, facing almost certain death when its joint-agency contract with the Anchorage Times was due to expire in 1979, was rescued by McClatchy Newspapers. Over the next several years it lost millions promoting the paper, building up staff and constructing a new plant. But it eventually overtook the Times, which finally shut down in 1992. Clearly, deep pockets helped the Daily News prevail.
The only other effort, a valiant one, involved the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1983. The agency there, jointly owned by Pulitzer and Advance Publishing (Newhouse), was required by the U.S. Justice Department to put the paper up for sale rather than shut it down to protect the profits of the agency¹s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Nobody thought a buyer could be found, but one was (an individual with no newspaper experience), and the Globe-Democrat endured another two years before collapsing into bankruptcy.
Times change, of course. And with the two papers that recently left joint agencies, there is some optimism about the potential for success.
The San Francisco Examiner, after a bumpy start, now has a solid editor and seems determined to continue its battle with its much larger competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle (see "Bad Blood"). The Examiner is being helped by two major factors.
One is the $66 million subsidy over three years that Hearst Newspapers, owner of the Chronicle, agreed to pay the local Fang family as an inducement to take over the Examiner.
The second factor is more important for the long run. The Fang family owns a large and successful San Francisco free paper as well as other publications, and this coupled with the new owner's considerable local influence and knowledge of the newspaper market conceivably could keep the Examiner going beyond the subsidized years.
In Honolulu, money presumably will not be a problem for the new owner of the Star-Bulletin, David Black, since he is the owner of numerous newspaper operations in Canada. And he too will benefit from an additional local presence because of his purchase last December of MidWeek, a 280,000-distribution free weekly in Hawaii. His plan is to upgrade MidWeek's printing plant to print the Star-Bulletin. MidWeek's business staff will also ease the Star-Bulletin's move to total independence. About all the Star-Bulletin took from the agency was its nameplate, circulation lists and the newsroom, so MidWeek's assistance in all other areas will be important.
The battle in Honolulu likely will be interesting as well as expensive for Black and Gannett, owner of the rival Honolulu Advertiser ("The Pulse of Paradise"). The Star-Bulletin plans a Sunday paper (it had not had one before) and a morning edition in addition to its traditional afternoon paper--the better to battle the morning Advertiser--and the Advertiser now plans an afternoon edition.
Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that the second papers in cities with competition, such as Boston, Chicago and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had a dim future. But the Boston Herald recently acquired about 100 suburban newspapers to buttress the Herald's weak suburban presence, which should remove that paper from the endangered list for now. Similarly, the Chicago Sun-Times several years ago began adding suburban papers and now is solidly profitable overall.
The Citizens' Voice in Wilkes-Barre, which began as a strike paper in 1978, recently was acquired by Times-Shamrock Communications, owner of dailies in nearby Scranton and other cities. Although the Citizens' Voice has but 70 percent of the weekday circulation and 44 percent of the Sunday circulation of Knight Ridder's Times Leader, its new ownership likely will ensure its continued survival.
The list of competitive newspaper cities remains small (there were 502 cities with competing dailies in the early 1920s). But it warms the hearts of old newsmen like me to see the list grow, even if only a little.