Great newspaper dies

Press, 6 March 1978, Page 9

Great newspaper dies

NZPA Chicago “So long, Chicago.” -aid the banner headline on Saturday in the last edition of the Chicago “Daily News.” Distinguished by generations of talented journalists whose accounts of life and death from Manila Bay to the Chicago’s Loop filled its pages over the decades, the “News” silenced its presses for good after 102 tears of operation. “We die knowing we did our job to the utmost and to the very end,” said M. W. Newman in the lead story of the week-end edition — a composite requiem fcr the city’s last afternoon newspaper that was born in the raucous days of Chicago’s frontier.

■ Pedestrians queued up a Loop news-stands in th _ crisp morning cold to put - chase the collector’s iter last edition. But the numbers wer ■ what finally choked th ' struggling paper during it final years. Circulatioi crippled by the rise of tele .vision, dwindled from abou ‘550,000 during the pea : years of the 1950 s to th final figure of about 315,000 I, The bottom line showe i[ losses of 521.7 M in the las three and a half years, an ’ and infusion of funds ths . recently financed the rede i signing of graphics and I massive advertising blit: provided only a stay of exe cution. The newspaper publishei

Marshall Field, in announc->-ing plans last month to shut down the paper, projected a deficit of SIIM this fiscal 1 year. “About the only good ; thing that can be said for >. working on a newspaper that i folds is that it. is sort of like .reading your own obit,” ■ wrote a columnist, Mike ‘Royko, the latest star in a ;(constellation that once in- ! eluded Carl Sandburg, Ben ■ Hecht, Keyes Beech, and ii Peter Lisagor. Royko wondered why the I;“News,” which won 15 Pulittizer Prizes, failed to survive. ■ I He said the paper’s aggresijsive reporting on civil . ( rights, on the police shoot- ■ j ing deaths of two Black Pani ther leaders, and on the chaotic 1968 Democratic nat-

is -.ional convention offended k L I some of its white, middle-;< J "class readers. ’* “Courage didn’t kill the,' jj'Daily News,’ but it undoubt-, t - edly shortened its life,” he I; wrote. ( ! The "Daily News,” New-ii ' man said, became victim of !j :i Chicago’s own problems —s i white flight and the accom■jpanying loss of jobs. Chi- < ijcago “has seemed to bek 11 breathing very spottily' itself lately — despite its wealth,! rand smashing skyline and c •{reputation as a slugger. .: “The 'Daily News’ was ( -ione of the most elegant andii 1i easily readable papers any-, 1 -Iwhere. So you can’t say itjl ■'died of old age. You can sayla j, it lied of urban com- s ■! plications.” r