Two Less

One night last week reporters and photographers for the Minneapolis evening Journal called their office for night assignments, got no answer. Those who went around to the Journal building on Fourth Street found files and other paraphernalia being carried out, piled in trucks lined up outside the door. Upstairs several linotype operators still worked. Most of the Journal's, 500 employes did not know just what had happened until noon the next day, when the first edition of the Minneapolis Star-Journal appeared. "Well," said one of the jobless 500 (150 of them later got jobs), "it looks like the Journal but feels like the Star."

To Minneapolis Bourbons the demise of the Journal was a death blow. For years it had fought their fight, played down their financial alley. Foe of the late Governor Floyd B. Olson and his Farmer-Labor Party, it was stanch Republican, anti New Deal. Rich with local department store advertising in the lush 1920s, it began to sicken when Depression I set in. Handsome, silver-haired Publisher Carl Jones (an amateur card-trick expert) shuffled his journalistic cards to no avail. To the Star went his acrid Managing Editor George H. Adams (later to return to his old job on the Journal, see it fold). To the rival Tribune went his cagey business manager, George Bickelhaupt.

Last week plump Business Manager Bickelhaupt called the Tribune staff together, gave a pep talk, promised a bigger and better newspaper to battle the Star-Journal for supremacy in the Northwest. Possibility: that the all-day Tribune would split into two papers, hold its morning circulation, go after the silk-stocking evening Journal readers.

No secret has it been that Minneapolis' Jones family was anxious to sell the thinning Journal. Nor has it been a secret that Des Moines' Cowles family, which had bought the Star in 1935 (and done well with it), has wanted a firmer foothold in Minneapolis. Last week's sale price, a reputed $2,250,000-$2,500,000, left Minneapolis (pop. 464,356) with only two daily newspapers: the all-day Tribune (circulation 148,017) and the evening Star-Journal, whose circulation will be around 250,000.

Other newspaper casualty of the week: the Buffalo Times; of anemia. Total daily newspapers in the U. S. at the beginning of 1939: 2,056. Total beginning 1929: 2,392.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.