Big Dailies Muscling Suburban Rivals   

Better news coverage and distribution bolster metro papers in the suburbs.

Recent developments in the suburbs of Atlanta and Chicago suggest that while the party may not be over for suburban newspapers, it probably will not be as much fun as before.

When suburban newspapers rose up in force in the 1970s and 1980s, they thrived on filling market niches that metropolitan dailies either ignored or served poorly. In recent years, though, the big papers have equipped themselves to make a stronger fight in the suburbs.

Aggressive competition from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the weak economy during the past three years forced the closing of the Gwinnett Daily News northeast of Atlanta. In Chicago, the same factors – with the Chicago Tribune providing the competition – forced the Pulitzer Publishing Co. to sell its Lerner weeklies in the northern suburbs. (A local investment group recently agreed to buy them for $4 million shortly before a threatened shutdown.)

Every market is different, of course, but the chain of events in Atlanta and Chicago illustrates some of the problems that suburban papers everywhere face.

The operations in Atlanta and Chicago represent the two major divisions of suburban journalism – a paid-circulation daily focusing on a well-defined suburban market (Gwinnett County in Atlanta) and a string of weekly community newspapers serving the suburban ring around a city.

When the New York Times Co. bought the Gwinnett Daily News for nearly $90 million five years ago, it saw a rapidly growing, prosperous suburban market that could become to Atlanta what Orange County had become to Los Angeles. The Times Co. hoped it could mimic the success of the Orange County Register.

Pulitzer bought the Lerner weekly chain in the Chicago suburbs seven years ago. It envisioned the same kind of success in drawing profitable advertising that a chain of weeklies had achieved around the company's home market of St. Louis. Over time, Pulitzer consolidated the 54 newspapers published by the Lerner operation into 15 to improve efficiency.

If there is a moral to this tale, it is that one should choose competitors carefully. The Chicago Tribune operates one of the most sophisticated suburban zoned operations in the country, which helps give it substantial market strength in the suburbs. The combination of the Tribune's savvy and the collapse during the recession of help wanted advertising, which contributed about half of the Lerner papers' ad revenue, eventually forced Pulitzer to conclude its investment did not have a profitable future.

In Atlanta, the management of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution likewise had been aggressive in establishing geographic zones. It immediately recognized the New York Times Co.'s purchase of the Gwinnett Daily News as a challenge to its dominance in the most important suburb of Atlanta.

The Atlanta dailies spent heavily on staff and promotion to create a zoned Gwinnett section of the Constitution that was the equivalent of a separate daily newspaper. The effort maintained the Atlanta paper's dominance. In the last county-by-county audit, the Journal and Constitution had a Gwinnett County circulation of 53,000 on weekdays and 73,000 on Sundays compared with the Daily News' 44,000 on weekdays and 40,000 on Sundays.

Some kind of suburban press has long been a feature of major markets (the Lerner papers, for example, have been around for more than 60 years and the Gwinnett Daily News was founded as a weekly in 1895). But the explosive growth of the suburbs that spread out what had been the traditional readership and advertising base of big-city newspapers changed the stakes. Booming growth in the suburbs meant not just a shift of people but, in time, a shift in retail sales as well.

Initially the metropolitan dailies responded slowly to this profound change in the nature of their markets, partly because of management lethargy, and partly because of the weaknesses inherent in targeting relatively compact city markets.

What has changed in recent years is that well-managed metropolitan newspapers have made investments in coverage, production technology and distribution networks. Today, most big newspapers either have or soon will have offset-quality printing (or close to it), digital color controls capable of removing flaws in advertising photos as minute as a wrinkle in a model's dress, and computerized press controls and on-line inserting machines that can split up press runs into ever smaller zones.

Editorial and advertising sections can be zoned to zip codes in markets with multiple zip codes, to specific communities, and even to carrier routes, although this last capability has yet to be offered. A grocery chain can place in the same newspaper an advertisement featuring filet mignon in an affluent zone and beans and franks in a poor one.

It has taken the big papers many years and millions of dollars to reach this point. Now that they have, the balance of market power in the competition for the suburbs is rapidly shifting back to them. l